Union Gallery's new exhibition features the work of two Edinburgh-based artists who approach 'Being Human' from quite different angles.
Audrey Grant began as a painter in the early 1990s with a Foundation Course at the Leith School of Art. Since then – particularly since 2006 when she won a Visual Arts Creative Development Grant from the Scottish Arts Council – her work has met with increasing attention and acclaim. She is, suspects Union's Bob Dawkins, on the cusp of major recognition from national institutions.
Her oils in this exhibition are figurative depictions of people, but people isolated from social contact and lacking much in the way of facial expression. Arms and legs are often uncoordinated, unselfconscious, as if caught before or between settled thoughts and completed movements.
Though Grant's subjects lack physical detail, that doesn't mean that they are without psychological interest. They suggest recognisable states of doubt, vulnerability, loneliness and becoming, the settings or contexts for which lie in the heavily worked surfaces from which they emerge (see 'Man Standing with Yellow Background' above).
'The figures in space grow out of a dialogue with the paint,' she wrote in December 2010. 'I begin from a place of not knowing, as I apply the paint I allow chance, risk and gesture to inform the process and respond to what emerges from this to exist within the painting.'
The areas around her humans are painstakingly applied, each work sometimes taking months to complete. 'By scumbling [scraping], scratching, painting wet into wet, drawing and re-drawing with palette knives upon the layered paint an active yet unspecified space emerges.' (See 'Small Figure and Landscape' above.)
'I am not interested in filling the space with "things", but want to explore it in a more abstract way where colour and the interaction of colour might suggest form.' The act of painting and the medium of representation themselves become part of what 'being human' means. For more images click here
Martyn McKenzie is a third-year Drawing and Painting student at Edinburgh College of Art 'reflecting or reacting to the world that surrounds us'.
His seascapes were admired in Union's 'Landscapes II' exhibition last October, but the world which has surrounded him more recently seems to have comprised group social encounters, rendered here with an appetite for what he terms '... the energy, texture, space [and] light' of human engagement.
He is interested in theatre and cinema audiences, in crowds on escalators, bar clienteles and table-bound meetings. He explores what makes these assemblies whole, what re-atomises them into individuals.
His work is sometimes sparely toned, as in 'Express' (ink and charcoal on watercolour paper, right), sometimes more colourful as in 'Marmaris Park Bar' (oil and oil bar on board, below). On the evidence of what is shown here, he is capable of both subtlety and remarkable assurance for one still so early in his career. Click here for more images. AM
'Being Human' will show at the Union Gallery (45 Broughton Street) until 14 March.
