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| Gertsev Gallery. Collection |
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Christine McArthur
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Christine McArthur lives and works in Glasgow and also spends much time on St. Ives in Cornwall, where she has a house. At different periods a small fishing port on this island had a close community of artists and thus gained world fame. No wonder that celebrated predecessors, who worked on St. Ives in the 1950s, especially Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton and Ben Nicholson, influenced McArthur's works. McArthur carries on the tradition of lyrical abstraction, which was characteristic of St. Ives artists, Patrick Heron in particular who in his formal quests never fully abandoned the reality of the figural world.
Christine McArthur's works hover between representation and abstraction. The artist does numerous still lifes, offering endlessly diverse, often semi-abstract variations. Recognizable pictorial motifs recur in one composition after another and disappear, reduced to simple geometrical shapes. More often than not they are household objects, such as old pottery that McArthur collects. Hers is a quiet contemplative art because it is only in quiet that the soul of ordinary things reveals itself. McArthur likens the variations of one and the same composition in her works to the metaphysics of poetry or music: the mystery of life recognized intuitively at the level of emotions is what her pictures are all about. Nevertheless, McArthur sets herself fairly concrete formal tasks when she experiments with the surface of her pictures. Throughout her artistic career she has tried different techniques from oil and watercolour to an original combination of acrylic and paper collage, producing a thoroughly worked-out multi-layer texture.
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