Philip Braham ‘Still’.

So we are fast approaching the opening of what I believe will be one of the most thrilling (and long overdue) exhibitions Edinburgh has seen in a long time.

You can have a look at the work in this superb catalogue with foreword by Dr Dom Smith from Dundee University.

Still Catalogue3

I have an awful lot of ‘favourites’ in this exhibition, but the one below is a definite….and the last painting to to be finished for the show.

Astonishing!

‘Still’.

In my last post I promised to reveal all about my recent trip to the woods with award winning artist Philip Braham. Phil is working hard now to finish the final painting for his exhibition, ‘Still’. which will open during the Edinburgh Art Festival. As the date looms ever closer, I feel it is an appropriate time to reveal the ‘fruits of our labour’, as they say. I should add that all hard labour has been down to Philip Braham who has been the consummate professional in the lead up to his exhibition.

‘Bluebell Woods’ is a large scale painting and I confess that it scared me the first time I viewed it in Phil’s studio: a sensation I’ne never experienced from a painting, but in a sensational way. Brace yourselves for August folks-’Still’. is a must see.
Contact Union Gallery for details: www.uniongallery.co.uk

The Hypnotist

‘STILL.’ TO THRILL THIS AUGUST
Friday, 3 June 2011

Organisers have announced an important exhibition in Broughton of new works by the acclaimed Scottish artist Philip Braham during August’s Edinburgh Art Festival.

STILL. will be Braham’s first solo show since 2005, and represents something of a coup for the two-year-old Union Gallery, where staff are already fielding enquiries about it from art historians, institutions and private collectors far and wide.

Braham, born in Glasgow in 1959, studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee in the late 1970s. Painting full time since 1985, he has worked in the Netherlands, California, Spain, Sardinia and various locations in Scotland. Over the years, he has won numerous prestigious awards from, among others, the Scottish Arts Council, Greenshields and the RSA. He is now based in Edinburgh.

Gallery co-owner Robert Dawkins says the exhibition will be a personal account of themes and events which have shaped Braham’s life. Many of his explorations for STILL. take place against the backdrop of strangely deserted but highly charged woodland, a terrain now unsettlingly familiar to those who admired his series Suicide Notes and Falling Shadows in Arcadia (the latter showcased as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival last year).

Superficially, observers of Braham’s work are often first seduced by the exactitude of his technique. One cannot help admiring the superfine brushwork which renders his beautifully composed paintings almost photographic in detail.

But there’s more going on than that. His technique is like the hypnotist’s glittering fascinator: it draws you in so that – without you noticing – other processes may begin.

His landscapes appear realistic, but in recent projects it has been through his refusal to explain, to direct the viewer’s eye upon any single area of interest or provide easily decoded metaphors that he has conveyed a disturbing sense of something other, unspoken, and unquantified.

Based on the previews seen by Spurtle, it seems that such themes will be continued: poignant suggestions of stories and forgotten histories (e.g. ‘Antonine Hill’ top right), glimpses of the everyday growing uncanny, the unfamiliar on the brink of recall (‘The Hermitage’, above). There is the sense of a wider context emerging, a world in which things we prefer to think of as understood and stable instead signify quite differently or are in flux (‘Love Letter’, below).

However, whilst Braham’s August exhibition may emerge from events in his own life – there is also a strong sense that – like a hypnotist – his power to move us will depend on what the hypnotised subject brings to the interaction. Speaking of STILL. he writes:

A brushstroke is different from a pixel or a grain of silver halide on photographic film [...] [T]he gestural movement both describes and withholds information simultaneously; it gives form, colour, tone, texture, depth and expression but it resists amplification. The openness of the mark allows completion in the mind of the viewer and the transmutation of the idea begins in front of the painting.

Braham’s paintings, then, will require concentration to appreciate fully, but Dawkins is convinced that such close attention will amply repay the effort. The works will be supplemented by a short film – Philip Braham in Conversation: a move typical of the gallery’s friendly and no-nonsense determination to share contemporary Scottish art with as wide an audience as possible. AM

STILL. will show at the Union Gallery, 34 Broughton Street, from 5 August to 5 September 2011, seven days a week.

Beautiful Words

I am really enjoying Janet Melrose’s solo exhibition, “A Still Life” at Union Gallery.

I am very grateful to arts writer and blogger Jan Patience for this wonderful foreword to Janet’s catalogue:

For the last blossom is the first blossom
And the first blossom is the best blossom
And when from Eden we take our way
The morning after is the first day.
Louis MacNeice Apple Blossom, from Collected Poems

I first saw Janet Melrose’s work in 2008 when I was a judge in the now sadly defunct Scottish art award, The Aspect Prize. What first struck me about her painting style, beautiful mark-making aside, was its simplicity. Simple lines. Simple yet striking colour. Simple composition. Seemingly simple subject matter. The natural world was presented through the prism of Janet’s watching eye aligned with her preternaturally poetic mind. Her paintings were all hymns to the beauty of nature. Yet danger lurked in the background. As the Aspect Prize moved on from the initial stage, which saw her selected as one of four artists who would prepare a body of work for a finalists’ exhibition in London six months later, I started to be drawn into Janet’s world. There was something in her work which moved me profoundly. These were not paintings ‘about nature’. They were about our place in a world which constantly shifts and changes. We have bees hovering around vivid blooms, an injured dog adrift by a sign which proclaims danger, butterflies making a beeline for blossom, birds perched on branches minding their own business and furtive foxes slinking through a wood. The world is served up for us here in microcosm. Scenarios are painted in through a process of layering. A matte surface starts to emerge, which she says ‘suits my way of thinking’. Conventionally accepted notions of composition disappear out of her studio window. Janet describes her paintings as being ‘accidents which have waited to happen’. “Sometimes I wonder myself why they take so long,” she adds. I was unaware of it when I first saw her work in 2008, but Janet and her husband had been through a traumatic period coping with the serious illness of their daughter. Being selected for the Aspect Prize represented a turning point after an enforced period of not painting. Returning to the studio as her daughter started to recover, she found her eyes opened up in many different ways. In narrowing her field of vision to the immediate surroundings of her walled garden by the River Earn in Crieff, the creative floodgates opened. Thinking about that now, I can see why I found myself drawn to the way in which she was making sense of her situation, for I too was trying to make sense of my own difficulties, watching the steady decline and fall of my mother’s health just a few years after the death of my father. It is the way of things. Something we all have to go through. There is always danger lurking in Eden. Since childhood, Janet has been an inveterate nature-watcher, but looking at each new work she produces, it seems as though with each new painting, she has just had the dust washed from her eyes For me, therein lies the beauty of this intuitive painter’s work.

JAN PATIENCE
May 2011
www.janpatience.blogspot.com

On Location!

I recently went for a walk in my dressing gown in the woods….with the sensational artist Philip Braham.
Well, it’s not everyday you can say you’ve done that!

We went to do some photo shoots in preparation for Phil’s solo exhibition in August. I’m extremely lucky to be able to see the work progressing and my god it’s scarily good.

I managed to get this wee snap.

This was taken back in February on what might have been the only nice day that month. Ironic really, as Phil had been watching the weather forecasts closely to try capture the right atmosphere. He wanted a much chillier look. All will be revealed………