Colin Middleton RHA MBE (1910-1983) El Nene I Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24'') Signed with artist's device, signed again and inscribed with title verso There are occasions when Colin...

Colin Middleton RHA MBE (1910-1983) El Nene I Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24'') Signed with artist's device, signed again and inscribed with title verso There are occasions when Colin Middleton's background as a damask designer created problems in his work as a painter, but in the later work in particular, he is skillfully able to draw on it to enhance rather than overbalance a composition. Pattern does dominate El Nene but the figures do not lose their solidity and weight nor does the space ever become too flat. The abstract coherence of the mother and child gives them a greater universality because they do not become too particular. Middleton's post-war work had often created women who were inextricably a part of the landscapes they inhabited. By the 1960s this had become less emotive and more detached, as he abstracted the female form to a point at which it became a synthesis of the natural landscape and womankind, invested with the monumentality and fecundity that we see in this work. Dickon Hall

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