Camille Souter, HRHA, (b. 1929) Up the Brae Oil on board, 49.5 x 74cm, (19 x 29'') Signed, inscribed 'Achill' and dated 1960 Provenance: Collection of Sir Basil Goulding, thence by descent Bruce...

Camille Souter, HRHA, (b. 1929) Up the Brae Oil on board, 49.5 x 74cm, (19 x 29'') Signed, inscribed 'Achill' and dated 1960 Provenance: Collection of Sir Basil Goulding, thence by descent Bruce Arnold has written of Camille Souter:- Richness. Not prodigality. Nothing wasted. Intimations of so much still to come. Behind the titles, poetry and vision, an exciting mind at work. In her colours great simplicity, yet great depth. Her subjects are so often human wastelands, junk, dereliction, the fringes of great cities. Yet she brings to them a passionate concern, not for their welfare - that is not in her painting, she is not a romantic - but for their simple existence, their life in the light of day. This means that her passionate concern is directed with equal intensity at all things. Cabbages in a back yard in Winter, iron bed ends, bicycle wheels, open stretches of land and sky, distant towns and cities, are reduced in, and by, her eyes to the fragmentation of understanding, and are then transformed into paintings that obey strictly egalitarian principles. All things are equal in Camille Souter's world, and the only inequality she has to contend with is the degree of her success in transforming vision into the reality of a finished canvas. She has to contend with the difficulty of choosing what to paint when all things lay equal claim on her attention. The easy landscape, the obvious still life, these are not for her. And in this she is by no means unique. But whereas for many artists, who choose to paint as she does, the result of picking on debris and decay - the butt ends of life - is so often sombre and drab, with her the result is painting which sings with light and colour. There is a gleam, a richness to her tones: her contrasts of colour are vivid, yet controlled; and her composition - the placing of low nondescript buildings along a horizon, the casual assembling of objects on a table - has just the right measure of flatness, of the minor key, to keep within the bounds the splendid assurance of her paint, both in colour and texture. She is a completely integrated artist, and this gives her great flexibility. As well as all things being equal to Camille Souter all people are, too. And the titles of her paintings are often like invitations; here are quite ordinary things for quite ordinary people to see. But how well they have been gathered, and how well transformed.

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