 |
|||||||||||||
|
 |
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||
|
|
|
| Galleries Magazine Oona Campbell Given the hard times that, despite all the critical protestations to the contrary, seem once again to have befallen painting, it is good to be able to acknowledge the steady growth and achievement over the last three or four years, of a young artist like Oona Campbell (MacLean Fine Art at Arndean Gallery 10 to 15 May) who really trusts to paint, without any apparent self-consciousness, to convey the full range and depth of her feelings about the landscape. So often, after all, it is painters themselves who would seem to be painting's worst enemy, their dull and timid surfaces confirming the suspicion that painting might indeed be a tired and outworn medium. Encouragingly, collectors would seem to know the difference though, this new show of landscapes, mostly of Skye, Cuba and London, almost certainly a sell-out like her last show at the same venue two years ago. For all the variety of theme such subject-matter might seem, initially, to suggest, these are not in any real sense, topographical landscapes, but works of subjective feeling and memory, records of emotional encounters and often, in the sequences of smaller paintings, like those describing her trip to Hemingway's house in Cuba, emotional journeys too. The larger Cuban paintings (4 x 6 footers), meanwhile, seem to represent a distinctive move forward in terms of the colouristic range of her palette; the warm pinks and reds that infuse the rich and velvety blues of the early evening bay landscape, gold lights flickering across the water, indicate a deepening and maturing of her emotional range. Sympathetic critics have compared her London riverscapes to Whistler and while that might be a bit premature for an artist still at the beginning of her artistic career, there is, nonetheless, an attempt here at a kind of atmospheric truthfulness and strangeness that brings to mind something of his Valparaiso harbourscapes. If these and the riverscapes along the Thames at Canary Wharf and Wapping are distinguished by a translucence of surface - layers of delicate glazes - Campbell turns on the power again in the bristling, wet-on-wet surfaces of her Skye scenes, all brooding mists ands hadowy shorelines, that show her to be a painter of considerable range. Nicholas Usherwood Click here to view exhibition catalogue |
||
|
|
|
Homes and Gardens
|
||
