Colin Middleton RHA RUA MBE (1910-1983)
Striped Figure
Oil on board, 90 x 90cm (36 x36")
Signed and dated August (19)71;
Signed, inscribed and dated 1971 verso

 

The single female figure is a recurring...

Colin Middleton RHA RUA MBE (1910-1983)
Striped Figure
Oil on board, 90 x 90cm (36 x36")
Signed and dated August (19)71;
Signed, inscribed and dated 1971 verso

 

The single female figure is a recurring image within Colin Middleton’s work and the main archetype amongst the range of enduring symbols that populate all periods of his work and demonstrate his consistency and seriousness of intent. 

 

Often these single figures carry with them some suggestion of narrative through their environment, activity or title, but in the 1960s Middleton adopts an increasingly analytical and detached aspect in much of his painting as a more formal abstraction becomes dominant, which continues until the early 1970s in works such as Striped Figure. 

 

Middleton’s association with the architect Noel Campbell, who commissioned him to produce mosaics and murals for various new buildings in the late 1950s, was perhaps a catalyst for Middleton to re-examine how he could integrate design within his painting. In 1947, the year he gave up his career as a damask designer, he described in a latter to John Hewitt how he perceived design and painting as separate aspects of his creative identity but by the late 1960s Middleton seems to have found a way to integrate elements of design into his painting, originally exploring a more abstract language based on a simplification and flattening of form and perspective, repetition of shapes and a non-imitative use of colour. 

 

By the 1970s these figures had become more descriptive, while still highly abstracted, more playful and at times more sexualised in their treatment. Striped Figure, completed in 1971, is typically hieratic and concentrated on the figure. It uses stripes and broken up, dotted passages across the composition. The figure is treated ambitiously, creating a sense of volume and tension by extrapolating and then overlaying various simplified elements of the body, which are defined in opposing stripes and colours. Formally, it is also closely related to the chair, whose dark leg relates to the background of the painting as well as the dark vertical of the figure’s hair, recalling the manner in which Middleton would make structural and thematic connections between the female archetype and the landscape in many works.

 

Dickon Hall, January 2023

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