New painters to see at the RSA

By Susan Mansfield, 05.09.2024

Sin Park, There Will Be Singing about the Wild Tree, image courtesy of the artist

Painting endures in contemporary art practice, with many young and emerging artists embracing it as their medium of choice. Why - despite all art’s changing fashions and the exploding potential of digital imagery - do people continue to paint? This is the question being asked by the exhibition Frontiers: Painting in Scotland Now at the RSA, curated by Robbie Bushe and Flora La Thangue. Bringing together work by more than 30 artists at all stages of their careers, they asked each to respond to the same question: why choose painting?

Sin Park

The bright colour palette and expressive brushwork of Sin Park always catches the eye. Although her work tends to look almost entirely abstract, it is sometimes possible to trace hints of landscape, flowers, architecture. She describes the territory of her work as the “space of familiar unfamiliarity”, drawing on elements of memory and personal experience.

Born in South Korea, Park has a degree in painting from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, an MA from the Royal College of Art in London and a PhD from Glasgow School of Art. She works between Glasgow and London.

For her, painting is dynamic medium, an active struggle. “I am trying to make a painting, but the painting is trying to undo this: the power dynamic shifts from one to the other, and the secret play between the two overflows on the surface. Indirect, informal and unforeseen conflict within the painting evolves, creating tensions and almost unintelligibly ‘becoming’ something unexpected.”

Lizzie Lilley

Based in Aberdeen, Lilley graduated from Gray’s School of Art in 2021, receiving the RGU Arts and Heritage Stand Out Work and Purchase Award and a John Kinross Scholarship. The following year, she was named as the Fleming Collection Emerging Scottish Artist of the Year.

Her paintings are inspired by photographic images from the past 150 years, often moments from social history which she then interrogates. She begins by making small drawings, then creates paintings, each with its own tonal palette, distilling the image into shape and form until the interplay of colour and texture overtakes the original subject matter.

“For me, paint as a medium is unparalleled in its intensity and flexibility... [It] usually comes down to a push and pull of the material on its surface; a repeated process of adding and taking away; an instinctive tug of war between the idea and the outcome.... Being a painter is a battle between feeling part of an overwhelmingly awe-inspiring legacy and a desperate longing to be forging your own path.”

Lily Macrae

For Macrae, who graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2016, the act of painting is a dialogue with the art of the past as well as embracing contemporary techniques. Often, her works swirl around a motif appropriated from a painting by an artist like Caravaggio or Delacroix. Stories and myths are reimagined in a contemporary way, with the movement and energy of Renaissance or baroque painting.

She says her paintings are a “push and pull of figuration verses abstraction”. “The choice to make a painting is in itself a choice to reference and engage with the past; to interact with and decontextualise that which has come before us and that which will be there long after we are gone.

“My practice is rooted in a desire to use painting as a method to reveal rather than just record. I use an almost subtractive method of working, applying the paint and then wiping back through the surface. For me, painting itself is used simultaneously as an act of excavation and construction of an image.”

Jack Dunnett

Dunnett’s work stands out despite the fact that he has always worked on a small scale. Originally from Caithness, he graduated from Gray’s School of Art in 2017 winning the RSA Keith Prize for the Best Work from a Student at a Scottish Art School.

His paintings create scenarios or stories for the viewer to unravel, often inspired by films, books, music or memories. After some experiments at art school using household chemicals and building materials to change the behaviour of the paint, he now uses salts and light acids in some works to get the effects he wants.

He says: “I suppose that because painting has a history of existing in certain contexts... it could be seen to lack contemporary relevance. I think that view is just a product of stilted imagination or excitement over newer forms of expression. The recency of invention of a format doesn’t really have any relevance when the medium is timelessly broad. Painting - like writing - is a vessel through which elements of humanity are revealed.”

Michael Clarence

Like Dunnett, Michael Clarence graduated in painting from Gray’s School of Art in 2017, but he also completed a degree in Sculpture and Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art 10 years earlier. His paintings are playful yet contemplative, exploring themes of identity and place. They both hide and reveal as layers of paint and applied and removed.

He says: “[Painting] is a form of problem-solving (with soul) - each new work presents challenges and can be devious. Yet, the rewards of making outweigh the difficulties, keeping me engaged and eager to return to the studio each day.

“My personal history and experiences as a gay man significantly inform my practice. Growing up, I navigated complex feelings about my identity, which were liberated by the boundary-free world of Glasgow’s club and music scene - spaces of pure self-expression. This sense of freedom help shape a distinctly queer and increasingly expressive aesthetic.”

 

Frontiers, Painting in Scotland Now, is exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy until 8^th September