Rosalind Lyons

Rosalind Lyons

Rosalind Lyons has long been fascinated by the past; her paintings are strongly indebted to the Renaissance art of Italy and Northern Europe, Elizabethan and Jacobean portraits and influenced more recently by Shakespeare’s plays.

Her practice involves the creation of an interdisciplinary dialogue, where the visual and the verbal intertwine and overlap. Ideas and thoughts meander and drift; there is a strong sense of the inherent uncertainty of Shakespeare’s plays and characters, the visual allusions to the Renaissance and Elizabethan England, to boy players playing girls playing boys, to the intricacies and extravagance of costume or the ethereal shimmer of candlelight on a white-painted face. It is the interweaving of silent words – what Harold Pinter called the ‘language locked beneath’ – and visual quotation, of echoes, of ghosts, of shadows, of something sensed rather than known – ‘that is, and is not’(Twelfth Night), the transience of performance and the illusory ambiguity of real and imagined memory.

Rosalind has exhibited regularly in both solo and mixed exhibitions, including solo shows at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, London, and the Long Gallery at Blickling Hall in Norfolk.

Rosalind gained a BA (Hons) in Visual Arts, MA in Fine Art, and has recently completed a practice-based PhD, which focused on Shakespearean theatre and involved extensive research across literature, history and performance, including a period as Artist in Residence at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.
She has also worked as an illustrator of children’s books and lecturer in art and design.


My Mask, to Defend my Beauty
Oil on Board
24 x 12 Inches

In the Likeness of a Sigh
Oil on Board
24 x 12 Inches

A Portly Sail of Ships
Oil on Board
12 x 12 Inches

The Fools Are Mad, If Left Alone
Oil on Board
24 x 24 Inches

One Touch of Nature
Oil on Board
12 x 12 Inches

Beauty O'ersnow'd
Oil on Board
12 x 12 Inches

Be Painted all With Red
Oil on Board
16 x 12 Inches

She Shall Be All in White
Oil on Board
10.5 x 7 inches

There's Magic in Thy Majesty
Oil on Board
48 x 36 Inches

For Love is Crowned
Oil on Board
16 x 12 Inches

And Here an Angel
Oil on Board
12 x 12 Inches

Made Tame and Most Familiar
Oil on Board
16 x 12 Inches

That Shrewd and Knavish Sprite
Oil on Board
24 x 12 Inches

The Scene Begins to Cloud
Oil on Board
10.5 x 7 Inches

The Seas Wax'd Calm
Oil on Board
10.5 x 7 Inches

These Boys Know Little
Oil on Board
12 x 12 Inches

These Happy Masks
Oil on Board
12 x 12 Inches

Let Us Listen to the Moon
Oil on Board
12 x 8 Inches

Let Her Show Her Face
Oil on Board
12 x 8 Inches

In Silence Sad
Oil on Board
24 x 12 Inches

A Goodly City
Oil on Board
24 x 16 Inches

A Most Simple Clown
Oil on Board
24 x 12 Inches

Betwixt Us Two
Oil on Board
16 x 12 Inches

This Borrow'd Likeness
Oil on Board
24 x 16 Inches

Worth the Looking On
Oil on Board
10.5 x 7 Inches

You Have Beguiled Me with a Counterfeit
Oil on Board
24 x 24 Inches

What Fairies Haunt This Ground
Oil on Board
24 x 16 Inches

Two Seeming Bodies, But One Heart
Oil on Canvas
33 x 23.5 inches

Is his Head Worth a Hat?
Oil on Board
16 x 12 inches