Lillias August was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (RI) in 2006 after exhibiting with them annually at the Mall Galleries in London since 2000. Since 2014 she has been on the RI Council and served as Honorary Secretary 2014 – 2023. From wide open landscapes to her more recent still life, Lillias’ work reflects a love of strong, simple subject matter for which she has been given many awards including 8 at the RI alone.
Primarily I want to honour the things I’m painting. They absorb me and, however mundane they may seem, I want to give them an opportunity to speak and be valued. Most things have some sort of personal resonance or connotation and they’ll evoke different feelings and memories in each of us. My work is not immediate – there’s a lot of planning. I use a restricted palette and work on a painting as a whole, gradually building up tone and colour and moving from large washes to more detailed structure until I achieve the sympathetic and sculptural quality that I want.
