Hugh Mackinnon - A Retrospective
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Above: Interior of Teesdale Road On-going Acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 (91.5 x 122cm)

HUGH MACKINNON (continued)
© Nicholas Usherwood
February 2006 

Painting full-time only began again on his retirement from teaching in the late 1980s. Yet what an astonishingly productive 15 years or so that has proved to be, not just because of the time it has given him to paint but because of the time it has also given him to think and articulate - above all in his remarkable letters to friends and family which read, in a sense, like letters to himself. This need to paint, then step back and consider carefully and then to revise radically, which forms such an essential part of his working method - some paintings are worked on over decades before finally satisfying him - eats up enormous quantities of time, but this, for the first time in his painting life, is exactly what he now has plenty of and he is taking full advantage of it in a stream of paintings that just seem to have been getting more and more richly varied. On the one hand there is the luminous, high-pitched colour of the paintings produced at his late son Jake's home at Peyriac in Southern France, the colour held in check by the tight vertical/horizontal structure he imposes on them, and by way of extraordinary contrast in mood and feeling, there are the dynamic, swirling spiral structures with which the dense, dark colours of the Venetian and Russian subjects are energised into intensely romantic life. There are also the quiet but wonderfully witty and touching figure paintings - the young W. H. Auden dressed as a bumblebee(!) - which make such a surprising counterpoint to the atmospheric works based on photographs taken by his daughter-in-law on holiday in Egypt. In all of them the nature of the enquiry (he would describe it as an obsession) is the same: how to resolve the 'eternal contradiction' of describing depth on a 2-dimensional surface and to this end he formulated the idea he has come to term "the anatomy of the membrane." Starting from the observation that a painter like Vermeer "seems to be able to fit together all the marks he places on the membrane like a tapestry of perfectly harmonious structure thus translating all that is required to describe 'depth'", he came to realise that, for him to achieve this, his long-standing love of the 'decorative' - textiles, embroidery, carpets, pattern - could help play a vital role. It provides the basis of what he terms "a reference point outside myself to keep an eye on the pictorial structure - the pattern, the phrasing of the marks", and something which he now also finds in memories of surface in nature in such things as butterfly wings, snake-skin, tiger skin, tree bark, leaves and petals, observing that "when a painting loses this connection it loses truth." Looking at the works of this idiosyncratic and quietly original painter, it would seem, at a moment when the function of painting in our society is in crisis, maintaining this artistic philosophy with such energy and commitment is, in itself, a serious and remarkable achievement.

Left: Still Life with Lemon and Bottle c1975 Acrylic on board size unrecorded Private Collection Right: Still Life with Apple 1968 - 1975 Acrylic on board

17.5 x 23.5 (44.25 x 59.5cm)

Left: Small Circus, Sketch Late 1960’s Acrylic on board 8.25 x 11.75 (21 x 30cm) Right: Portrait of the Artist as High Flyer (initial stages) 1960 - 1970 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 96 (183 x 244cm)

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