Tag Archives: painting

Mary Maclean and Jo McGonigal – September 2017

Mary Maclean, Campus #7

Mary Maclean

Mary Maclean’s work in photography explores the intersections of spatial thought and the flux of things that are always on the move, even if captured in the apparently implacable, static, objecthood of the image. She is founder member of the curating group Outside Architecture and was a member of the collaborative artists project Five Years 2010 -2015. She is currently Senior Lecturer at the Royal Academy Schools.

Mary Maclean, Left of Place, A photographic installation exploring the space of borders and thresholds in the everyday structures within architectural environments.

Mary Maclean, Non-Coincidence

Mary Maclean, Outcomes may Vary # 1

Jo McGonigal

Jo McGonigal
Side (cadmium yellow deep) 2016

Jo McGonigal, Dirty Gold, 2016
(Lycra, pigment,wood)

Jo McGonigal makes spatial paintings out of physical things in real space. The work begins with a visual analysis of historical Baroque painting (e.g. Poussin, Vermeer, etc.) as a basis for understanding painting, not as a fixed identity but as a specific spatial construction with a pictorial and spatial vocabulary. These observations became translated through the construction of three-dimensional spatial paintings as pictorial compositions that reconfigure the space and its architecture, using specific physical things. The exhibition space evolves the work through its spatial characteristics. In using materials to imply formal and conceptual qualities of transparency, light, opacity, verticality, proximity, distance, McGonigal is dealing with in how they are used a vernacular of painting.

Jo McGonigal,
Close Looking (2015)
Oil on Lycra and Wood
35 x 10 x 7 cm

Jo McGonigal, Rectangles (2015)
Edge of a Silk Scarf / Perspex

Ian Kane and Eric Cruikshank – September 2016

Ian Kane

Ian Kane is a spatial artist working from his studio in Dalcross, near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. He has exhibited nationally and internationally since studying Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art and completing a post-graduate degree in the 1970s. A Scottish Young Contemporaries Prize-winner in 1984, his works have been shown in the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Norway, Canada and Japan.

Ian Kane, Seeing is believing

Ian Kane Studio

‘Curiosity and the spirit of enquiry into what exists is always the starting point for the work. This preoccupation with reflecting the truth of the world and our place in it is the work of the artist. The work changes as we ourselves change. The artist strives to find ways to produce the works that become signifiers of our time. The making of every piece is a re-learning; the bringing together of the conscious and the unconscious. Memory does not help here as the presentness of the work generates its own problems to be resolved’

https://spark.adobe.com/page/wcrwajr059abC/

Eric Cruikshank

As to the situation of the colours, the purest and strongest must be placed in front of the piece, and the colouring varied according to subject, time and place. If the subject be grave, melancholy or terrible, the general tint of the colouring must incline to brown or black, or red and gloomy; but it must be gay and pleasant in subjects of joy or triumph.

Encyclopedia Britannica or A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, edited by William Smellie, Edinburgh 1771

Eric Cruikshank Number 9 – Deep-Scarlet-Red-Pomplean-Red; 2016 Coloured Pencil on Paper, 19 cm x 28cm

The Scottish artist Eric Cruikshank is a modern painter. Born in a country and into a culture with a strong narrative tradition, his work departs from customary figuration, yet revels in the craft and artisanship of his chosen medium. Instead of portraying famous men, it analyses the qualities of colour and light. Instead of imitating landscapes, it explores notions of painterly space. And instead of illustrating stories, it investigates the process of painting itself. More than anything, this approach relies on the individual viewer. Our perceptions of colour, light and space are not only dependent on the painting – they are just as much dependent on the conditions in which we perceive it. Changes in lighting, spatial arrangement, distance to the object, subjective mood of the beholder and even the time spent with the artwork, become constituting factors in understanding it. Instead of a mere consumer of a pre-packaged story, the beholder becomes participant observer.