Carolynda Macdonald
House of Macdonald
Cover image
Where Spirits Run Free oil on linen | 91cm x 84cm
Printed by Kilmorack Gallery, March 2024
Carolynda Macdonald
House of Macdonald
16th March - 13th April 2024
New Beginnings
oil on board | 32cm x 30cm
Foreword
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. Removing the figures from their original context and narrative gives them a new life and setting, and allows thoughts and feelings of the human condition to be explored - including inner turmoil and vulnerability, love and hidden desires, betrayal, motherhood and protectiveness. Rather than keeping these human figures within the birds, I have allowed them to break their boundaries and occupy a space between two worlds. I like to create a sense of stillness in these lands, using reflective bodies of water and skies with an end-of-day light, providing safe places of solace.
Other works include structures or towers like bowers for birds to visit to adorn with jewels. The birds themselves may take on unusual plumage like Delft ceramics or patterns as they inhabit a recognisable world, but one not quite as we know it.
Carolynda Macdonald, March 2024
Kindred Spirits oil on linen | 113cm x 105cm
Sanctuary oil on linen | 91cm x 64cm
The Silver Tree oil on board | 43cm x 40cm
Safe Haven
oil on linen | 76cm x 69cm
Storm Bird oil on linen | 91cm x 84cm
The River of Lost Souls oil on linen | 113cm x 105cm
Fortress of Shadows
oil on board | 25cm x 23cm
Where Spirits Run Free oil on linen | 91cm x 84cm
Vanguard
oil on board | 25cm x 23cm
Hoardguard
oil on board | 25cm x 23cm
Beacon of Hope
oil on board | 25cm x 23cm
Soul Threads
oil on board | 25cm x 23cm
Guiding Light oil on board
| 25cm x 23cm
Where Time Stood Still oil on board | 32cm x 30cm
Voyages of the Soul
‘Beauty, fortunately, is remembered long after ugliness vanishes,’ a visitor to the gallery commented many years ago. ‘It stays with us,’ he told me - and his words have stayed with me. One thing that art can do is bring this aesthetic to bare and use it to pull you into a painting. Carolynda Macdonald does this and much more. She weaponizes it, and psychologizes it, and makes it into something profound. It’s no easy feat to achieve, requiring all the tools of painting - a honed palette, meditated compositions and, most of all, an understanding of the subtleties of our need for story and understanding. Sometimes these are best told in paint.
Although trained in art, Macdonald spent many years as a bacterial biologist, staring down a microscope and looking at worlds within worlds – the indivisible, divided, and seen with trained scientific eyes. She has retained this ability to look into the minute - the eye of a bird, a discarded pearl or the detail of an old master’s work - and to place them in the worlds Macdonald creates. They are worlds where voyages can take place and the mind can roam.
There is an evolution in these soulscapes, as she calls them, even in this House of Macdonald exhibition. In the earliest painting, Kindred Spirits (2021), blue-and-white-porcelain-plumed birds
perch around a precious silver object. The rocky landscape they inhabit is possibly a hidden coirre, and it is somewhere they are safe. Here, they can be themselves and enjoy what is precious without noise or threat, and the only eye that sees them is ours.
In other paintings, birds contain scenes inspired by old master’s paintings. The subject is often mythological. In River of Lost Souls, a crane carries an image inspired by Rubens’ Samson and Delilah (1609-10) within her body. This allows both us the viewer, and Macdonald, to spend time with both great archetypal stories as well as with other great artists, enriching the psychological depth of each painting.
The figures in one of Macdonald’s newest paintings, Where Spirits Run Free (inspired by The Abduction of Europa by Jean Baptiste Marie Pierre, 1750,) breaks through into the world around them. In the myth that inspired these works, Europa is taken by Jupiter disguised as a beautiful bull. We are also carried away inside the body of this beautiful bird. Again, it is a painting that offers a haven – the safety of a bird’s belly - that allows us to live dangerously.
It is a great honour to be able to spend time with these fifteen paintings and to show them in Kilmorack Gallery as part of the House of Macdonald exhibition in March 2024. They will find fresh admirers, not just here in Kilmorack, but afterwards in their passage of the long and varied lives these works will live. They are timeless paintings – psychologically powerfully, exquisite and lingeringly beautiful.
Tony Davidson, March 2024
+44 (0) 1463 783 230 art@kilmorackgallery.co.uk by beauly, inverness-shire iv4 7al
Carolynda Macdonald in her Edinburgh studio
Contained paintings are taken from the following...
New Beginnings: Taken from Diana and Endymion (170510) by Francesco Solimena, which from the Royal Museums in Liverpool, and The Rising Sun by Francois Boucher (1753) from the Wallace Collection in London.
Sanctuary: Francesco Solimena, Venus at the Forge of Vulcan c. 1704. It is housed in the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Safe Haven: Venus and Adonis by Annibale Carracci c.1595, from the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna.
Storm Bird : The Setting Of The Sun by François Boucher (1752), which is in The Wallace Collection in London.
River of Lost Souls: Samson and Delilah by Peter Paul Rubens (1609-10), from the National Gallery, London.
Fortress of Shadows: Tarquinus and Lucretia (1609) by Peter Paul Rubens, which is in the collection of the Hermitage in St Petersburg.
Where Spirits Run Free: The Abduction of Europa (1750) by Jean Baptiste Marie Pierre, which is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art.
Vanguard : The Progress of Love: The Meeting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1771) which is in The Frick Collection in New York.