Natalie Dowse

Mise en scène brings together a number of series based on cinematic tropes: a cut to the cheek framed within the eye of the lens; actors crying for the camera; a woman with a cut lip.

I work with a single frame, which I extract from obsessively watching hundreds of hours of film and television, looking out for that one moment. My process degrades the source material, and I isolate the characters from the original narrative, shifting the context and simultaneously rendering the actor virtually anonymous. The audience does not need to know the character or story in order to read these paintings; each viewer brings their own narratives as the image becomes further removed from its original source and gains autonomy.

I choose my image carefully, then crop, edit and reframe for a particular focus. I sometimes deliberately compose to reference the Baroque. Although the paintings themselves are mostly small, the scale within the picture plane is much greater than life-size, much like the cinema screen.

Biography
Natalie Dowse lives and works in Portsmouth and has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Her work is in public and private collections, including the Jonathan Vickers Collection, the Robert Priseman Collection at Falmouth Art Gallery and the Priseman-Seabrook Collection. Her work is also featured on the BBC’s Your Paintings website of the UK National Collection.

Natalie was the recipient of the Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award, a year-long residential project which culminated in her solo show Skimming the Surface at Derby Museum and Art Gallery. She was awarded an international residency to Riga, Latvia, by the Arts Council England International Fellowship programme in partnership with Braziers International Artists’ Workshops. Natalie is a graduate of Falmouth School of Art (BA Fine Art) and the University of Portsmouth (MA Fine Art).

Recent exhibitions include: Rogue Women 3, Manchester 2024, Arcadia for All? Rethinking Landscape Painting Now at the University of Leicester 2023-4 and University of Leeds, 2023.