Louise McClary
ARTIST
ARTIST
Louise McClary was born in Cornwall and studied at the Penzance School of Art. Over thirty years, she has developed a career as one of the area’s most respected contemporary painters, drawing influence from a cultural backdrop of 20th century landscape painting, poetry and the decorative arts. Intense veils of colour, fluid shapes and a peculiar brilliance of light define her paintings, which respond to the unique landscape of Cornwall’s Lizard Peninsula, a luxuriously tranquil place of closely wooded valleys and tidal creeks. Working from plein air sketches, her studio practice is process led and heavily influenced by the instinctive laying down of mark and colour
in an emotive response to her subject.
Louise was elected to the Newlyn Society of Artists in 1994 and is a recipient of an Arts Council of England award. Her work has been exhibited in Truro, Bath, London, Glasgow and New York, and is held in private and public collections in the UK and abroad.
"My painting and printmaking practice are about the natural world, the feeling of being within landscape and seascape. I do not represent nature directly in my finished work; rather, I am looking to recreate its wonder and rapture."
Louise McClary 2024‘Let me show you,’ we say. And we draw it, whatever it is we are trying to explain but which words won’t fit round or make clear. ‘See.’ Here is the crossroads. Here is the church, and the signpost that points the wrong way … Admittedly, drawings like this are not usually very sophisticated, but at least they stop us getting lost. Perhaps all drawings have something of the map, projecting on to a flat plane the salient features of an emotion, thought or sight into which there may be no other effective means of marking the path. Even conventional life-drawing has its psychogeographical side – this business of making human sense of the pliant boundaries where flesh meets atmosphere.
The sensation of a path, or paths, interwoven and inextricable, is certainly very present in Louise McClary’s new drawings. These large drawings are densely worked and subtly textured to the point where, when paper is translated into canvas and ink into acrylic colour, they sometimes become paintings. But in most cases the underlying movement, the one you follow as the image unfolds, is a drawing movement – in several senses, that is. The brush or pen is drawn across paper, but there is also the drawing to the surface of something that feels as though it lay beneath or within the image, as water is drawn from its own depths. The movement feels strong, but the direction is veiled. It’s like walking in mist, when the few square feet of visible ground that bear you forwards become vivid with the pressure of unseen distance.
Here, as it happens, the looped and branching pathways I can’t help but see in these abstract images are at least partly to do with real walking routes, leading through and around the fields near McClary’s home in Cornwall, and down among woods and along the fringes of a narrow, twisting creek of the River Helford. Sometimes she draws in this landscape, but just as often she watches while the landscape draws itself. The tough curves in oak boughs mirror the bends in the creek; the water forges the clouds in its winter tincture of steel and leaf-mould. Birds scatter, and the skittish bulge of a flock against the sky echoes the bristly, undulating horizon line etched by leafless beeches. In the drawing titled Liquid Dark, thin layers of shellac and tissue-paper collage have a breathing, earthy translucency. I think of how the floor of these woods must look in a November dusk, under the dewfall’s swiftly darkening varnish. In the painting Luminary Dusk the night’s drawing-in feels less invasive, as though balanced or softened by meditative process.
The landscape to which these works relate is a landscape you could visit. You could walk the same way, and perhaps notice the same things. But the paths do not stop here, by the water’s edge or up in the open field. They twine and pulse with a kind of arterial, visceral plasticity, turning in on themselves like thoughts that refuse to be grasped. It’s often the case that a particular walk, especially a circular walk, becomes associated for us with a particular thought-atmosphere. For Louise McClary, these last two years, this landscape has been a place to work through grief following her father’s death in 2008 – a place where bereavement’s erratic unwinding can find some form of safety and renewal.
Standing in a gallery, looking on, you aren’t necessarily to know this. But I would say that it’s there all the same, in the work. The white, and occasionally midnight-dark, penumbras that ring the heart of these pictures speak of a surrounding, unmapped silence – a silence whose inner boundaries protect as much as its edgelessness feels daunting, like the mist-walker’s landscape. What’s happening at the centre, on the other hand – all these reminders of life, of body and mind responding with wonder and relief to the pull of a place – draws you in.
Some of the marks resemble writing, a lovely meandering, calligraphic script in walnut-brown ink. These marks are made with reed pens, which are actually shaped from bamboo sticks and not – as I used to imagine – from thin, whispering reeds cut from a riverbank, as in Blake’s line about making ‘a rural pen’ to write his verse. But no matter. I like the idea of the landscape being written with a fragment of itself. It seems true to the spirit of these drawings and paintings. How you read the writing, or follow the path, is up to you.
Michael Bird
February 2010
1958 Born Penzance, Cornwall
1974-76 Trained at Penzance School of Art
1976-81 Head Decorator, Troika Pottery, Newlyn
1990-95 Tenant at Porthmeor Studios, St. Ives
1993 Elected member of the Newlyn Society of Artists
1995-2020 Resident at private studio and artists garden on the Lizard Peninsula
Collections
Cornwall County Council
Government Offices for the South West
Royal Cornwall Hospital
Truro School
Work in many private collections in the UK & USA
Awards
2003 Arts Council of England
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2018 Selected Works Tremenheere Gallery, Penzance
2017 ‘Featured Artist’ Artwave West, Dorset
2012 ‘Your Green Voice’ Kestle Barton, Manaccan, Cornwall
2012 ‘Into the Morning Green’ Adam Gallery, London & Bath
2010 ‘The Nature of Silence’ Millennium Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall
2008 Selected Works Cadogan Contemporary Gallery, London
2007 ‘Silent Songs’ Bohun Gallery, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire
2006 ‘Echoes’ Waterhouse & Dodd, Cork Street, London
2005 ‘Stations of the Cross’ Truro Cathedral, Cornwall
2003 ‘Transition 4’ Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2023 London Art Fair Long and Ryle, London
2022 The Original London print fair, Somerset House with Long and Ryle
2018 ‘Seen Unseen’ curated by Melanie Millar, Long & Ryle Gallery, London
2018 ‘Summer show’ Belgrave Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall
2016 ‘Serpentine’ Falmouth Art Gallery
2012 Summer Show Wills Lane Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall
2012 ‘RA Summer Show’ at the invitation of Tess Jaray, Royal Academy, London
2011 ‘Discerning Eye’ invited artist at Mall Galleries, London
2009 ‘A Cornish Perspective’ Jean Monnet House, Westminster, London
2008 ‘Drawing the Line’ Newlyn Society of Artists, Cornwall
2004 ‘Presence’ St. Paul’s Cathedral, London
2004 ‘Cornish Show’ Edgar Modern, Bath
2004 ‘Colour & Light’ John Martin, Chelsea, London
2003 ‘Critic’s Choice’ curated by Joan Bakewell, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall
2001 ‘Objects of Desire’ Lemon Street Gallery, Truro, Cornwall
Since the Enlightenment the world has slowly solidified beneath the growing weight of scientific knowledge. With the triumph of reason, the resulting process of de-mystification has seen the invisible and numinous treated with an increasing degree of scepticism. And yet for many, the world continues to offer enticing encounters with its thin places, those spaces of mystery and awe where reality seems to be only an insubstantial veil through which a tantalising promise of otherness is glimpsed.
For Louise McClary the creeks that extend their liquid fingers from the main channel of the Helford River into the rolling hills of the Lizard Peninsula are such a thin place. As she walks along their tree-lined banks a quick flash of white can herald an encounter with otherness borne on egret wings, whilst fragmentary glimpses of unresolved forms tease her eye through a tangle of leaves and branches.
These are places of flux and constant transformation, where each tide can bring a new discovery and source of inspiration; pieces of intriguing flotsam washed in from a foreign shore, their journey ended within the Rubenesque folds of iridescent, glistening mud that lie exposed at each low tide. Here nothing is static and stable except the sense of wonder that greets McClary on every visit.
Socrates described moments of wonder as the starting point of knowledge; the essential inquiring spark that inspires human beings to investigate and understand the world. Such moments are certainly the starting point for McClary’s investigation of the world, but it is visual rather than scientific knowledge she seeks. With an intense, searching gaze she probes the creeks and hills that surround her Cornish home, her eyes caressing each natural form to tease out the secrets of its unique visual character.
The drawings she makes, sat within the roots of a waterside tree or on the boundaries of ancient fields and hedgerows, are the notes of this visual investigation; each sketch a treasure map of wonder. As she allows her eyes to touch and taste the landscape, her arm leaves a record of their passage on the paper. Often they dance lightly across the contours leaving little trace of their passing. But occasionally they are caught up in the beauty of something – the profile of a single leaf, the gnarled and bent stem of a fragile plant, a cloud of leaves clinging like smoke to a barely visible tree. Then a flurry of darker marks betrays the presence of wonder; of the lingered gaze that has become lost in time.
Whilst McClary’s drawings describe a recognisable world, her paintings reveal a very different reality. We glimpse a world of liquid solidity, of transparency and ethereality, a world of nebulous clouds of colour whose inhabitants seem too fragile to grasp. The branches and leaves, flowers and feathers that she captured in her drawings have here become waterfalls of light and dancing lines that hover in the space between abstract matter and recognizable form. Individual identity has been replaced by a platonic ‘ideal’ of essential shapes, a symbolic vocabulary of her sense of awe in the natural world.
This reality is revealed, because when we look in wonder our eyes open wide, and like a camera whose shutter has been opened to its widest aperture we can only focus on the smallest of details, the rest falling away into a blur of abstract, unresolved shapes. As McClary gazes in rapt attention at the world, those objects that have become the subject of her attention emerge from their surroundings, slowly expanding to fill her vision until what has once been familiar grows into something strange and alien; a new visual form that she collects and places within her paintings.
McClary’s paintings are cases in a museum of wonder, each canvas offering a different approach to the display of their subjects. In paintings such as Collecting the sun in your hands or Down by the Carpet Tree the hesitant suggestion of a landscape provides a simulacra of reality for their subjects to inhabit. The majority, however, are a cabinet of curiosities; their rich, velvety background colour offering protection for their elusive forms.
These paintings are not celebrations of uniqueness, nor are they specimen drawers in which row after row of butterflies co-exist in silent isolation. Instead, they are celebrations of otherness and dialogue. In Gathering First Light, a waterfall of soft pink light, like the furrows of a ploughed field, unites a pair of angel wings with the branches of a fallen tree; a moment of annunciation connecting one world to another, just as the moment of wonder itself provides a bridge to otherness.
One of the problems with wonder is that the knowledge that it inspires can quickly turn something initially awe-inspiring and unique into something familiar and mundane. Our familiarity with the forms of McClary’s visual vocabulary might render them mundane as well, but each time we encounter them we see them afresh and within a new context; made wonder-ful by new pairings, and the constantly changing background of colours that not only enfolds them, but returns them to the natural world, bathing them in the pink of an ethereal sunset sky, the rich ochres of autumn fields, the glistening livid reds and purples of wet mud that forms and the pale, bleached greys of the sun-dried layer of mud that coats the creek banks at low tide like a peeling, dead skin.
As we look in wonder at these paintings they force us to turn back to the world that inspired them, to see it anew as a place of miracle in which its true forms are revealed. Then as we turn back to the paintings we cannot help but see them in a new way, until we find ourselves caught up in state of constant wonder that opens our eyes wide to the beauty of the world.
End
Louise is represented by
Long and Ryle, London UK