Skyfield
ROBERT MCAULAY
Valleycover View/Neighbour’s Garden mixed media | 99cm x 99cm SmalloppositeWhite Roofs 4 mixed media | 21cm x 24.5cm Published by Kilmorack Gallery ltd, 2022 ISBN Kilmorack978-1-7396557-4-7Gallery,inverness-shire iv4 7al SCOTLAND
www.kilmorackgallery.co.ukart@kilmorackgallery.co.uk
23 September - 15 October 2022 Skyfield ROBERT MCAULAY
Gust mixed3media | 40cm x 50.5cm
Tony Davidson, September
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We have shown the paintings of Robert McAulay in Kilmorack for over twenty years, and, in this time, McAulay has produced a remarkable body of work. I see this in his studio when I am lucky enough to visit. Decades of colour, composition and honesty are hung, or stacked, around his home. He has always painted a small series of work – incline, rural, treeline, community – before moving on to fresh subjects. They come from memories; of his past, nature and the manmade world, and they create a place of memory, a vault of things McAulay doesn’t want to recede. This is what art is: seeing, feeling and expressingthrough a language without words. It takes the personal and makes it universal. McAulay is self-taught, but he has all the sophistication of the best art school graduate, and he achieves what he sets out to do, to keep a flame alive, and remind us through images that it is vital that we remember, so we can make a better world.
Skyfield2022
2 121cmDisconnectedmixedmediax121cm
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4 121cmmixedSheltermediax121cm
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6 December99cmacrylic1970x99cm
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8 The 99cmmixedCourtyardmediax99cm
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10 Small White Roofs 4 mixed media 21cm x 24.5cm Small White Roofs 1 mixed 21.5cmmediax24.5cm
11 Small White Roofs 2 mixed media 20cm x 23.5cm Small White Roofs 3 mixed media 24.5cm x 23cm
12 5th November 1973 99cmacrylicx99cm
13 5th November 1970 mixed media 99cm x 99cm
Valley View/ Neighbour’s Garden mixed media 99cm x 99cm
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16 Winter 99cmacrylic1971x99cm
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18 Gust 69cmacrylic1x80cm
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20 Dark Field 1 69cmacrylicx80cm
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22 Dark Field 2 mixed media 40cm x 40.5cm
23 Dark Field 3 mixed media 42.5cm x 42.5cm
Robert McAulay’s latest body of work is a deeply moving affirmation of life in creative practice. Drawn from nature and childhood memories of Glasgow, the artist’s visual language is distilled and transcendent. There is an overwhelming sense of expansion in city skies and fields, balance of composition and joy in colour that engenders hope.Undulating like the Northern Lights, Wood’s Edge is a magical, technicolour vision.Translucency between worlds is implied in an emotive palette, shifting between warm and cool hues. Vertical flickers of vivid blue and orange reach upward, beyond the physical scale of the painting. McAulay creates an evolved, liberating mindscape. White stippled marks create an ambiguous, imaginative space, shimmering with possibility. Trees are stripped back, with branches like uplifted arms. McAulay achieves the perfect measure of gesture, colour and mark, pure choreography in paint. There’s a sense of being on the edge of burgeoning awareness, of aspiration and tenderness in being human, beholding nature and self. In McAulay’s Gust series, seeds are being sown. In Gust 1 the orange glow of field extends to the upper bar
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Illuminating Skies
25 of blue-grey sky. The artist’s scratched, circular marks dig into the underpainting, like subliminal musical notation. White- dabbed movement rustles with life, casting chaff away and revealing what is essential. A reduced palette and energy of mark create an intense outburst of feeling that resonates throughout the series. McAulay’s movement into abstraction reaches a zenith in his Dark Field series, paintings of distilled emotional intelligence. Like Rothko, Robert McAulay doesn’t shy away from what makes us human. Dark Field 1 is profoundly moving in the way McAulay cuts to the bone of human experience and emerges with such bright mastery of composition. We feel the horizon shifting, tempered by delicate colour, beneath heavy white impasto and the dark, deeply textured ground. The insistence on incandescent borders of orange, and all that is held simmering beneath, brings light to the world. In the face of darkness there is insistence on life, growth, and creative fire. It burns between buildings, inside windows and through walls. Colour uplifts and command of composition creates unexpected beauty in urbanity. Georgina Coburn, September 2022
Wood’s 50cmacrylicEdgex75cm
