Woods of Caledon
Oxmarket Contemporary is presenting The Woods of Caledon, an exhibition of oil paintings and oil pastel drawings by Iain White.
Andrew Churchill, Oxmarket Contemporary’s gallery director, explained: “The Woods of Caledon is an old term for the native coniferous pine forests that once covered much of the Highlands of Scotland.
“This vast primordial forest has been reduced in area by both natural environmental change and by human activity, although still a significant element in the highland landscape, dominating it in parts of the East Central Highlands. The reduction, alteration and fragmentation of this forest has been called the biggest effect man has exerted on the history of the Highlands and is regarded by some as an almost wonton destruction of the last extensive primeval forest which had no equal in Europe.
“The artist Iain White first visited many of the remaining woodlands in the early 1960s and over the years has become familiar with their aesthetic, their ecology and their history.”
Iain said: “I have long been a practitioner, sometimes sporadically, sometimes, for brief periods, with intensity. I have maintained an interest in and an awareness of art and art history through reading, through the arts press and through visits to galleries and exhibitions large and small in the United Kingdom and abroad.
“This interest has been more than recreational.
It has been informed, critical and scholarly in approach. I have also sought qualifications in art and art history over a protracted period whilst pursuing an unrelated academic career. This passion finally culminated in a master’s degree after retirement in 2007. Real places are more than space perceived by our senses. They are complex entities, each an amalgam of actual and imagined space and as such they possess emotional properties, an essence or spirit of place. Landscapes are a complex of such places and their connectivity, their connectedness in space and time.”
Andrew added: “We are thrilled to be able to welcome Iain White to Oxmarket Contemporary. His paintings and drawings of the Woods of Caledon are extraordinarily evocative. This has been accomplished by his close study and familiarity with the area. Equally his intense and serious study of art invokes numerous reference points from the past whilst being uniquely his own.
“The works, both oil paintings and soft pastels, fall into approximately two groups: first, largely figurative, impressionist works that draw on real places, albeit with some latitude for interpretation and secondly semi abstract and often expressionist works intended to capture the essence of the forest.”