I thought I’d post up a review of one of my favourite contemporary artists. He has a show on in Glasgow just now. Those paintings may be viewed on the link to the gallery, below, and his other work can be seen on this website:
http://www.gordonmitchell.co.uk
Amid the designer-clad threads, confidently pealing voices and stunningly assured paintings at the opening of his new exhibition, Gordon Mitchell cuts an unassuming figure. Casually dressed and quietly spoken, Mitchell is modest and displays a dry sense of humour and a sharp intellect.
At 56, Mitchell has been producing technically brilliant and unusually intelligent paintings for several decades now. Trained at Edinburgh College of Art, he was elected a member of both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Glasgow Institute, and has picked up a vast array of prizes and awards. He has exhibited around the world and his unusual, surreal paintings are prized by many public and private collectors.
A typical Mitchell canvas will consist of an amazingly lifelike depiction of a familiar scene or object – waves lapping on a deserted shoreline, ceramic pots bearing flowers, fruit on a table top, pieces of weathered driftwood washed up on the beach. But there is always something unsettling and disturbing about the images, they throb with an unvoiced threat, danger or vulnerability in a similar way to a De Chirico. Observe the Mitchell painting for a minute and ghost images leap out at you – the cracks in the vase or wall make up the outline of a woman’s body, the bite marks in the pear resemble a figure, the shadows coalesce to form another form. There is something haunting and mesmerizing about Mitchell’s work.
For this exhibition, he has abstained from using the image of a violin, which cropped up a lot in his work of a the last few years. Mitchell chuckles when I ask him about this.
‘I stopped painting the violins because a reviewer wrote ‘He paints violins.”
Put bluntly like that, the violin phase sounds far more simplistic than it was. I had spoken to Mitchell during that period at another opening, and he had explained that the image of a violin carried deep memories for him – his grandfather had played the fiddle and had left it to Mitchell’s mother. And of course, he had added, the violin bore a resemblance in outline to the female figure.
In this show, the female body appears a lot – perhaps more than ever before. I ask him about this and he chortles again.
‘It must be my age’, he quips. He explains that his wife Deedee acts as his model for the female form in his paintings.
‘I think she prefers that to the thought of me using another model’, he says with his wry smile. ‘Deedee does yoga, so she’s very supple and fit.’
How about the paintings of still life – does he paint from photos or from real objects?
‘I have a photographic memory’ he says, with no hint of boasting. ‘So I paint images of flowers and fruit from my mind.’
This would certainly help explain the almost freaky realism of objects in his paintings. I have a ten-year-old Mitchell at home, my favorite of all his paintings, in which a vivid red driftwood woman spurns a beseeching driftwood man. Everyone who sees it says it’s stunning and then comments on how lifelike the fruit in it are. One could almost reach in and pluck them from the canvas. In this marriage of technical virtuosity and gnawing discomfort, Mitchell reminds me of Salvador Dali, whose early work demonstrates that he was a master at the basics before he moved onto the trickery. This expertise in realism and the technical side is something that seems often to be forgotten in the gimmicky work of the conceptual artists nowadays. After all, how can one believe a light flicking on and off or a pickled shark has deep inner meaning when the artist can hardly draw a stick figure?
No such worries about Mitchell, and no fears of stagnation either. Each of his shows has shown evolution in a new direction, so it’s a fair bet that the next one will be as fascinating as the ones before.
Gordon Mitchell’s new exhibition is on show at the Roger Billcliffe gallery, 134 Blytheswood Street, Glasgow G2 4EL for three weeks from Sat 23rd April. Mon – Fri 9.30 – 5.30; Sat 10 – 5, free admission. www.billcliffegallery.com
