Colin Middleton RHA (1910-1983) Brockagh I Oil on Board, 61 x 61cm, (24 x 24'') (including integral backboard) Signed twice. Also signed, inscribed with title and dated 67 on the reverse ...

Colin Middleton RHA (1910-1983) Brockagh I Oil on Board, 61 x 61cm, (24 x 24'') (including integral backboard) Signed twice. Also signed, inscribed with title and dated 67 on the reverse Provenance: Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, whence purchased by Dr & Mrs J.B. Kearney, November 1967 The austerity of Colin Middleton's painting in the 1960s is as much a reflection of the mood and circumstances of his life as the lushness of the early 1950s landscapes around Strangford and North Down was at that time. He had searched out a harsher landscape than this lush terrain to find motifs to explore a new sense of himself as a painter as well as to develop a new technical and pictorial language. While the landscapes of the later 1960s and the 1970s are as much about the shifting light and mood of a landscape, the early and mid-1960s have as central concerns the search for a defining physical structure or feature that can be used to represent a particular landscape as an unchanging geological fact. These paintings also express with extreme clarity Middleton's attempts to create a visual synthesis between the landscape and the female archetype, to the point at which the two become completely interrelated. The elegant arabesques of line with which Middleton depicts a rocky, hilly landscape are also very easily read as a reclining woman. This treatment of massed form is reminiscent of the sculpture of Henry Moore, but there is also a strong influence of Ben Nicholson and Victor Pasmore in the manner in which lines and abstract geometric shapes relate to the flatness of the picture plane. Middleton's work developed so coherently towards abstraction that even at its most non-referential we can still see clues to read a landscape or figure within severely abstracted shapes.

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