House of Macdonald: Alan Macdonald | Carolynda Macdonald | Rory Macdonald

When a painting arrests you and forces a dialogue with it - a ‘hello, what, how, wow’ – you know that it is good. All three of the Macdonald family achieve this and more. Their work makes you look deeply and intimately. It is like sitting at the Macdonald’s dinner table and joining a conversation where talk is about art, the great masters of the past, and about literature, psychology and the playful excitement of creating fresh worlds.

Each Macdonald has a distinctive voice. Father and husband, Alan Macdonald has exhibited widely since the 1990s and has earned a cult following with paintings that take the dark blanket of Renaissance techniques, and merges them with the insecurities and flotsam modern life. Subjects are often dressed in self-fashioned mock-period costumes, possibly surrounded by smaller characters that, like us all, act out drama. I am reminded that ‘All the World is a stage, And all the men and women merely players.’ Sometimes the best plays are dark comedies.

Carolynda Macdonald’s voice on the surface is calmer. At the dinner table conversation, she would be a controlled chair, steering the debate to new shores. There is often a beautiful bird in her work. It may be feathered in an old master’s painting or dressed in porcelain pattern. The flamingo or songbird is most likely settling on a precious object and somehow placed in a mythological landscape. These are paintings of the subconscious and they invite us, like the birds and animals, to explore this inner world and to embrace our daydreaming minds.

Rory is the second generation of this extraordinary artistic dynasty and brings a third voice to the dinner table. His paintings bring us eye-to-eye with painted figures from the past – Velazquez and Giordano and the world of the Baroque and Renaissance. These exquisitely painted figures join us in the here-and-now, repositioned and rescaled to fit into our modern lives - in the palm of our hands or the inky black of the dinner table, eager to join the conversation.