Bailiffgate Exhibition: On The Horizon
By Luke McTaggart, 29th October 2022
It is now just a few days to go until the opening of my new exhibition, ‘Horizons’, at the Bailiffgate Museum and Gallery, Alnwick. I have been very busy making preparations and after over a year of working towards it I am very pleased to see it all pulling together. I am billing this show as my first major solo exhibition, with around 40 works included this exhibition is double the size of my last show, ‘Amble Now’, and with many of the paintings being my largest yet it has been a huge undertaking to prepare for. I am extremely grateful to the Bailiffgate for inviting me to exhibit and for the great team who have helped behind the scenes. Curator Catherine Neil has been an invaluable assistance to the delivery of the show and in casting her critical eye over the work. I am taking this opportunity to offer up a bit of an overview of what work you can expect to see in the show, without giving too much away. I have shared a number of the paintings on social media over the past year however I have retained the most recent ones exclusively for the show.
The earliest work that will be included in the show comes from the beginning of the final year of my degree course at the end of 2021. Of particular interest are my two large Amble Harbour paintings from the time. These works, a day and night version, titled ‘Amble Harbour, November’ and ‘Night Harbour’, were the largest paintings I had made at this point in time. Due to space constraints they were not exhibited in my degree show, hence I am looking forward to having an opportuntity for them to be seen at the Bailiffgate. The former of the two paintings marked a real breakthrough in terms of working on such a large scale. It was also symbolic of my move away from painting solely from direct observation, towards an approach that involved relying more heavily on memory, I wrote about this in a previous essay titled ‘Realism Isn’t a Dirty Word’. All paintings benefit from being viewed in person, but it is particularly the case with these larger works. Measuring 91x122cm (3×4 foot in old money), ‘Amble Harbour, November’ has a particular light and surface that is very difficult to photograph.
I am very concious of the presence of seriality in painting: I am what I would describe as an all-over-the-place painter. I don’t conciously set out to make series of paintings that methodically explore a single subject. I feel that I am more of a magpie, a painter who darts about picking up one shiny thing after another. I chop and change what I am working on a quite a fast rate and it is only really in hindsight that the works become organised into series. I see each of my paintings as a fragment in a wider exploration of the possibilities of painting for myself. If they are bound by anything into series, it is the locations they are drawn from. The paintings can, roughly, be broken down into several locations that I have returned to repeatedly. Locations that I feel lately have begun to take on a life of their own in the paintings, developing their own weather, moods and feelings.
Amble Harbour is one of these locations. Included in the show are the two aforementioned large works, as well as a number of other smaller ones. Most of these other works focus on broadly the same view up the estuary, dealing with the way that the River Coquet occupies space in this landscape. I find the harbour in the evening a particularly interesting place, it is an environment dominated by a constrast between the harsh artifical light of the two huge floodlights and the darkening sky over the estuary.
Featured also are a number of my ‘white paintings’, in the show, paintings in which I have been trying to depict the effect of bright sunlight hitting the river. The resultant paintings are relatively minimalist works that required a balancing of very small amounts of colour against large qualities of creamy white paint. These of all my paintings, given their pale and subtle, hard to photograph nature, are perhaps those that benefit most from being viewed in person.
Also featured are a number of paintings of Warkworth, the views I have been most interested by in the village are those looking down from around the castle mound. Whether it is in the view of rooftops looking towards Amble as with ‘View From The Castle Bank (Warkworth)’, or the view of the river snaking round the village as in ‘River Through The Trees (Warkworth)’, I find that this landscape offers an antidote to the flatness of Amble. Indeed I noticed in hindsight that most if not all of the paintings I have done in this group utilise a portrait format.
Right: ‘River Through The Trees (Warkworth)’, 2022, Acrylic on canvas 60x50cm.
Indeed being an antidote to flatness is even more the case with the landscape of Morwick, in particular near to the site of the old Mill, a location of which there are a couple of paintings in the show. I find this area to be interesting for its steep banks and dense woodland, having to descend down into the space gives a sense of being closed-in and makes the location a strange microcosm within the landscape. The Megalithic cup and rings marks covering the rock face of the large outcrop, known to me as ‘Jack Rock’, only serve to add to the strangeness of this shallow, curving, river valley.
My Pond paintings are perhaps some of my more idiosyncratic works and most, if not nearly all of them, will be included in the exhibition. The small, nameless body of water located near Warkworth that I have been allowed to access has proved an outsized source of inspiration for me. In painting this pond I have become aware of my own deep interest in depiciting reflections and waterlines, be it in ponds, rivers or the sea. Its landscape and shape has given me a wide and strangely compelling vocabulary of curves, twists, slopes and folds that have fed my paintings both of this place and those of the wider landscape.
Right: ‘Pond, Heavy Drizzle’, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 40x50cm.
The most recent subject of my painting has been the Amble Links, in particular a point on top of one of the dunes near to Low Hauxley, looking back over Amble and towards Alnmouth Bay. Not a place that I had anticipated painting but upon the idea coming to me it was one that I found very interesting to tackle. Included in the show are two versions of this view, an initial medium-sized work and a second larger version that develops it, the latter of the two is the largest in the show and for that matter the largest painting I have ever painted. I haven’t shared either work on social media or on my website and they will be shown for the first time at the Bailiffgate.
So, I hope that you are looking forward to seeing the show installed and up on the walls as much as I am and that you are able to make the time to visit it. Having had this opportunity of working towards a solo show in such a large, spacious venue at such an early stage in my vocation has been invaluable to me and I am deeply grateful to everyone at the Bailiffgate who has helped to make it happen. So, I can only hope that leaves you in suspense and excitement as you await…Horizons!
The show will be open to the public from this Tuesday 1st November, from 10am-4pm. The museum is open from 10am-4pm each day of the week except Mondays. If you would like to receive an advance copy of the PDF exhibition catalogue please send me your email and I would be happy to provide you with one when it is ready. For further details about access to the museum, including directions, please visit the Bailiffgate Museum and Gallery website via this link: https://bailiffgatemuseum.co.uk/
Luke McTaggart 