Union Gallery’s April exhibition will resonate long in the memory, writes Ross Maclean.
Thirteen artists were invited to paint images inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poetry. The resulting ensemble is exhilarating and haunting by turns.
Several artists responded to lines from The Waste Land and ‘The Dry Salvages’ from the Four Quartets.
Adam Kennedy’s two interpretations of the essence of ‘The Dry Salvages’ are particularly outstanding. Here, the ‘strong brown god’ of the river is indeed ‘sullen, untamed and intractable’ and is perfectly conveyed in a crescendo of mixed media – chalk, pen and ink, acrylic, watercolour, pencil and charcoal. The bridges loom and rear up from cloudy spume, insubstantial yet weighted, just holding on. Eliot’s force of nature seems indomitable, and the man-made, vulnerable and transitory.
Both paintings have a dreamlike quality in spectral grey, cream, and white, which recalls Piranesi and Turner. Here, people appear absent but surely they teem in the mist and cloud (‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many’). Kennedy’s wonderful paintings echo that other great poet Baudelaire’s lines from ‘Les Septs Vieillards’ – ‘Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!’ – which influence the extraordinary conclusion to Section One of The Waste Land.
Let us hope Adam Kennedy will have a solo exhibition soon. The Union Gallery is to be congratulated yet again on highlighting the work of Scotland’s most thoughtful and original artists.
Group13. TS Eliot – Personal Perspectives continues at the Union Gallery (45 Broughton Street) until 30 April.