Shake off winter!
Annette Edgar's solo exhibition Life Times at the Union Gallery this month features brilliant, joyous, colour-saturated affirmations inspired by scenes of Los Angeles, Tuscany, Majorca, and occasionally Scotland.
Artist, writer and critic Jack McLean says of the work: ‘I know of no other Scottish painter whose paintings burn with such colour. You come away from an Annette Edgar exhibition with a suntan.’
Based in Glasgow, the multi-award-winning Edgar revels in gorgeously rich, highly textured semi-abstract work expressing an intense appreciation of life, light and brightness as in 'Quercerta Blossom' (mixed media on card, 15 x 20cms; above-right) or 'Tonfano' (oil on linen, 61 x 71cms; below).
Such scenes, she says, trigger in her head the beat of music, which rhythms she tries to convey in her images. Something of this can perhaps be seen in 'Kinlochleven' (mixed media on card, 12 x 15cms; below).
For Edgar, the 'heartbeat and pulse' of the landscape are full of intoxicating action. But they are also constants which underlie the even more transient actions and relationships of human beings.
Strangely then, given their supposed fleetingness, the human figures currently appear in her work as rather solid, stiff and monumental. For this reviewer, they were less successful than her vibrating landscapes, although one notable exception was 'Sea Lovers' (oil on linen, 71 x 81cms, below), whose forthright, muscly bustiness I enjoyed a lot.
For all their exuberant optimism, Edgar's works are not simple outpourings of cheerfulness. Each is carefully controlled, both tonally and in terms of strong structural composition. And there is in several of the works a trace of something more subdued, wistful, perhaps portentous. My favourites in the exhibition were from among this group, including, first, the modestly sized 'Downtown' (oil on linen board, 25 x 25cms; below) ...
... and second, the mysterious (and, I thought, quite Scottish-looking) 'Pale Moon Rising' (oil on linen board, 30 x 30cms).
Life Times continues at the Union Gallery, 45 Broughton Street, until 3 June. AM