Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The artist grew up in the countryside outside Perth out in the fields on his own making little discoveries in the hedgerows and pathways of an archaic landscape isolation feeding his imagination. He visited the local museum as often as he could and loved the odd juxtaposition of the exhibits: Victorian taxidermy ethnography and paintings from the eighteenth century. objects redolent with history exotic and immutable. At art school his extraordinary facility combined with a necessary measure of obsession allowed him to use painting as his chosen path of discovery. Art for Guild is illusory an artifice part confection part icon. His range of reference is astonishing his art historical appropriations so complete so compellingly absorbed into his personal iconography that we are beguiled. Unlike most painters his starting point is not a blank sheet but a choice of point of reality: will he paint on a three dimensional object (hus resin cast potato or orange) or will he create the illusion of a piece of parchment complete with age-curled edges which becomes the imagined support of his images? Like so much conceptual art of the last century a small debt is owed to Marcel Duchamp (we can think of his Mona Lisa) but Guild is spiritually closer to Juan Sanchez Cotan the seventeenth Century Spanish painter of the bodegon. There is present also a deep respect for the medium: the paint is always the servant of the idea he shares a mastery of the medium with 20th Century painters as diverse as William Nicholson Lucian Freud and Ken Currie. His title Mother Figures informs his themes of fecundity renewal and ancient worship but like so many of his visual references it is deliberately opaque: as much disquieting as reassuring to those who seek mearung. (LL)