Barry McGlashan: Between The Dream and Waking
The Scottish Gallery, 16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ
Thursday 28th October – Saturday 27th November 2021
Waldemar Januszczak of The Sunday Times described Barry McGlashan as having ‘…boundless curiosity, a spirit of adventure, lots of unalloyed nosiness, laced with a quality that is rare in important art: naughtiness.…’; this new exhibition at Edinburgh’s The Scottish Gallery, Between The Dream and Waking, brings the artist’s personality to life in this new series of paintings.
With travel having not been possible of late, McGlashan has given way to journeys of the imagination. Although feeling restless, the artist refused to let this be a hinderance and allowed his thinking to travel further, leading to a deeper connection with his work that evokes a feeling in the viewer. This new series of paintings explores that place between the real and imagined, using references gleaned from personal experience – often recollections of travel. He also takes inspiration from imagery discovered in literature, historical events and often film.
Between The Dream and Waking considers the paintings as objects too – although a flat surface, these works describe form and spatial depth, offering something you can hold and feel. McGlashan has explored the more material nature of painting in these new compositions.
McGlashan comments, Over years of work in the studio, I have accumulated many ghosts. These are pieces of paper, stained and marked through the process of painting. I’ll often use a piece of paper as a blotter, to remove excess paint from the surface of another painting, so I am left with this relic of something other, like a memory. They are very beautiful in their own way – ghostly and thin, whispering forms that suggest something new. I decided to use these as a starting point for some of the paintings – they are bonded to panel, sealed, and then worked over. Those feint images may remain to the end or may be completely obscured, but the point for me is that this feels like starting in the middle. It’s very liberating.
Each painting in this exhibition is its own object, arrived at by a process of making in which I create an environment of making and thinking which can encourage the accidental. Very little is prescribed, I like to keep the paintings active by allowing more to ‘come in’ as I think of it. In this way, the paintings evolve from one to the next and new territories are encountered.
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Born and raised in Aberdeen on the North East coast of Scotland, Barry McGlashan studied painting at Grays School of Art where he then returned to teach for a period. Winning The Alastair Salvesen Scholarship at The Royal Scottish Academy in 2001, McGlashan used the funds to travel through the United States for 3 months. This fascination with exploration and discovery has endured and continues to influence his work. Examples of his paintings are held in several public collections including Aberdeen Art Gallery, The Scottish Society (New York) and the Royal Scottish Academy.
