Alasdair Wallace : All Enquiries
"My paintings are produced in an intuitive process of invention, oblique observation and memory. There is a constant accumulation of the absurd, of everyday places, objects and ideas which snag my vision. Employing a visual vocabulary which I have honed over many years, I aim to produce images which seem to have an emblematic quality but which retain an ambiguity."
An exhibition of new paintings, Alasdair Wallace creates works that are characterised by very controlled composition combined with an unusual density and richness of colour, the outcome is what he calls 'landscape inventions'.
'My paintings are produced in an intuitive process of invention, oblique observation and memory. There is a constant accumulation of the absurd, of everyday places, objects and ideas which snag my vision. Employing a visual vocabulary which I have honed over many years, I aim to produce images which seem to have an emblematic quality but which retain an ambiguity. I hope this might be engaging to the imagination of the viewer. I don’t usually seek to evoke specific places or objects but I hope that the work conveys some sense of real experience.
Often taking my viewpoint from the unfixed margin between the rural and urban edge of the city, my work ranges from larger scale landscape paintings to smaller pieces which ‘zoom in’ to the landscape. The work in this show mostly consists of these smaller paintings of invented and observed objects, distilled to a solitary subject in a reduced context. These evoke a sense of absurd icon, portent, baffling emblem or obscure signal: clouds, figures, vehicles, buildings, bones.
The attitude I have to my working practice is that it is one long continuous and slow moving process. I always have many and various paintings underway in the studio in a process which overlaps and interweaves. Some pieces can stall for years - until they 'make sense' again alongside new work. The process is reactive. The material of paint conjures itself in the shaping of images. There are plenty of quick tangents and capricious forays along the way but somehow everything eventually feeds back into this slow elliptical orbit of work.'
Alasdair Wallace trained at Glasgow School of Art from 1987 to 1991. He exhibits regularly in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London and has won numerous awards including the prestigious Noble Grossart Painting Prize in 2001 and the W. Gordon Smith Award in 2018.
Wallace is an accomplished draughtsman and technician. His works are sophisticated in terms of both their accessibility to the spectator, and the complexity of thought which lies behind them. In a style that is characterised by very controlled composition combined with an unusual density and richness of colour, Wallace creates what he calls landscape inventions. His works are held in public and private collections internationally.
