£40,000
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture | 466
Auction: 9 June 2016 at 19:00 BST
Signed, oil on board
Provenance: The Wood Collection
Note:
As a personal friend of Anne Redpath, Walter Quarry Wood included some lovely examples of her still-life work within his collection, alongside the work of the Scottish Colourists.
In an interview, where Anne Redpath discussed the collection of items featured in her house, the artist exposed the blurred boundary of art and life as she lived and painted; 'They are a mixture but they have all been chosen for me and therefore live quite happily, and they all have memories too - memories of places that I have been to, and also of my life. I read once long ago that you can't have art without experiences, and I feel that all the things I have, that I live amongst, have both memories and experiences and are part of my painting.' This sentiment is particularly true of her still-life paintings, in which her own personal collection of objects, especially ceramics, feature heavily.
Still-life subjects were an enduring area of interest for Redpath, and as these examples demonstrate, colour and texture were of the utmost importance in her compositions. In her travels as an art student she had admired the dry, flat quality of frescoes in Siena and spoke often of how powerful an influence she found the white-washed walls of her Mediterranean accommodation. Redpath was also interested in the relationship between two and three dimensions and the decorative quality of compositional elements; often flattening perspective, depicting assemblages from a high vantage point and converting featured objects into decorative compositional components, as with the red chair in A Still-Life of Spring Flowers, which becomes areas of pure textural colour.
In A Still-Life of Spring Flowers the extravagance of flowers fills the pictorial plane, spilling out to the top right and bottom left corner; these are beautifully balanced out by the superficial, decorative lines of the red chair-back and Redpath's distinctive looping signature, to the bottom right. This was a convention she often used, harnessing her signature script as a distinct compositional element. The background colours remain a soft background for the contrasting strong blues, pinks and fresh white to stand against, but the texture comes purely from the paint.