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The Colin Middleton Gallery

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Introduction

Introduction

Moonlight, Ballyholme

Colin Middleton moved with his family to Bangor in 1952 after three years in Ardglass, during which he worked in an expressionist style that continued throughout the 1950s. The intense palette and energetic handling of paint in this work are typical of the period and the mood is ambiguous yet slightly melancholy, with a single figure set against a turbulent sea.

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Moonlight, Ballyholme 1953 oil on canvas 50 x 75 cm CAG2783, Crawford Art Gallery Presented to the State 2012 (Allied Irish Banks)

The ‘Holy Lands’

Colin Middleton returned to Belfast in 1945 with his wife, Kathleen, and their young family, having spent a year living in Ballyhalbert, and this painting reflects both his pleasure at returning to the city and the mood of joy and exuberance at the end of the war. It has been suggested that the blank newspaper sheets flying away in the wind represent this new sense of freedom, with the news and events of the war no longer dominating everyday life.

Private Collection

26.7 x 30.5 cm

Shipyard Family

Probably painted in Coleraine in the late 1950s, this subject seems to look back to earlier, urban subject matter, but the colourful clothing seems untypical of Belfast at this time and demonstrates Middleton’s ability to use pattern and other elements of design within the increasingly abstracted works of this transitional period.

Shipyard Family oil on canvas

Private Collection

Previously part of the David Bowie Collection

1994

30 x 30 cm

Two of Middleton’s drawings from his school days

Punt on the Isis drawing

14.5 x 22 cm

Belum U4729, Ulster Museum

A Street Band drawing

18 x 20.5 cm

Belum U4728, Ulster Museum

Middleton was taught art at BRA by Miss Dickson, who apparently encouraged drawing from the imagination, rather than from the object. Colin Middleton recorded later that he had been awarded the highest mark for art in Ulster in the Senior Certificate. The first of these drawings might be copied from an illustration, perhaps to a story, while the second is more likely to have been something he saw in Belfast.

If I Were a Blackbird

One of a series of quietly impressionistic Belfast street scenes Middleton painted around the time of the Blitz of Belfast in 1941, which deeply affected him and which seem to have inspired a sense of empathy with the often isolated figures that he drew and painted. The poet John Hewitt wrote of this work that “what gave the painting its permanent life was that trail of a song through the title, which can only be heard in the heart”.

If I were a Blackbird 1941 oil on canvas

50.7 x 61 cm

Belum U4792, Ulster Museum

Lagan, Annadale, October

Lagan: Annadale, October

Another painting completed after the Blitz that demonstrates Middleton’s affection for Belfast and his enjoyment of the aspects of daily life that continued despite recent events. Middleton often painted around Stranmillis and the Annadale Embankment at this time, and Queen’s University can just be seen in the distance.

Lagan, Annadale, October 1941/3 oil on canvas

51 x 61 cm

Belum U598, Ulster Museum

Strange Openings

This highly-stylised and abstracted treatment of a factory and houses seems to date from the early 1940s. The black windows of the factory might relate to the wartime black-out or to the black felt that was hung in the windows of one linen mill when its windows were blown out during a bombing raid. The scale and placing of the factory buildings in relation to the houses around them might indicate Middleton’s attitude towards industrialisation and its impact on the individual.

Strange Openings oil on canvas, 50.8 x 61 cm

Irish Museum of Modern Art

Northern Village

Painted during Middleton’s time in Ardglass, when he was working with the Waddington Galleries in Dublin, Northern Village has the heightened palette, dynamic paint surface and use of impasto typical of this period in which he worked in a powerful expressionist manner. The carefully constructed pattern of related brushstrokes and the integration of the foreground trees with the buildings beyond is reminiscent of Cézanne.

Northern Village, 1949/50 oil on canvas

65.8 x 76.1 cm

National Gallery of Victoria, Australia

Purchased 1953

Loughanure

In the 1960s the Ulster landscape became the central subject of Middleton’s work, and he sought to capture both the visual effect of changing light and the underlying structure of the landscape. His palette was often darker and carefully controlled across the canvas, achieving a sense of space and gradual recession towards the horizon line.

Loughanure, oil on canvas, 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Marie Heaney

Farmhouse, County Down

One of the last paintings completed by Colin Middleton, the simplicity of the composition and the traditional farmhouse seem to look back towards some of his earliest landscapes. The subtly integrated palette contains an extraordinary range of colour, as if he wanted a last opportunity to explore the tools of a painter.

Farmhouse, County Down 1983 oil on canvas, 46 x 61 cm

Jane Middleton Giddens

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