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Paintings of Christine McArthur.
Roger Billcliffe
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Still life painting has always been at the centre of Christine McArthur's art. At Glasgow School of Art in the 1970s she began a lifetime's habit of making drawings in a sketchbook, incessantly recording things that caught her eye, amused her, intrigued her, puzzled her. Many of these drawings would form the basis of later paintings, where the subject would seem to be observational still life, but usually there was a distinct sub-text which was for McArthur the true subject of the painting. Her painting has always been driven by an emotional response to her life and things around her, inspired by her love of poetry and music, and in the last ten years or so this emotional drive has become the dominant element in her work. Observational drawing no longer underpins her paintings; it has been replaced by what she would describe as 'emotional memory' and this divorce from immediate reality has taken her work forward in other directions as abstraction and passion began to play a larger part in her work. Thus the abstract shapes of Hans Coper and Lucy Rie ceramics replaced the more literal vases and jugs, and her assured draughtmanship gave way to a more intuitive handling of form and colour.
The simplicity of these shapes called for a sympathetic technique. McArthur turned to collage, not simply to reproduce the shape of a vase, cup or coffee pot, but also to create a surface upon which the composition is painted. There is nothing simple about the construction of these paintings other than the illusion the artist creates of their simplicity. The raised surface she makes by the application of layers of torn paper on to a board may seem haphazard but it is much more considered; shapes and layers are built up gradually; colour washes are applied to separate areas to form underpainting for the final marks; and, as the composition evolves, separate pieces of paper, usually pre-painted, are applied to represent particular forms within the composition. These stages form a contemplative respite while McArthur considers the final painting. This final stage, however, as the surface collage is overlaid with paint and more cut-paper, is by no means a calculated or drawn-out process, as intuition and emotion take over as the driving forces in the creation of the finished work leading to a speedy and vigorous, sometimes aggressive, resolution of the painting.
Although I have described this, for the sake of clarity, as a sequential process - first the idea then the technique- in truth the two developed side by side, one alternately leading the other until a final resolution was reached. But there are some developments which seem to be a direct result of changes in the artist's life. Five years ago she began to spend more time in the Cornish town of St Ives, a fishing village which had been the spiritual home of much of the best of British painting for over fifty years from the mid-1920s to the 1970s. Several of McArthur's heroes had worked there - Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon - and like them she was attracted to the intense quality of light which seems peculiar to St Ives and the Penwith coastline it shares. Bleached blues and greys predominate in this light, created by the sun reflecting off the sea which surrounds the town, and these colours began to dominate her collage paintings. Then two years ago she moved out of Glasgow to a lochside in Argyll where again the light has a predominantly silvery-grey quality, more the result of cloud and rain than sun, but still a dominant factor of everyday life. These things remain as underlying and constant factors in her current painting.
Shape and texture, then, tend to dominate McArthur's current paintings and ideas for these are recorded in a very different kind of sketchbook. The pen has been replaced by the paste brush, as the artist now fills notebooks with torn paper compositions, pasted on to pages and coloured as part of series of personal statements not intended for public view. As she has said, some of these cannot be developed, they catch the moment and there is nothing to add, while others can lead to whole series of paintings, which see a simple idea develop to complex and satisfying conclusions. These pages can be inspired by a rock, a dark silhouette of a headland, a single pear, an elegant and considered pot by Coper or Rie, a coffee pot by Alessi, or the simple bold shapes of studio clutter such as a stool or frame. None of these objects would appear in her work were it not for a spiritual or emotional association which demands their inclusion. Music and poetry, family and a few friends, fill her life and painting is a response to these various stimuli. Every painting is the direct result of some emotional stimulus, an event or dilemma, of feelings for friends and family, of the delight in encountering new forms or colours or textures. The Hans Coper series reflects her fascination both with the individual pots and with Coper's own personal dictum 'Why before how', which she has now made her own. "Hans, may you always have quails'eggs" refers not to the potter but to a friend, a gifted cook, who would be unhappy if his supply of fresh quails' eggs were ever to falter. "Storm Fish", with its violent brushwork and swirling imagery is a reaction to a wild Scottish storm and the winter weather of the west of Scotland. Alongside these paintings McArthur can take a more abstract approach in an attempt, she says, to empty her mind of things remembered and to allow shapes and colours to suggest themselves. Often the results echo the papier-collЋs of her notebooks but painted in a fluid acrylic they achieve a more spontaneous and intuitive result. The titles are - such as "Inwardness" and "Moments in Time" - suggested by the imagery, not vice-versa, and often reflect the poetic nature of the works.
Poetry is the consistent thread in all of McArthur's works. A succinctness of pictorial language, an imagery shrouded in personal references, a technique which is at one with its subject matter, it suffuses all of the paintings in this exhibition with an individual voice which is a rare commodity today.
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