Louisa Longstaff-Scales

Gallery 2 | 13-29 November 2025

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The Lido Stores is pleased to present Borrowed Light, a solo presentation of recent paintings featuring dramatic land, sea and skyscapes by Louisa Longstaff-Scales.

This quietly autobiographical series documents the artist’s impressions of the evolving landscapes and coastlines of East Anglia, where the wild beauty of the North Sea – home to some of the UK’s most treacherous sea lanes – offers an ever-changing vista of dramatic land, sea and skyscapes.

Borrowed Light muses on the continual evolution and change of coastal landscapes, exploring the idea of nature as a metronome that sets the pace of our lives. This is particularly deeply felt when living on the coast, where the subtle shift in the angle, intensity and softness of sunlight more vividly marks the passing of time and changing of the seasons.

It’s against this backdrop that Longstaff-Scales’ works evolve; she absorbs herself in the observation of the landscape and paints from memory, her emotional response to her individual experiences in nature influencing the direction of each work as she layers oils over vivid watery marks of acrylic, wiping through layers to excavate passages of paint to the foreground – exploring the interplay between time, light and nature, in her own way, through the application and removal of acrylics and oils.

The gesture and fragility in the placement of marks, Longstaff-Scales says, is a reflection of her own lived experience of the East Anglian coast – a reverential celebration of the sweeping vastness of its landscapes, and a quiet meditation on the impermanence of life inspired by the transience of its seascapes.