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Colin Middleton MBE RHA (1910-1983) MAG

Currency:EUR Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:35,000.00 - 45,000.00 EUR
Colin Middleton MBE RHA (1910-1983) MAG
Colin Middleton MBE RHA (1910-1983) MAGNETIC LANDSCAPE signed and dated [1942] lower left; inscribed and signed again in monogram on reverse oil on canvas 46 by 61cm., 18 by 24in. Provenance: Purchased by the mother of the present owner, circa 1950 Exhibited: ’Colin Middleton’, Belfast Museum and Art Gallery, August 1943, catalogue no. 37 Opus I, group IV, no. 37 Colin Middleton was selected to be the first artist shown in the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery when it reopened in 1943 after the blitz. Remarkably for an artist still working as a damask designer, Middleton was able to include well over one hundred paintings, in a variety of styles which demonstrated the diversity of his response to European art since the late nineteenth century and above all to Surrealism. Dali and de Chirico are the most obvious influences on the series of surrealist landscapes that Middleton painted in the manner of Magnetic Landscape, but he does maintain a consistently individual style and atmosphere within them. The emphasis on repeated patterning, the manipulation of perspective and ideas of space and reality are threads that carry through these paintings and are picked up again by Middleton in the 1970s. His early design training suited him ideally to work in this manner and he also used the Opus I strand of this first exhibition to explore his own personal theories and ideas. These seem primarily to have been organised around the idea of our relationship to the earth, our impermanence contrasted with its seeming permanence and the place of the artist in society (ideally “a vital link in the social chain” whose work must communicate within the society in which it is made). In Magnetic Landscape the enduring cycles of nature are contrasted with features of a modern industrial landscape. The sea and the eclipsed moon create an uneasy backdrop to the train tracks and telegraph poles, and the title and elements of the painting direct us towards a sense of magnetic fields in nature that are silently and powerfully present beneath the currents we have imposed above the earth. While Middleton seems to have adopted Surrealism as the most suitable language to communicate his ideas, the essence of his work and the elucidation of these ideas seem to have a central humanist or neo-Romantic theme, which foreshadows his future development as a painter. Dickon Hall Killinchy, Co. Down, October 2005