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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 expressing - through 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.
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Looking Skyward
The Art of Robert McAulayColour uplifts and command of composition creates unexpected beauty in urbanity.
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 beautifully distilled and transcendent. There is an overwhelming sense of expansion in city skies and fields, pure balance of composition and joy in colour that engenders hope.Undulating like the Northern Lights, Wood’s Edge (acrylic on gesso, 50cm x 70cm) 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, poised as dancers. 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 (acrylic 69cm x 80cm) the orange glow of field extends to the upper bar 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. In Gust 2 (acrylic 40cm x 50.5cm) stark, fine stalks hold a flurry of white, yellow and black flora aloft, rooted in a fertile foreground of earthy brown, alight with yellow and orange. A reduced palette and sheer 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 (mixed media, 80cm x 59cm) is profoundly moving in the way McAulay cuts to the bone of human experience and emerges with such bright mastery of composition. We can 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. There is insistence on life, growth, and creative fire. In the face of darkness, it burns between buildings, inside windows and through walls. Colour uplifts and command of composition creates unexpected beauty in urbanity.
McAulay’s high-rise perspective is unlike any other. The sense of elevation in Winter 1971, (acrylic 99cm x 99cm) comes from the ethereal handling of the frosted sky and vibrant yellow houses in the foreground. Memory is brought to life within each uniquely composed window, dominated by what we feel looking skyward. In Shelter (mixed media, 121cm x 121cm) it is nature’s elements, rather than man-made structures, that envelope the paired figures and the viewer. Shelter resides not in a designated space, but under the cover of mist and cloud. Disconnected (mixed media, 121cm x 121cm) is the partner image and counterfoil to Shelter, isolating individual figures and bisecting the picture plane, separating human architecture and nature. The scale and orientation of figures against cavernous buildings amplifies the feeling of being in a city space, but resoundingly alone.
The ambiguity of 5th November 1970 (acrylic 99cm x 99cm) and 5th November 1973 (acrylic 99cm x 99cm) lights a psychological bonfire, with bare trees seemingly ablaze. McAulay’s paint handling sees flickers of blue and orange underpainting emerge beneath a heavy, bitumen-like sky. The celebration feels acutely distant, with the viewer effectively placed at their own window as observer, drawn into intimacy by a specific date whose personal significance is unknown. The pathway between these buildings, memory and time is processed in painterly terms, with rich, layered textures of lived experience. Led by composition, colour and mark, we make our own way inside the image.
Honesty and compassion define Robert McAulay’s painting, qualities which shine in the current Zeitgeist. What is expressed in every mark of a creative life helps us see, and here in this group of new works, McAulay presents an ever-expanding horizon, grounded in the discipline of painting.
Georgina Coburn September 2022
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Skyfield | ROBERT MCAULAY: new paintings | 23 September - 15 October
Past viewing_room
