Colin Middleton RHA (1910-1983) Edge of the Fields Oil on Canvas, 49.5 x 75cm, (19.5 x 29.5'') Signed; also signed, inscribed with title, numbered 222 and dated Portrush 1957 on the reverse ...

Colin Middleton RHA (1910-1983) Edge of the Fields Oil on Canvas, 49.5 x 75cm, (19.5 x 29.5'') Signed; also signed, inscribed with title, numbered 222 and dated Portrush 1957 on the reverse Provenance: The Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin The diversity of styles in which Colin Middleton worked is usually the first comment passed on his painting, in general a misleading point, as elements filtered from one style and period to another, maintaining the evolution and consistency of a serious creative artist. The second part of the 1950s, however, is an intriguing point at which Middleton's painting is full of the unexpected, the new and the experimental, a point at which he seems to have tested himself and questioned his painting to find a new direction. The broader treatment and intense colours of the post-war period are still apparent in some of Middleton's landscapes of the later 1950s, although he does also employ a very muted palette in works which reflect his own difficult personal circumstances. The increasing stylisation of works such as 'Edge of Fields', however, begins to demonstrate his search for a more concrete and less emotionally responsive style that leads to the austerity and abstraction of some of the landscape paintings of the 1970s. The repeated series of monochromatic broken strokes used here to define foreground, middle distance and horizon looks forward to Middleton's landscape painting of a decade later, as do the highly simplified figures who appear to be sitting on a wall looking towards the horizon. Middleton completed a series of rather geometric paintings of sunflowers in the mid-1960s, so in many ways this painting seems to contain the germs of ideas that reach their full expression in the following decades, while demonstrating a toughness, coherence and adventurousness that is easy to underestimate as it does not necessarily fit easily within the best-known areas of Middleton's work.

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