Academicians VI - Philip Braham, Victoria Crowe, Paul Furneaux, Wendy McMurdo: First Floor Gallery

Glasgow Print Studio is pleased to present the sixth in a series of exhibitions bringing together the outstanding work of four well-respected Royal Scottish Academicians. Ghost orchids coalesce out of the darkness, forms flicker through a snowy landscape and the natural world finds its way into ours through printmaking, painting, photography and sculptural forms in this broad ranging survey of work by four artists at the height of their practise.

Braham's paintings and photographs capture the beauty and fragility of the natural world, while Crowe's work explores the boundaries between representation, reflection, and surface. Furneaux's woodblock prints are inspired by the Japanese Mokuhanga tradition, and McMurdo's experimental photographs capture the fleeting beauty of plants and flowers.

Philip Braham is a Scottish artist whose paintings recall the Northern Romantic tradition in which the landscape reflects aspects of the human condition. Fidelity to experience is fundamental to his practice, developing from a phenomenological immersion in landscape that discloses nature as timeless and our mortal existence as preciously short.

Philip Braham graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 1980, and completed a Postgraduate at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Holland the following year. He then undertook a year of research as visiting artist at the University of California at Los Angeles before returning to his native Scotland. In 1989 he joined the stable of Raab Gallery (London and Berlin) and later, BCA Gallery, London.

His career includes 26 solo exhibitions to date, in addition to numerous group shows both nationally and internationally. Braham's paintings and photographs are held in many public and private collections and art foundations. Among the awards received are the prestigious Royal Scottish Academy Guthrie Award for painting and the Royal Scottish Academy Morton Award for lens-based work. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Perth Museum & Art Gallery, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, Roger Billcliffe Gallery, Glasgow, Raab Gallery Berlin, and at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. In 2021, Braham was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy.

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The work of acclaimed artist Victoria Crowe encompasses and entwines landscape, portraiture, still life and interiors. Dividing her time between Scotland and Italy, of where the landscape and light can be felt in her distinctive practice, she explores the boundaries between representation, reflection and surface, with exquisite sensitivity to line and form

Working between painting, drawing and printmaking, with each discipline informing the other, the inner structure of Crowe's work is often concerned with memory and association, timelessness and fragility, moving towards a metaphysical understanding of the nature of experience, as well as nature itself, real and transmuted.

Crowe studied at Kingston School of Art from 1961-65 and at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1965-68. She lives and works in West Linton, Edinburgh, and Venice. Her first one-person exhibition, after leaving the Royal College of Art, was in London and she has subsequently gone on to have over fifty solo shows. Her first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery was in 1970. In August 2018, The Scottish National Portrait Gallery held a retrospective exhibition of Crowe's portraits, Beyond Likeness. In 2019, the City Art Centre, Edinburgh, honoured Crowe's career with a four-floor retrospective, 50 Years of Painting.

She is a member of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours (RSW). Crowe was awarded an OBE for Services to Art in 2004 and, from 2004-07, she was a Senior Visiting Scholar at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. The resulting work, Plant Memory, was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2007 and subsequently toured Scotland. In 2009, she received an Honorary Degree from The University of Aberdeen and, in 2010, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2013, Dovecot Studios wove a large-scale tapestry of Crowe's painting Large Tree Group. This collaborative tapestry was acquired for the National Museums Scotland.

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Paul Furneaux was born in Ellon, Aberdeenshire, in 1962 and studied Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art (1982-1987). Winning the Monbusho Scholarship in 1996, Furneaux was able to begin comprehensive research into the art of woodblock printing and undertook a Masters degree in the subject at Tama Art University, Tokyo (1998-2000). During his time in Tokyo, Furneaux developed his interest in the Mokuhanga printmaking technique which has underwritten his practice ever since.

Furneaux has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including the RSA Salvesen Scholarship; the RSA Gillies Bequest Award and the Hope Scott Trust Award. In 2006 he was elected a Member of the Royal Scottish Academy. A Master Printmaker and highly-regarded authority on printmaking in Scotland, Furneaux regularly leads workshops and demonstrations in the Mokuhanga technique. He lives and works in Edinburgh.

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Wendy McMurdo works primarily in photography and has a specific interest in experimental forms of photographic production. She has published several exhibitions exploring the impact of computation on our collective identities and her work has featured in a wide variety of international exhibitions including: The Anagrammatical Body: The Body and its Photographic Condition, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, Uncanny, Fotomuseum Winterthur and Only Make Believe Compton Verney, Warwickshire, UK.

In 2018 McMurdo was named by the Royal Photographic Society as one of the Hundred Heroines - an initiative to 'showcase the best of global contemporary female photographic practice and reflect the amazing diversity of methodologies and approaches of different generations of women working within the medium'. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art and the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. She is based in Edinburgh.

Photo credits: Victoria Crowe - Kenneth Gray ; Wendy McMurdo - Fiona Watson ; Paul Furneaux and Philip Braham - Courtesy of the Artist