Category Archives: Figurative Art

Thresholds – The Art of Carolynda Macdonald

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Carolynda Macdonald River of Lost Souls (oil on linen, 113cm x 105cm)
Image courtesy of the artist and Kilmorack Gallery

‘I seek to bridge a recognisable world with that of an imaginary or mythological one. I almost always include birds as the main protagonists but have increasingly brought in human characters too. This alchemy of birds and fragments of old master figurative paintings, become vehicles for the subconscious to play and facilitate self-expression.’ Carolynda Macdonald

Working previously as a Biomedical Scientist in Microbiology, Carolynda Macdonald has progressively developed her painting practice since 1982, studying life drawing, printmaking and exhibiting extensively in the UK, USA, and Australia. Now based in Edinburgh, Macdonald’s recent exhibitions, including House of Macdonald with fellow artists Alan and Rory Macdonald, affirm her emergence as a distinctive voice in Contemporary Art. Drawing on traditions of painting in Western Art, the tradition celebrated by Macdonald is freedom of expression, art which is big enough to admit multiple layers of interpretation, making ‘paintings you can fall into.’ ‘Humanity being imprinted onto Nature’ is a strong theme in her latest work, where birds are threshold subjects, guardians of the natural world and human vulnerabilities.

River of Lost Souls (oil on linen, 113cm x 105cm) contains a scene of human betrayal, the cutting of Samson’s hair by Delilah’s accomplice, a removal of his supernatural power depicted by Rubens and reimagined here within the body of a bird. The brown, russet, crimson, and flesh tones glow humanely, emerging from a dark, cool, calm before storm background by the river’s edge. The human body is tucked protectively into the bird’s feathers, a safe space where humanity, emotion, and nature, within and without, can be examined. Poised on one leg, the bird’s gaze meets ours. This recognition, the confrontation of the eye of one species meeting another’s, is deeply arresting. It is a moment of tension that brings thought and feeling bubbling to the surface, in our immediate present and in relation to a shard of visual history.  The painting is a threshold space and being held within spaces where land, sky and water meet, have a particular role in Macdonald’s art. She composes images of sanctuary for her protagonists and the viewer, alive with tension and burgeoning consciousness, full of possibility. This feeling of potential, psychologically and in the realm of dreams, is incredibly subtle and potent. In River of Lost Souls, who or what gives us strength, is given new context out with the Old Testament Biblical story and an art historical canon of Old Male Masters.

There are a number of genres and art historical expectations in play here, and Macdonald inadvertently subverts them all, bringing fragments of grand Master subjects into intimate focus, honouring scientific enquiry and ornithological art with feeling, and bringing untold psychological depth to the traditionally demure arena of still life. The field of enquiry is truly expansive, painted with meticulous detail and devotion to craft. It is the joy of painting and not politics that drives Macdonald’s art. We are free to interpret meaning and lose ourselves in narratives of our own making- that’s the gift and flow within her painting. In the presence of an artistic voice that elevates the mind and spirit, we can confront difficult things and begin to heal. Macdonald describes the music of Jocelyn Pook, Lisa Gerrard and Portuguese Fado singing in such terms, and the same is true of her paintings.  

Carolynda Macdonald Beacon of Hope (oil on board, 25cm x 23cm)
Image courtesy of the artist and Kilmorack Gallery

Carolynda Macdonald brings her microbiologist’s eye to the pattern of life and creates different spheres of awareness in the process. In Beacon of Hope (oil on board, 25cm x 23cm) we see a feast of finely painted flowers reminiscent of Rachel Ruysch within the body of a tiny wren. Although delicately rendered, the dark bird is alert, determined and poised in readiness on a natural stone, clasping a diamond in its claw. Broken jewellery is strewn at its feet, a microcosm of detail in a mountainous landscape of macrocosmic emotions and association. There is a jewellery box inheritance opened here and an uncanny, fleshly light which plays across the surface of lake and sky in the background. The artist creates an atmosphere of profound stillness, a place of solace, contemplation and in this case, an unsettling suggestion of relationships being tested. Macdonald describes the objects in her paintings being ‘broadly drawn’ rather than autobiographical. ‘Pearls are beautiful things to paint- glowing. They can abstractly solve a painting. What a pearl is, what it means’ also comes into play. ‘Pearls are a living thing, a grain of sand, giving all these things a different life in the work.’ Sometimes the placement of objects emerge unconsciously out of a brushstroke and Macdonald is simply enjoying where the mark takes her. It is an art of instinct and precision, that allows the human condition to be explored in all its nuances, ‘including inner turmoil and vulnerability, love and hidden desires, betrayal, motherhood, and protectiveness.’

Carolynda Macdonald Fortress of Shadows (oil on board, 25 x 23cm)
Image courtesy of the artist and Kilmorack Gallery.

The intimate scale of Macdonald’s wren and robin paintings draws you in, often with unexpected twists. In Fortress of Shadows (oil on board, 25 x 23cm) the female form is revealed and protected within the body of the bird, perched on a silver jewellery box. The strawberries in the right foreground link with drapery which the female protagonist draws towards her body to shield it, her hand resting on the wren’s head. They are both vessels of potential narratives. The vulnerability of this reclining nude pose, seen so often in Western Art History as exposure for a male gaze, shifts to a more heightened state of awareness within, as if the threat exists beyond the boundaries of the picture plane, with the painting as refuge. The way Macdonald positions the female body gives it protection and agency -within the painting and the viewer, to begin to explore what this internal scene means to us.

Carolynda MacdonaldThe Scream (oil on board, 25 x 22cm) Image courtesy of the artist.

The Scream (oil on board, 25 x 22cm) is another powerful example, punching far above its scale and subverting the hierarchical dominance of large-scale History Painting. The combination of elements-still life, wren and jewellery, set in what feels like an 18th Century Arcadian landscape is juxtaposed with a fragment of Goya’s resistance painting The Third of May 1808, with civilians dying before a firing squad. Perched on the lid of a jewellery box, the open-mouthed wren omits a sound, amplified by the viewer’s imagination. There is a broken, half submerged ring or tether in the water, an intriguing detail that suggests shackles being broken on multiple levels. The potency of the scream, its volume and resonance is made by association, linked to the viewer’s awareness/experience and the scene of execution. There is beauty, horror and tension in this work achieved with consummate skill. The grand history painting is a fragment on the bird’s body, perhaps suggesting the relativity of human history when staring the current Anthropocene era in the face.

Carolynda Macdonald The Garden of Solace (oil on linen, 134 x 124cm) Image courtesy of the artist.

Our perception of violence in The Garden of Solace (oil on linen, 134 x 124cm) is tempered by how Macdonald leads the eye into the painting. The curves of the brown flamingo’s neck and beak direct us towards a fragment of Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus contained within its body. The extreme violence and chaos of this scene is repositioned so that we can actually be still with it and begin to interpret what is brought to the surface. It is a very powerful thing to give freedom to the imagination, both in the act of painting and enabling the viewer. This self -reflexivity is precisely what art is for, individually and collectively, to actively process what it means to be human, how we relate to each other and the natural world. In The Garden of Solace, the indifferent male ruler at the apex of Delacroix’s original painting is absent and the curve of the female body which mirrors the form of the beak opposite becomes more present. There is a sense of compassion and vulnerability that completely transforms the aggression of the original scene. The psychology and emotional intelligence of this painting is breathtaking. It is a wonderful example of the complexity and strength of art in expressing what often cannot be voiced or contemplated anywhere else. The beauty of these works lies in Macdonald’s ability to create a safe, yet gently confrontational space for a range of different emotions and experiences to be acknowledged and felt. ‘Removing the figures from their original context and narrative gives them a new life.’ Sanctuary (oil on linen, 91cm x 64cm) may be dream like and reassuring, the heron presenting as a guardian of the three figures within, but the clouds and water, receding in tsunami-like fashion, reveal an unsettling atmosphere which the bird resiliently withstands. The fragment of art history, Solimena’s Venus at the forge of Vulcan carries its own mythology, yet the chosen fragment and trio of resting hands makes this feel like a familial scene, rather than a distant narrative of ancient deities.

Carolynda Macdonald Sanctuary (oil on linen, 91cm x 64cm)
Image courtesy of the artist and Kilmorack Gallery

There are paintings where ‘rather than keeping these human figures within the birds’, Macdonald allows ‘them to break their boundaries and occupy a space between two worlds.’ In Where Spirits Run Free (oil on linen, 91cm x 84cm) figures float off the bird’s back, into a mythic landscape and nature’s elements. There is a sense of reverie in this action and in the handling of the background which feels made of us. It belongs to the Northern Romantic tradition of beholding the landscape/ nature and all it means to us, a quality internalised in Macdonald’s art, liberating the spirit.

Carolynda Macdonald Where Spirits Run Free (oil on linen, 91cm x 84cm)
Image courtesy of the artist and Kilmorack Gallery

There is also a powerful edge in paintings such as Refuge (oil on canvas, 91 x 83cm). Here the female figure breaks free from the body of the bird, hands outstretched and gazing above, beyond the picture plane. Although we feel there is something bearing down on her, she stands securely on the bird’s back. There is love in every brushstroke and we feel we are in safe hands to unpack the unseen but palpable sense of threat. The poise of the bird and the presence of nature comforts, while the true scale of humanity can be scrutinised. There is a drive towards renewal in Macdonald’s art, a calling, like the doves in her painting Kindred Spirits (oil on linen, 113 x 105cm), ‘vulnerable things coming together in a hostile landscape who have called each other to restore.’ Crossing these imaginative thresholds, we may discover strength, resilience, and the joy of possibility within ourselves and the wider world.

Carolynda Macdonald Refuge (oil on canvas, 91 x 83cm) Image courtesy of the artist.

Carolynda Macdonald’s work is currently on show in HOUSE OF MACDONALD, Kilmorack Gallery, Scotland, 16 March- 13 April 2024 https://www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk/exhibitions/404-house-of-macdonald-alan-macdonald-carolynda-macdonald-rory-macdonald/

PINKIE MACLURE LOST CONGREGATION

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Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow 17 June – 9 September 2023

Pinkie Maclure Totally Wired (Self Portrait with Insomnia Posy) 2020 63cm x 72cm, stained glass. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Iconic award-winning artist Pinkie Maclure has been blazing a trail in visual art and music for over thirty years. Co-writing ten albums with musician and sound designer John Wills and revolutionising the art of stained glass, Maclure’s art is a potent, beautifully realised form of activism. Her ability to bring the most pressing issues and anxieties of our age into the light with power and compassion, resists dogma and triggers consciousness through imagination.

Maclure’s recent exhibitions at Homo Faber (Venice), Collect (London), the Outsider Art Fair (New York), the John Ruskin Prize (Manchester) and awards including the Sequested Prize, John Byrne Prize, Zealous Craft Prize and Jerwood Makers, have contributed to the artist’s growing international following. Represented in the National Museum of Scotland collection and private collections worldwide, Maclure’s distinctive voice as a visual artist, vocalist and musician has resounding impact. Her debut solo exhibition Lost Congregation at CCA Glasgow, is a thoroughly immersive and haunting experience. The show consists of three rooms of stained-glass, a 3D ambisonics sound installation and moving image, together with a series of live performances by the artist. In addition to new work, the exhibition is also a survey of key works from 2017-2023, including Pills for Ills, Ills for Pills (2018), addressing Britain’s opioid epidemic and Beauty Tricks (2017) a multilayered expose of the environmental and psychological cost of the beauty industry. (Discussed in a previous essay Pinkie Maclure– Beauty Tricks https://www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk/pinkie-maclure-beaty-tricks-essay/ )

Pinkie Maclure Beauty Tricks 2017, stained glass Photograph courtesy of Kilmorack Gallery

Tackling the enormous sense of grief and loss felt by many people seeing ecological collapse unfold in real time, Maclure offers a vision of hope and connectivity with Nature’s capacity for renewal. It’s this spirit that enables you to emerge from the exhibition having faced the reality of climate crisis, human displacement, and misogyny with a sense of empowerment and optimism. The central work in the show is Maclure’s installation The Soil (2023) with sound installation Dust Won’t Lie, written and sung by Pinkie Maclure with John Wills. This dark, immersive space envelops the viewer in soundscape and imagery, on the wall, projected onto the floor and in a stunning, large scale stained glass at the far end of the room. This abandoned chapel feels haunted and ethereal, but inviting, two staggered groups of cushioned pews and Maclure’s mesmerising voice, as if drawn from the earth in tonal descent, ground the participant. Tangles of dead branches and the crunch of leaves underfoot evoke a kind of passing. An expression of human experience and resilience, Somehow We Mend (2023), reveals itself in the gloom, the eye directed to the wall work by an extended branch. A red thread connects the hand of a figure to a sewn and drawn panel with words, some censored or obliterated by ink, burnt cigarette holes and a band aid.

I UNSTUCK MYSELF FROM

SOMEONE’S SHOE

PEELED BACK THE SOUL AND

WALKED OUT

ALL THE WAY TO

THE BROW OF THE HILL WHERE

THE SILK

HUNG FROM THE TREES

SOMEHOW WE MEND, SOMEHOW,

SOMEHOW WE MEND IN THE END’

Pinkie Maclure Somehow We Mend 2023, mixed media.
Photograph by Alan Dimmick, courtesy of the artist.

This element of the installation is poignant and deeply affecting in its acknowledgement of lived experience, bringing the personal into what is historically held as a communal and religious space. Perception shifts in the shimmering projected light on the floor, where faces emerge and recede, like reflections in a pool of water, artist, youth, and crone goddess, digging deep beneath man-made architecture. Other elements of the soundscape provoke and soothe in contemplation, some are drawn from tradition, land and collective memory, the voices of women waulking cloth, a masculine voice in Scots song, calling children in from play, whispers, zooming traffic and the overarching statement of lament; ‘The Dust won’t lie.’ Is this because it is being stirred and disturbed, or because the earth and the dust we become speaks the ultimate truth? I find myself writing first about sound, because of the immediacy of being drawn sonically into the space, then there is light. Maclure’s large 3m x 2m stained glass is a revelation borne of all the thoughts, emotions and questions which swirl 360 degrees around the participant in the dark. In a reactionary age of fear and survival, Maclure brings much needed critical mass and ancient wisdom to the fore.

Pinkie Maclure The Soil 2023 3m x 2m, stained glass installation.
Photograph by Alan Dimmick, courtesy of the artist.

Her gothic peaked triptych of stained glass is a magnificent centrepiece, largely comprised of salvaged glass from a ‘Victorian greenhouse that blew down in a storm.’ The use of material feels poetic and ironic, a composition borne of destructive weather patterns of the Anthropocene. The central figure is radiant with questioning, her head tilted, gazing upwards, a flaxen haired Joan of Arc-like protagonist, hands clasped in prayer. Gardening gloves, wellies and fishnet tights bring her down to earth and the stream of urine which becomes a flowing stratum beneath her feet anchors the human body to nature’s eternal cycles. It is Maclure’s response to the horrifying prediction reported by the UN that ‘the world could run out of topsoil in sixty years’, also drawing on the knowledge that human urine contains nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous, ‘nutrients essential to healthy plant growth.’ That saintly vision, deferring authority to a divine God is delivered squarely into our hands. We are part of the body of nature and can be agents of regeneration, rather than destruction, if we choose. At the base of the composition, plants, microbes, fossil and seed forms give a sense of propensity to growth, a cycle of life starting again in a discarded banana and mouldy pie sprouting seedlings. The fragility of glass and the fractured word ‘Frag’ ‘ile’ in the upper black and white world of the composition, meets the ‘Fragile’ complete, written red in depths of soil. The upper section dominated by humanity is filled with fractured lines and industrial wires, fallow plough lines and delicate marks like those of ink suspension in water. It feels like a dystopian future, which of course is now. The narrative unfolds in each considered element. Magic, rage, loss, critical interrogation, compassion, humility, hope, and empowerment circulate throughout the exhibition.

Future Daysies (2023) asks what will we choose to nurture as a species, a hand raised, pointing upwards, an illuminated nucleus of cell division in the upper right and a mass of potential life below, or is it just a bloody soup of destruction? The hand and the light lift the spirit in favour of resilience, with or without God, a refrain of ‘somehow we mend.’

Pinkie Maclure Two Witches (Knowledge is Power) 2021, 62cm x 100cm, stained glass.
Photograph courtesy of the artist.

The idea of Future Daysies could also apply to Maclure’s Two Witches (Knowledge is Power) 2021, an unexpected vision of adolescence on the cusp of womanhood, coming into power and divining true agency. I say unexpected, because images of feminine youth, possessed of knowledge and potentiality are so rare. The words ‘knowledge is power’ written ‘in seven of the world’s most used languages’ wraps itself around the globe. Patriarchal societies excluding women are deposed by Maclure’s ‘winking owl’, ‘defecating on a freemasonry emblem’. Knowledge of the natural world is exalted in the torch attracting moths and self-determination in relation to one’s own body is celebrated in the flagpole flying a condom. It’s a powerful declaration of potential, and beauty in potential, that shines brightly in the darkest of spaces. Popular culture and oppressive regimes do not allow such expression of feminine strength and Maclure smashes the ceiling with her mighty, fragile art- it’s a wonderful thing to witness. Seeing visitors to the exhibition studying the intricate details, debate meanings and make connections with their own experiences was also a joy. This is what art is meant to do.

Completed ‘at the heights of the pandemic’ Maclure’s Totally Wired (Self Portrait with Insomnia Posy) 2020 reads as an awakening, not just from physical sleep or through a nightmare, but in the linear fracture of stained glass that rests on the artist’s forehead like a third eye. Intense blue and frenzied black drawn marks halo the portrait, with ‘the waving hands of friends on Zoom’ scattered above, ‘imprinted’ in the artist’s mind like a constellation of stars. It’s a response to horror and tragedy that reconstructs humanity, in the care and crafting of stained-glass. The split line pupils give a sense of altered perception and profound unease, contrasted with the warm toned, floral, lace textured blanket which the artist clutches to her chest. Held there too, is the comfort of Nature, a posy of herbs which in that moment is subdued by a man-made global crisis. The contradictory nature of Maclure’s art is true to life, in the profound need for confrontation and comfort. When I say comfort, I’m not talking about cosy distraction or denial, but the enduring, transformative action of hope, which lives first in the imagination.

Pinkie Maclure X-Ray Eye 2023, stained glass.
Photograph courtesy of the artist

Although X-Ray Eye (2023) addresses a post truth world, the ‘twisting of words and fragmentation of social interaction’, it also recalls a strong cultural tradition of truth, in folk music and in the work of artists such as William Blake. Stephen Ellcock and Matt Osman’s book England on Fire, which features Maclure’s Green Man Searches for Wilderness (2020) taps into a seam of ancient knowing and divinity of imagination. In X-Ray Eye, Maclure’s female figure plunges head first, downward, like Blake’s The Simoniac Pope in the inferno. Though injured, she is far from helpless, flanked by opposing forces, fire and water, divided by argument, her hands pull words and assumptions apart, the fractured lead lines converging on her eye. The dominant colour within this space of exploration is the divine, sacred blue of medieval glass. Her sneakered feet straddle a portal of instinctual knowing at the apex of the composition. The body is fragmented, in a fallen position of discomfort, but there is also a will to understand that we feel will bring clarity, even in a climate of screaming opposition.

Walking away from the exhibition down Sauchiehall Street I saw a black and white poster with a lighthouse on it ‘The seas are rising and so are we’, a slogan adopted by climate activists. I had to smile, as the red, life affirming thread throughout Maclure’s extraordinary exhibition altered my perception of the world outside. ‘Somehow we mend, Somehow we mend in the end.’

Pinkie Maclure’s Lost Congregation continues at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow until 9 September 2023. https://www.cca-glasgow.com/programme/lost-congregation

Beauty and Rage – Pinkie Maclure’s ‘Brigid in Dualchas’

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Pinkie Maclure ‘Brigid in Dualchas’ (2022, stained glass and lightbox, 65cm x 62cm)
Photograph by Tony Davidson, Kilmorack Gallery.

Radically transforming the art of stained glass, Pinkie Maclure’s latest work brings feminine power and the climate crisis brilliantly into focus.

Pinkie Maclure’s Brigid in Dualchas feels like a songline, tapping deep into the earth and our collective unconscious through storytelling. It is an image of origin, crisis and ultimately, hope. Illuminated in glass, a medium as fragile as humanity, Maclure’s Brigid takes full possession of beauty and rage. Rendered with consummate skill, this goddess of pre-Christian Ireland becomes conduit and cure, a contemporary icon of emboldening solidarity and potential change. All Maclure’s work presents the viewer with a knife edge of burgeoning consciousness and action, here contrasting ‘the old traditions and worship of nature with our contemporary abuse of nature and the resulting climate crisis.’

Brigid (Brighde or Bride in Scotland) is a deity of keening and healing, a protector of nature and an apt patron saint for the Anthropocene era we are living in. In a global context circa 2022, her luminous presence is a confrontation.  Reappraisal of feminine power, not as ‘other’ but as an intrinsic aspect of all life and creation, has never been more urgent and cuts through all cultures and gender identification. Maclure’s Brigid is a sacred flaming red flag to reconnect with ancient, indigenous knowledge, not just to survive, but to reclaim life on this planet in all its eternal mystery and wonder.

The idea of ‘Dualchas’ in the Gaelic tradition, which ‘refers to the intimate bonds that exist between the natural world, the land and its people, transmitted through generations’ is communicated in the female figure placed centre stage, described by the artist as the goddess ‘in her element.’

Pinkie Maclure Detail- ‘Brigid in Dualchas’ (2022, stained glass and lightbox)
Photograph by Tony Davidson, Kilmorack Gallery

Maclure’s composition is alive with free association. Colour radiates through layered glass in a strong, opposing palette of bloody red and divine blue, evocative of earthly and spiritual planes. Brigid is engulfed in red, a colour which drenches her arms and hands ‘Carrie’ style, while her softly glowing face, eyes closed, is pure repose. There’s great ambiguity here, between a defiant, enduring lifeforce and potential carnage being unleashed. Microbes on finely etched tree branches are underpinned by a vestige of pattern, akin to Medieval stained glass, shining beneath. The smallest details are held aloft by all that has come before, layer upon layer of concept, craft and understanding. In Maclure’s own words;

‘I sandblast, paint, fire, engrave and layer glass and relish the inherent chaos of such an unpredictable medium. The slowness of the process lets me access subconscious, dreamlike imagery and tell stories linking real-life, contemporary experiences with historical texts, characters, and events.’

Pinkie Maclure Detail- Brigid in Dualchas’ (2022, stained glass and lightbox)
Photograph by Tony Davidson, Kilmorack Gallery

Pinkie Maclure’s art is a masterful union of ideas and technique which encompasses the entire spectrum of art practice. Like the figure of Brigid in Dualchas, the artist’s upward diagonal path of pure neon lightening may be framed in linear black and white geometry, but this in no way contains her. Brigid moves beyond the upper frame of the composition, pulsing with colour and energy. This petal like radiation of lead line, form and colour bring order and meaning out of chaos. It is pure Zeitgeist, but it is more than that.

The goddess is resolutely complex and complete, divine and human, seen in a Christ-like pose. Associations with the crucifixion, of suffering, sorrow and resurrection, not of God’s only son, but of the world are invoked. Saint Brigid’s feast day, 1st February, heralds spring or Imbolc, celebrating new life out of dark winter stasis. Maclure celebrates life giving creativity as an essential drive, in nature and us, linked with eternal cycles of life and death. Brigid’s clenched hands hold twigs like anode and cathode charges, grasping the mettle of all creation with open arms, much like the artist herself. Brigid in Dualchas is an image of feminine creative power beyond childbirth, in possession of self and body.

Pinkie Maclure Detail- ‘Brigid in Dualchas’ (2022 stained glass and lightbox)
Photograph by Tony Davidson, Kilmorack Gallery

The stained-glass composition hinges on a ‘v’ of pubic hair, like the stem of a winged seed, the centre of a flower or a veined petal. It is an unexpected, radical bloom, presenting the female body in an uncompromising, completely organic way, ironically unseen for centuries. Maclure describes the red scratch marks on Brigid’s legs as ‘reminiscent of the graffiti you sometimes see carved into trunks of trees, reflecting the brutalisation of nature and women. Her legs are like the trunk of a tree, still standing despite decades of abuse.’ Significantly, the artist does not define the female figure with these marks. Maclure renders Brigid’s toes delicately mortal pink, her legs glowing pale green, not a deathly pallor, but one of burgeoning life and awakening. Leaves of green and yellow diffuse from her body and birds are silhouetted around a nest of blackened hair. There is nothing idealised here, jagged edges are part of the pattern and flow, held in radiant light. The fiery ignition of thought and instinct are all consuming, in making and seeing.

Maclure radically reinterprets the story of Brigid, ‘associated with perpetual, sacred flames, surrounded by a hedge which no man could cross. Men who attempted to cross were said to have been cursed to go insane, die or be crippled.’ The artist extends this idea to the current climate crisis, acknowledging the truth in the legend, of entire ecosystems. ‘Hedges are very important habitats for wildlife and for the prevention of wildfires,’ which have engulfed the planet. The element of fire, like the goddess herself is ambiguous and multifaceted, triple faced in her most ancient form.

The expression on Brigid’s face, a deeply meditative, active subconscious, calls upon us to collectively awaken and remember through ancient stories. The cathedrals of old encouraged the viewer to look up and be elevated, and in her own inimitable way, Maclure encourages us to do the same, reaching down through the foundations of belief to the site of origin, buried deep beneath the church. This is a different kind of power to that which currently blights our world, one that leads creatively towards hope.

Pinkie Maclure artist’s website: https://www.pinkiemaclure.net/

Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance

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23 November 2019 – 19 April 2020

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two)

Paula REGO (b. 1935) Angel , 1998 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium, 180 x 130 cm Collection: Private collection © Paula Rego, courtesy of Marlborough, New York and London Photograph courtesy Museu Paula Rego: Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Cascais

‘My favourite themes are power games and hierarchies. I always want to turn things on their heads to upset the established order, to change heroines and idiots…at the same time as loving the stories. I want to undermine them, like wanting to harm someone you love. Above all though, I want to work with stories that emerge as I go along.’ Paula Rego

Obedience and Defiance is the first major retrospective of Paula Rego’s work to be shown in Scotland, with a very timely focus on the politics of power and political agency. Featuring over 80 works from the 1960’s to 2010’s, it’s an intensive trajectory of self-examination and discovery. What I took away from this show, and what I know will stay with me, is the pure inspiration of creative protest and the towering strength of feminine resilience. As you move through each room, Rego’s intelligence, will and evolutionary craft are courageously forged in the mind. Informed by her thirty-year friendship with the artist, Catherine Lampert’s curation creates an intimate and appropriately monumental sense of Rego’s stature and humanity. Paula Rego moves very naturally between deeply personal and collective fields of reference. Whilst autobiographical or culturally specific narrative triggers are often the drivers, her compositions invite wider interpretation and debate. Rego’s art actively hands imaginative power back to the viewer in a spirit of free association.

The artist’s Girl and Dog series is a good example, inspired by her husband’s battle with MS and the role of carer. A viewer may know nothing about the personal history/ iconography in Untitled (1986 acrylic on canvas), but immediately the positioning of the figure and the inferred relationship is unusual and arresting. Firstly, the girl child/ woman is the dominant presence or agent in the image, rendered in a way that embraces benevolence and malevolence simultaneously. Cemented and entwined at opposing angles with a large black dog perched on her lap, this isn’t just a girl with her pet we are witnessing.  Despite the presence of yellow, lilac and blue, the tonality and delineation are heavily set. The female protagonist’s determined brow is only just visible, focussed not on play or the potential for a walk, but about to snap closed the final link in the metaphorical chain around the dog’s neck. The girl’s spiked yellow arm band and dress, which feels like the costume for a circus act, has an edge of ambiguity and menace. In another emotive twist, the dog is rendered empathically. Despite his robust form, his black eyes are drained of life. He sits not just obediently, but with resignation, staring ahead and beyond the picture plane, tended and equally trapped.

These starkly defined figures, tempered by love, impending loss and resentment are on one level a double portrait of real life, however they also transcend the personal, presenting a rich seam of universal triggers and the possibility of multiple narrative interpretations. The archetypal examination of the caregiver role, the dynamics of power between an animal and its master, the balance or imbalance between masculine and feminine aspects of the psyche or within society, our capacity for loyalty and compassion, dominance and submissiveness, creation and destruction, life and death, are all at play in this work. Rego is consistently fearless in addressing the complexity of human emotions and desires.

In a similar way, Rego’s Dog Woman series, which has its origins in a Portuguese fairy tale, presents the viewer with hidden motivations and truths about the human condition. In many ways they reflect constrained civilization, fraught with frightening and liberating physicality of the animal within. Bound to their masters and existing on an edge between love and punishment, these are powerful figures of feminine aggression and sexuality, so often relegated to a corner of the room, the psychological belfry or society’s hidden basement. Rego courageously brings them into the light and into public consciousness in exhibition works like Dog Woman (1952 pencil on paper), Sleeper (1994 pastel on canvas), Love (1995 pastel on paper mounted on aluminium) and catalogue works Bad Dog (1994 pastel on canvas), Dog Woman (1994 pastel on canvas) and Baying (1994 pastel on canvas). The Dog Woman series is a highly significant body of work, not just in terms of Rego’s oeuvre and development as an artist, but for what these images represent in terms of the ongoing struggle for equality.

Paula REGO (b. 1935) The Cake Woman 2004 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium150 x 150 cm Collection: Private Collection©Paula Rego, courtesy of Marlborough, New York and London

Throughout the exhibition, Rego emerges as an absolute Master of her art. Witnessing the distillation of her voice from masked abstraction to unbridled boldness is an empowering experience. Regardless of inherited circumstances, making art gives licence to explore what is forbidden, reinterpret history and initiate change. Rego’s avenging Angel (1998, pastel on paper mounted on aluminium) strikes me as not just standing at her shoulder in this respect, but as an unwitting symbol of her own right hand. Angel is an expression of compassion and action, with a sponge to taste bitter gall in one hand and a vengeful sword in the other. These emblems of passion and sacrifice are not just the artist’s Arma Christi, but feminine weaponry originating in lived experience and collective memory.

In a domestic image such as Sit (1994, pastel on canvas), we see the societal command of a title which pins the female protagonist to an armchair, hands behind her back and feet crossed, invisibly nailed in the manner of Christ’s crucifixion. It’s a timelessly stark predicament with the suggestion of pregnancy, dressed and upholstered in pleasing, demure florals. The woman’s eyes are directed above and it’s the whites of her eyes which hook in the mind and slowly creep under the skin. Sit isn’t just an image of enforced expectation; dutiful woman, wife, mother, but one ‘anointed’ with fear. ‘Giving fear a face’ is perhaps Rego’s greatest gift, because it is only when trauma is acknowledged that it can be processed and creatively transformed, individually and collectively. Storytelling is how we make sense of ourselves and it’s the retelling in Rego’s work, drawing on ancient mythology, folklore, popular culture and current affairs, that is personally and politically transformative. Her work is a reckoning with inequality and injustice, using imagination to affect change in the world and reimagine a different state of play. This ‘turning the tables’ of expectation, about what it means to be human, female and an artist, is a defining characteristic of her practice.

Rage against oppression and inequality have always been present in Rego’s art. From her early 1952 pencil drawing Dog Woman in a crouched position rabidly barring her teeth, to ‘violent cutting’ of The Imposter (1964 oil and mixed media on paper collage and canvas), and later pastels tackling human atrocities such as war, anti-abortion legislation, FGM and sex trafficking. Throughout her career, she has always grappled with human nature and its contradictions, never shying away from our potential for complicity. Rego’s great strength and where she really comes into her own, is in the dynamic suspension of all that we are and are fighting to be, in taut, monumental pastels, dominated by female protagonists. Her use of this medium is unexpected and completely transformative, giving soft intimacy a distinctive edge of urgent, burgeoning consciousness. Rego’s high definition pastels articulate rather than blend away truth. The artist’s trajectory extends toward integration of masculine and feminine, seizing what has been historically denied or hidden. Works like Joseph’s Dream (1990, acrylic on paper on canvas) and Painting Him Out (2011, pastel on paper mounted on aluminium) actively reclaim creativity, despite enduring social hierarchies and the received canon of art history which casts women as submissive or irrelevant. Rego actively embraces the desire and entitlement of making images, traditionally assigned to “Masters”;

‘Painting pictures is like being a man, really. It’s the part of you that’s the man. Even the way you stand or sit, confronting the work like a man and it has to do with the aggressive part. It has the kind of push, the thrust which you must normally associate with what being a man is.’

Empowerment is doing and making, redefining yourself, your perceived role in society and its underlying structures in the process. In the spoilt, ego driven art world of the late 1990’s and 2000’s, Rego reveals what art can stand for and against- not just in her own time, but for all time. All great artists transcend themselves and Rego is no exception. Growing up in Portugal under the totalitarian rule of António de Oliveira Salazar, a highly repressed society in terms of gender, class and colonialism, the seeds of protest were sewn. In such conditions, expression becomes encoded and survival an imperative. Rego’s escape route, to Britain and the Slade School of Art in the 1950’s, presented her with a different set of cultural and institutional constraints to negotiate. Discussing her coming of age experiences in the 2017 documentary Secret and Stories (directed by her son Nick Willing) the artist’s congruence and openness about what it is to be female is still painfully relevant. While advances have been made and legislation may have altered in certain countries, class privilege is still the only thing affording freedom of choice for many women throughout the world. Every advance in the fight for equality must also be measured against the epidemic of modern slavery. The trafficking of women and girls is a growing industry which Rego makes visible in her work. The artist as witness has an incredibly important role to play in terms of political agency and visibly upholding freedom of expression, doubly so in a “post-truth” world.

Paula REGO (b. 1935) Untitled No. 4 1998 Pastel on paper, 110 x 100 cm Collection: Private Collection © Paula Rego, courtesy of Marlborough, New York and London

A survivor of oppression and injustice is also a witness and this transformation of self-awareness is at the heart of all Rego’s work, extending far beyond autobiography. This powerful gaze of resilience is exchanged with the viewer in the Abortion series (1998-1999), where Rego skilfully reveals lived experience we cannot turn away from. It is full frontal confrontation with life and a rallying call to action, delivered without gore and in deliberately palatable colours. Rego defiantly makes unnecessary suffering visible to the world. Her direct response to the lack of votes in Portugal’s 1998 referendum was to create large scale pastels and etchings for wider dissemination, making female experiences of illegal abortion visible in the public domain for the first time. These images were instrumental in raising awareness about a taboo subject and aided the second referendum which legalised abortion in 2007. However, Rego’s Abortion series isn’t simply a visual campaign. Her series delves deeper than anyone else has dared, into the foundations of power written on the body and internalised. The way that trauma is held in the body as memory and physical response, strikes me immediately looking at Rego’s drawings, pastels and etchings from this series. Rego has spoken candidly about her positioning of the female figure in these works. The dynamic of tension created in blurring the line between anticipation of penetration by a lover and the abortionist’s hand is a deliberate trigger of profound unease. Untitled No 5 (1998 pastel on paper) is a good example, where the woman braces herself against the bed, legs separated by two folding chairs, dressed in a floral sundress as if on a date. The suggestion of seduction and violation are equally present. Although depicted clinically, the human need for affection, love and sex become disturbingly entwined with ideas of Romance and trauma in this image. The wider question of how we learn to become women enters the frame.

The dualism of human fear and desire within and hidden by institutions of church and state also join the debate.  As Rego has stated ‘guilt doesn’t come into it.’ It is atrocious that it (abortion) is forbidden’, causing untold suffering and deaths that are entirely preventable across the world. Whatever your gender, life experience or beliefs, what Rego resoundingly confronts the viewer with is survival. She places her female protagonists front and centre, clothed in school uniforms and grimaced in pain, defiantly meeting our gaze.  Untitled No 1 (1998 pastel on paper) is an image I returned to several times. A woman in a red headscarf and blue dress sits knees drawn up on a bed with a pink doormat beneath her. Her strong features and steady gaze are a counterfoil to the tension in her mouth and jaw. It feels like she is biting the inside of her mouth, waiting. Beside her is a patterned porcelain bowl, a refined vessel in contrast to the red stained basin and bucket stacked under the bed. The inference is that this isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last. The woman’s muscular poise in that moment are composed of absolute dignity, in the most undignified of circumstances. Her presence and right to be is undeniable, communicated in Rego’s masterful composition. The artist places the viewer in a position of potential complicity with her suffering, at bed height, our feet squarely on the ground, the right foot almost touching the protruding buckets. The reality of this work is inescapable in all its brutality and injustice, with shock supplanted by knowing and compassion. Even in the face of horrific, highly controversial subject matter, such as Two Women Being Stoned (1995 pastel on paper mounted on aluminium) or Mother Loves You (2009 etching and aquatint) from the FGM series, the artist creates a space for honest reflection. Rego’s work is raw and highly sophisticated in equal measure. Her magnificent triptych The Betrothal; Lessons: The Shipwreck, After Marriage A La Mode by Hogarth (1999) is another wonderful example. There is just so much experience, knowledge and insight in every panel!

Seeing the evolution of Paula Rego’s practice throughout the show is a triumph of self-determination. It’s an eternal dance between obedience and defiance that declares an unbreakable spirit with absolute clarity. Her willingness and courage to go wherever the creative process takes her, without a predetermined outcome, allows the artist to explore our deepest human drives. Rego’s rare, unfaltering honesty define her art and political agency, inspiring not just contemplation in a gallery setting, but action in the wider world. Grounded in everyday life, she works her magic, weaving stories and renegotiating the nature of power in the process.

Paula REGO (b. 1935) Impailed 2008 Conté pencil and ink wash on paper, 137 x 102 cm Collection: Private Collection ©Paula Rego, courtesy of Marlborough, New York and London

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/paula-rego-obedience-and-defiance

Klimt / Schiele

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Drawings from the Albertina Museum, Vienna
Royal Academy of Arts, London
4 November 2018 – 3 February 2019

Egon Schiele, Seated Female Nude, Elbows Resting on Right Knee, 1914
Graphite, gouache on Japan paper, 48 x 32 cm
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the Albertina Museum, Vienna

Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit. / To the age its art, to art its freedom. (i)

The day before the Klimt / Schiele preview, I saw a London Underground billboard advertising the exhibition. Three naked figures with a banner collectively preserving modesty declared this work too shocking for public display, even in 2018. Potential offence and outrage are ever present in contemporary life, lived mostly online, with critical discussion and reflection harder to find. Coming face to face with humanity, warts and all, is a given with this exhibition and it would be a shame to expect anything less. Unmasking the nature of provocation and social propriety is unavoidable when following the drawn line of both artists. Although the official PR images don’t come close to representing it, the viewer is consistently arrested, having to psychologically, morally and ethically grapple with where they stand, often in relation to taboo subjects.

As the first exhibition in the UK to focus on the drawing practice of both artists, Klimt / Schiele presents a rare opportunity to see over 100 delicate works on paper from the Albertina Museum, Vienna. Among these are some of the finest examples of life drawing I’ve ever had the privilege to see, sublime, assured and intensely beautiful. Equally I loved this exhibition for the disquieting, uncomfortable questions it raised and for the timeless radicalism of both artists which positively sings, howls and scratches its way off the walls. The drawings are on an intimate scale and arranged thematically to highlight each artist’s creative process, explore relationships between them and engage with the confrontational nature of their work in juxtaposition. Together with this insightful visual survey, the centenary of the deaths of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and Egon Schiele (1890-1918) provide a timely focus for questions about art and censorship in our own time.

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Emil Nolde – Colour is Life

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Emil NOLDE (1867-1956)
Old Man and Young Woman(Man with Feather in his Hat) (Alter Mann und junge Frau (Mann mit Feder am Hut)), c. 1930s-40s
Watercolour on paper, 16.2 x 15.4 cm
© Nolde Stiftung Seebüll

14 July – 21 October 2018

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two)

“Colour is strength. Strength is life. Only strong harmonies are important.” Emil Nolde, Travels. Ostracism. Liberation. 1919–1946.

Colour is Life presents a rare opportunity to come to grips with the undeniable vibrancy and jarring contradictions in Emil Nolde’s art. This illuminating retrospective features 120 paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints from the Emil Nolde Foundation in Seebüll, Northern Germany. Nolde’s images reveal the journeys of his life; from rural villages, domestic gardens and highly charged religious subjects, to the bustling, industrial port of Hamburg, the cabarets of Berlin and indigenous people of Papua New Guinea. His extraordinary land and seascapes are among the highlights of the show, together with his controversial “unpainted pictures” incorporating elements of folklore and the grotesque.

Emil NOLDE (1867-1956)
Landscape (North Friesland), (Landschaft (Nordfriesland)),1920
Oil on canvas, 86.5 x 106.5 cm
© Nolde Stiftung Seebüll

Living on a shifting border between Germany and Denmark and with a lifetime (1867-1956) spanning two World Wars, there are inevitable conflicts in terms of how the artist saw himself and how he/his work has been perceived by successive generations. When this exhibition first opened at the National Gallery of Ireland in February 2018, The Independent ran with the headline; “Can you enjoy great art created by a Nazi? New Emile Nolde exhibition explores this dilemma.” The mistake we make too often in the age we are living in is making superior moral judgements that reinforce polarity rather than understanding, based on the assumption that the function of art is enjoyment. What I found fascinating in Colour is Life is human nature on display and how you must confront beauty and ugliness in full view of each other; in the comprehensive survey of Nolde’s work and within yourself as a viewer, or potential witness.

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Rembrandt- Britain’s Discovery of the Master

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Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69)
A Woman in Bed, about 1645 – 1646
Oil on canvas, 81.1 x 67.8 cm
Collection: National Galleries of Scotland, presented by William McEwan 1892
Photo: Antonia Reeve

7 July – 14 October

Scottish National Gallery

“Britain’s love affair with one of history’s greatest artists” is the celebratory focus of the Scottish National Gallery’s latest summer blockbuster. Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master features 140 works: oil paintings, drawings and etchings by Rembrandt Van Rijin, works from his workshop and those by British artists he inspired from the 18th Century to the present day. Seeing Rembrandt’s impact on the art of William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Henry Raeburn, David Wilkie, Thomas Duncan, Augustus John, James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Jacob Epstein, Leon Kossoff, William Strang, Henryk Gotlib, Eduardo Paolozzi, Frank Auerbach, John Bellany, Ken Currie and Glen Brown is one of the fascinations of the show. It is also an exhibition about historical acquisition and how an artist’s legacy is enabled. Works on loan from the National Gallery, British Museum, Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Tate, London, the National Gallery of Ireland, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C bring together familiar images, new discoveries and reflections on why Rembrandt is so revered.

Outside the Netherlands, the UK holds the largest collection of Rembrandt works, a trend that began during the reign of Charles I and reached fever pitch in the 18th Century, when prints, drawings and paintings were highly sought after by private collectors. Cataloguing the artist’s work also began at this time, an indicator of Rembrandt as currency and a practical response to market driven climate of forgers and respectful copyists. The desirability of Rembrandt’s work among collectors in the British Isles has resulted in much wider awareness of his work and most importantly, the opportunity to experience it live, having found its way into public collections. Coming eyeball to eyeball with a Rembrandt seems to level all arguments about what good or bad art is. At base he shows us what art is, what it is for and why it matters.

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NOW

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JENNYSAVILLE, SARA BARKER,CHRISTINE BORLAND, ROBIN RHODE, MARKUS SCHINWALD and CATHERINE STREET. 

JENNY SAVILLE
Rosetta II, 2005 – 2006
Oil on watercolour paper, mounted on board, 252 x 187.5cm
Private collection © Jenny Saville
Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian

March until 16 September 2018
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One), Edinburgh.

It’s hard to believe that the latest instalment of NOW, part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s contemporary art programme, is the first major showing of Jenny Saville’s work in Scotland and only her third exhibition in a UK museum. It seems that for many of our finest artists, international acclaim is a pre-requisite for national acknowledgement. The Scottish National Gallery’s newly acquired Study for Branded (1992, Oil on paper, 100.3 x 74.4 cm) is amazingly the only example of Saville’s work currently in a UK public collection, made possible by the Henry and Sula Walton Fund.  Whilst the curatorial aim of the three year NOW exhibition programme is very much about placing contemporary Scottish Art in an international context, it also illuminates the national context of how we regard art and artists in the 21st century.

The purchase of multiple works from Saville’s Glasgow School of Art graduating show by collector Charles Saatchi, her participation in the Saatchi Gallery’s Young British Artists III exhibition (1994) and the Royal Academy’s exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists (1997), effectively launched Saville’s career in terms currency on the international art market. However, that’s not what gives her work its immense power, universality, or ultimate value. As five rooms of her work spanning 26 years powerfully testify, she achieves that integrity entirely on her own terms. The scale of this artist’s emotional intelligence, discipline and command of painting is truly extraordinary, crossing multiple boundaries in how we perceive the female body, art and humanity.

In the history of Western Art and the Scottish figurative tradition Saville’s work radically transforms perception of the female nude with its unflinching honesty. Presenting completely “un-idealised”, “uncompromising” images of the human body, Saville confronts us with the timeless and sometimes overwhelming truth of human vulnerability. It’s a truth which ideal Beauty has cloaked for centuries, then effectively obliterated in popular culture of the 21st Century. At base we are all flesh, magnified in Saville’s adept handling of oils, pastel and charcoal, with all the discomfort and fragility which attends mortality.

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