On 8th May 2012 Art in Healthcare hosted
a hugely successful fundraising evening at the Ingleby Gallery with the internationally recognised Scottish artist, Callum
Innes, giving a tour around the gallery and his paintings currently on show.
Innes studied at Grays School of Art in Aberdeen before going on to establish
his own style of reductive painting. He was nominated for the
Turner Prize in 1995 and later went on to win The Jerwood Painting Prize in 2002.
Walking into the Ingleby Gallery I had no idea what
to expect from Callum Innes’ latest exhibition. As a relative ‘newbie’ to
contemporary art myself I was looking forward to hearing about the thoughts and
processes which go behind his modern, minimalist style.
Innes’ work is often very bold and intense, making
use of statement colours and shapes to draw emotion out of the audience - a
complete contrast with the artist himself who was very soft spoken and eloquent as he addressed the
20 or so people gathered in the gallery with a great passion for his work and craft.
Everyone attending the evening’s fundraising event was pinned on his every word
as Innes described his beginnings as an artist, his old college tutors,
anecdotes of artists he had worked with, and parts of his life which had
inspired his own art.
“All
these works are fragile, emotionally, physically…and (they) retain a human
fragility about them. They’re imperfect; if they were perfect they wouldn’t
work”
Untitled No 33, 2011
Oil on Canvas
Oil on Canvas
He told us how he regularly finds himself throwing
work away and how he is somewhat of a perfectionist. Once out of the studio or
exhibition context he regularly sees his work in a completely different light
and often discards it completely. He once worked with curator Marco Livingston
on a run of 50 books which were to be beautifully letter pressed and each covered
with an individual painting. However, when the time came to wrap the books, it
was discovered the paintings had been cut down 2cm too short and were therefore
unusable. Innes immediately went up to his studio, gathered pictures which had
been displayed in the Tate and in the ICA, and cut them all down to the correct
size, destroying 30 paintings to make 50 books.
“It was about trying to achieve perfection. I learnt
in that process of looking at your work and making decisions about it. I learnt
how to edit, which is something you can only really learn through time, and I’m
still learning.”
The ‘Works on
Paper’ exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery fundraising event was filled with paintings
focussing on what had been taken away
from the painting, what wasn’t on the
page, and what had been left behind,
rather than what had been created by
the paint. Innes described how when painting onto wax paper, turpentine made
certain parts disappear and it was this in which he was most interested
Untitled, 2008
Oil on wax paper
Oil on wax paper
Having
been a figurative painter until his early 20’s Innes told us how he slowly
worked the figure out of the painting but still kept the gesture and the marks
to make paintings as objects. The small series of squares which were displayed
on the upper level are an example of this. Two blocks of colour had been
painted over each other freehand to
create a semi-transparent look. The result is wonderfully effective and the
bold colours oozing out the side of squares really draw in the eyes of viewers.
Quinacridone Violet / Lemon Yellow, 2012
watercolour on paper
watercolour on paper
“In all the paintings I make there is always a
single line that goes through the painting; there’s a moment where the canvas
is filled with oil paint and I take a line from the bottom to the top of the
canvas so it doesn’t meander, it looks like its formed naturally but it’s
controlled, picked out very delicately and it forms itself at a certain point.”
