MACLEAN FINE ART - Key Persons
Andrew Squire, a Scottish artist, trained and still practices as an architect. As a painter, he remains deeply engaged with the treatment of space. His work is poised on the boundary between description and abstraction. Working in acrylic and gouache, he builds up fields of intense colour - pink, tangerine, indigo - which resonate against each other, striking up complex relationships of their own. Objects, reduced to their visual essence, flicker between the imagined pictorial space they inhabit and the two-dimensional surface of the panel; this tension is central to his compositions, endowing them with a distinctive energy. His most recent work is inspired by time spent on the coast of Newfoundland.
Andrew graduated from Manchester University School of Architecture. His work has been successfully shown in Europe and in Scotland, most recently with the Roger Billcliffe Gallery in Glasgow.
Brian was born in Belfast and attended both Belfast and Liverpool Colleges of Art. After graduating he worked with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for 20 years and has been a full time painter for the past 15 years. His work is mainly still life, landscapes and nudes with the main source of inspiration coming from painters such as Matisse and Bonnard. He is a modern day colourist whose palette of "vivid colours and bold subject matter wear a glaze of heat and summer. It is a generous art, and satisfying to watch". (Circa, Summer '99). Brian is regarded as one of Ireland's leading painters and his work is held in several important collections including U2, Arts Council of Ireland, and Royal Bank of Scotland.
Job Titles:
- Critic and Historian, London 2000
Strong jewel-like colour is central to Oona's work. Her landscape painting emerges out of a process of observation and analysis. Although the paintings are made in response to specific places they are in no sense literal topographical accounts. Rather they are the means through which she explores the aspects of the natural world, which she finds most compelling: depth, scale, and the continual process of transformation achieved by shifts in light and weather. These are the qualities, which she translates into her work. The end result is a haunting series of habitable dreamscapes - unique and not easily forgotten.
Oona Campbell was born in 1967. She graduated from Brighton University in 1989 with a BA Hons in the Visual and Performing Arts. Oona has won and been shortlisted for several major prizes including winning the City of Westminster Arts Council 'Annual Open Exhibition', 1999 and shortlisted for the Laing Art Exhibition 2000, Discerning Eye 2000 and The Hunting Prize, 2001. Her work is very popular and she is fast gaining a strong following among private and corporate collectors.
Donald Provan's large, powerful landscapes look back to the stony shorelines of his native Scotland notably to East Wemyss, an old mining village where he used to fish as a boy. But people, incident, anecdote are nowhere to be found here. Instead, these are paintings about places where land and water meet, explored with a meticulousness heightened by Provan's limited palette - blues, greys, tans and the softest of browns - and his subtle understanding of tone and texture. At once entirely specific and yet clearly on intimate terms with abstraction, these intricate descriptions of sky, sea and shingle are less a record of how things actually look than an account of a particular way of seeing.
Donald is a graduate and postgraduate of Edinburgh College of Art. He has had several solo shows and widely exhibited in group shows across the UK. A regular prize winner, he has received a Grant from The Scottish Arts Council, two from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, Canada, and twice been awarded prizes by the Royal Glasgow Institute.
A one-man show of James Fairgrieve's still life work. The artist has an innate ability to compose images of immense beauty through acute observations.
James Fairgrieve is one of Scotland's leading painters. He studied at the Edinburgh College of Art (1962-68) and went on to teach painting and drawing at the Edinburgh College of Art. He retired in 1998. He is a member of the Royal Scottish Academy, Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours and past President of the Society of Scottish Artists. Birds, animals and the natural world feature strongly in his pictures and have been widely shown in group and solo Exhibitions north and south of the Border. He has been awarded prestigious awards, some, several times, throughout his career including the David Murray Landscape Award (RA), Gillies Award (RSW) and the Gillies Travel Award (ARSA). His work is held by many collections; the most notable include, HRH Prince Philip, Ian Rankin, Edinburgh City Art Centre, Scottish Arts Council and the Fleming Collection.
Jennifer Anderson, a Scottish painter, combines clear-eyed examination with formidable illusionistic skill, producing sensitive, haunting portraits. Within tightly-cropped compositions, illuminated by unsparing mid-winter light, she conveys the real, weighty physicality of her subjects - friends, lovers, strangers - while at the same time hinting at the inaccessibility of their inner lives. Her work explores with candour the complexity of visual experience, enumerating the tiny shifts in colour that we read as warm skin, lank hair, or pale fabric. The blue-green tonality lends these works a very distinctive coolness, which somehow suits their theme: the artist's intense observation poised against her subjects' reserve.
Jennifer Anderson is one of Scotland's most promising young artists. In 1997 she graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College Dundee with a first class honours degree and since then has exhibited her work to great acclaim at both group and solo shows north and south of the border. In addition she has won several notable prizes and twice been selected to exhibit at the annual BP Portrait Exhibition.
Louis Sinclair McNally, is a regular finalist for the much sought after Noble Grossart, Scotland on Sunday Art Prize. A graduate of the Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen he has always enjoyed success with leading galleries both in Scotland and in London.
Sabrina Rowan-Hamilton, who has twice been a finalist for the much-coveted Nat West Art Prize and winner of several other mainstream prizes, has recently completed postgraduate studies with the City & Guilds Art School.