Artwork
Lonesome
Lonesome is a print by Bronwen Paterson. It dates from 2013 and is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
About this work
Overview
The work blends natural imagery with stylized abstraction, emphasizing isolation through scale and spatial arrangement.
Lonesome is a 2013 screenprint by Bronwen Paterson, depicting a solitary bear atop a massive, angular rock formation. The composition centers on the animal’s stillness against a vast, layered landscape. The print is signed, titled, and numbered by the artist, indicating its place within a limited edition. The work blends natural imagery with stylized abstraction, emphasizing isolation through scale and spatial arrangement.
Subject & Meaning
The bear, rendered in solid black, stands alone on a rugged stone platform, facing away from the viewer. Its posture suggests contemplation or quiet endurance. The surrounding terrain—mountainous, distant, and softly colored—enhances the sense of solitude. The creature’s presence evokes themes of isolation and resilience, not through dramatic action but through its quiet, unmoving stance within an expansive, indifferent environment.
Technique & Style
Paterson employs screenprinting to build flat, layered planes of color with sharp edges. The bear’s form is simplified into a single tone, contrasting with the textured, earth-toned rock and the delicate pink dots suggesting distant flora or atmospheric haze. The background’s pale blue sky and foreground mountains create depth without perspective, favoring a flattened, graphic aesthetic rooted in modernist print traditions.
History & Provenance
Created in 2013, Lonesome is part of a limited edition of Paterson’s screenprints, each signed and numbered by the artist. It emerged during a period when her work increasingly focused on solitary animals within abstracted natural settings. The print has been exhibited in regional galleries and is held in private collections, primarily in North America, with no known institutional acquisitions to date.
Context
Paterson’s work aligns with contemporary printmaking trends that merge figurative elements with minimalist abstraction. Her focus on wildlife in isolated landscapes reflects broader cultural interests in environmental solitude and human-nature relationships. While not overtly political, her imagery resonates with ecological awareness, positioning animals as silent witnesses to vast, unchanged terrains.
Legacy
Lonesome contributes to Paterson’s evolving body of work that reimagines wildlife through reduced forms and deliberate color palettes. Though not widely reproduced or publicly archived, the print remains a representative example of her approach: quiet, precise, and emotionally restrained. It continues to influence emerging printmakers interested in nature’s stillness and the expressive potential of limited color fields.
Artist & collection
Artist
Bronwen Paterson makes quiet, single-figure prints that feel like a pause in a story.
