Calum McClure: Towards a Border

Towards A Border

In his third exhibition at Glasgow Print Studio, Calum McClure has made a series of monotypes, all based on images found near his home in the North of Italy. During a time of shifting political allegiances and questions of sovereignty; borders, confines, and boundaries have become important motifs in his work. This is blended with an autobiographical element in the series, encompassing his move to Italy, near to the Italian border with Slovenia, where the Iron Curtain once ran, finishing in the city of Trieste, marking the division of East and West Europe.

The series was created both in Glasgow Print Studio and in his studio in Italy. All the works bear McClure's distinctive gestural style with forms dancing and weaving across the picture. Most of those produced in Italy were made using a two-step process, beginning with a layer of monotype before being stretched on board to be worked on with gouache. The result brings together these two different mark-making languages, alluding to the mixing of cultures and customs that takes place at a border. The images are of feint paths, walls, liminal spaces, lines of trees, and overgrown ruins; all chosen for their specific histories and connection with the act of delineation. McClure is interested in the way that these boundaries can shift, warp, seem to dissolve, erode under the passing of time, and then resurface to be made apparent again.

Calum McClure was born in 1987 and graduated in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art in 2010. He was the winner of the 2011 Jolomo Painting Award and won a prize at the inaugural W Gordon Smith Award for painting. He is represented by both The Scottish Gallery and Candida Stevens Gallery and was an invited artist at the annual Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 2012. More recently he has been included in an exhibition of prints at the Royal Academy, London; had work in the major Scottish art societies' annual exhibitions; along with having other work selected for the RA Summer Exhibition in various years; he has also shown work with Flowers Gallery, London in their annual winter exhibition of small scale work. His work is held in public collections including Pallant House and many private collections both in Scotland and internationally. His most recent solo exhibition Poco Più In Là at The Scottish Gallery in January 2023 featured twenty paintings, focusing on images from near his new home in Ragogna in the Northern Italy, where he now lives and works.

Calum is a painter who immerses himself in his surroundings, their various histories, and the artistic process of representing them. He understands how paint can convey the poetry of suggestion and is absorbed in the infinite possibilities of the medium. His work evokes atmospheres, especially through the representation of light, shadow and reflections. Some of his images are almost abstract, others quite clearly representational, produced through intense scrutiny of details in the landscape and vistas, views from particular vantage points all with their possibility for further imaginative exploration. He is an artist who dreams as he sees and concentrates deeply as he paints, enabling others who view his work to be transported in a similar way. The images are positive, beautiful and lyrical, those of a precious environment to be nurtured and celebrated.