lan Macdonald has a slightly different idea of Renaissance portraiture than the average painter. Or perhaps he has a slightly different idea of contemporary portraiture. Either way, this artist, whose work we first spotted over at Lost at E Minor, paints wonderful portraits in Renaissance style, but with conspicuous modern touches, like plastic bags, beer cans, and airplanes as well as well-known phrases tucked in here and there. In turns funny, poignant and totally weird, these paintings make us think about what the Renaissance masters would think if they could see the world today. Caution: a few of these paintings are mildly NSFW, but only in the same way that Botticelli is. “There is a cool, quiet elegance to Alan Macdonald’s paintings, which belies the disequilibrium at their heart. His figures, grey eyed and dreaming, might be time travellers, drawing distant cousinship from the portraits of Rembrandt or Frans Hals. His bucolic northern landscapes lay claim to an equally venerable artistic heritage. But if an accretion of the art historical past informs his imagery, it is transposed into a world where confidence has been lost, where the spiritual beliefs and myths which once bound man to nature, and through nature, to the divine, fail to connect. Frequently, single letters or words, even meticulously copied dictionary definitions, are added to the sections of a painting, as if language might hold a key. We follow through the a,b,c, trying to piece together the jigsaw, but language proves as fallible as any system by which we structure our existence, and we are left with a series of miswired lexical circuits. Is a landscape “an area of land regarded as being visually distinct,” or is it “a painting, drawing, photograph etc. depicting natural scenery?” Macdonald lets both definitions stand. Though he would not call himself a surrealist, like Magritte, he points up the ambiguities surrounding real objects and their images in art, encouraging us to consider his work as more than a simple pictorial narrative. The otherworldly characters in his series of portrait heads have the look of forgotten pilgrims, bonneted and constrained by cords like the followers of some perverse form of Puritanism. Each is neatly titled according to a state of mind: hedonist, altruist, sadist. We read the titles and search their waxen features, hoping to discover their soul in the curl of a lip, or the tilt of a chin. Despite this attempt at self assertion the figures remain isolated, pinned down by their cords, as if by the codes and strictures of society. These are beautiful paintings, all the more potent for their distilled sense of calm. Macdonald gives us no answers, but the questions he raises about the search for faith and identity in a difficult modern world touch a nerve, and in the faces of his pilgrims, we recognise ourselves.” (Jane Burton) Be sure head over to Alan’s website below, to check out even more of his great work or to get in touch with him.
www.alanmacdonald.net
