New etchings

Etchings - Calum McClure

Hobby House and Ripples, etching, edition of 12, 21.5 x 31.5 cms There is rarely any big overall plan to my practice; it’s mostly chance and accident. After a week of painting it’s a bit like waking up after a dream and asking myself “What was all that about?”

Most subject matter is from photographs I take on walks, in gardens, cemeteries and country estates. And there is always a preoccupation with water, more specifically water that is employed for our pleasure or used for ornamentation. I take these images to the studio, there to be contemplated, selected, combined, manipulated or rejected. The process is all immediate, instantaneous reactions to the associations I make when I take a walk. You won’t find a copy of Heiddegger or Derrida lurking in my studio; I’d like to think it’s a bit more “Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar”.

Perhaps landscape painters find themselves in a strange position since conceptual artists have, by the nature of their work, laid claim to concept, whilst abstract painters can concern themselves with pure form, colour, shape and tone and indeed with the very nature of paint and painting itself. Why I still want to paint landscapes is that I find nothing more interesting than situation, locality and setting, the way that these affect the human psyche, and the emotions that we attach to them. Landscape painting for me is a world of complex atmospheres and histories.

In my last exhibition at The Scottish Gallery, Reflection, most of the images came from my time painting in Hamburg. There I became interested in the city’s many lakes, ponds and canals,

Katsura, Benmore, etching, edition of 20 17 x 24 cms in particular those used by the city’s inhabitants for sailing, swimming, water polo and kayaking.

In works such as Hobby House and Ripples I was seeking to capture some of this utopian feeling in the easy flow and rhythm of the canal waters. I suppose there is a great deal of escapism in this work but in that part of the city, on that Sunday, it felt like a little patch of utopia had been created.

I found this sense of communal enjoyment to be distinctly German, unfamiliar and worth capturing.

My most recent work relates to music and rhythm.

After a week’s painting outside (something I hadn’t done in years) in Italy, I have begun to work on a series of nocturne paintings. For this series I am selecting pieces of music from various classical composers who have written nocturnes and producing paintings inspired by their music. I’ve always been tone deaf and although every attempt I’ve made to learn an instrument has been a failure, I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship that visual art has

with music. : Kandinsky, for example, was thought to have had synaesthesia, a condition were stimulation of one sense automatically triggers other senses. In his work, music and art were symbiotically combined. It is this idea of music precipitating an image that I want to run with..

In tandem with this series I have been producing etchings at Glasgow Print Studio, concentrating on work that reduces images to line, and using aquatint for its painterly qualities. While working on this series I was remind of Disney’s film Fantasia and the idea of the soundtrack as a personality represented by a line which then produces ripples and shapes depending on what music is being played. The prints will be exhibited at The Scottish Gallery in the New Year, with a full exhibition in April of 2016. www.scottish-gallery.co.uk mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk