Ewan Taylor's exhibition Psychedelic Collage opened at McNaughtan's Bookshop on Haddington Place last night.
The Bellevue-based artist has been creating these works for 20 years, using images cut from colour magazines to create his beautiful, richly coloured and deeply puzzling works.
Taylor resists interpretation, claiming that 'there is no underlying philosophy', only a mirror-maze progression of inspirations and responses based on the images themselves.
However, these are no random assemblages. For a start, they are beautifully crafted. One cannot help admiring the dexterity and finesse with which the images have been extracted and repositioned. Then, there is the compositional skill with which Taylor gives overall form and motion to the component parts. Sometimes he achieves this using geometrical forms to frame or complement his images, lending a kind of measured formality to the surreal and paradoxical collisions within. His choice of colours too is carefully considered: greens and purples, pinks, oranges and blues are certainly 'psychedelic', but again rendered adult, formal against the impenetrable black backgrounds upon which many of his horrors and marvels swim.[img_assist|nid=1826|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=473|height=640]
So what do these unphilosophical collages mean? I'm not sure, but certain themes recur: tranced or drugged or ecstatic visions; eyes of all sorts – animal, human, disembodied, missing – challenging the viewer gaze for gaze; the cultural and technological icons of civilised Man contrasting with the interior and surface intricacies of Nature; mortality and decomposition – mummies, bones, and anatomisation – balanced against astonishing fertility and multiplicity; mythic cities, often simultaneously ruinous and teeming with life; the making and unmaking of religiously resonant symbols, using details to suggest new wholes, charting thought processes and memories as if they were still unresolved chemical reactions.
The result, I find, is a fascinating mix of solemnity and exuberance. Taylor's works do not comfortably sum up existence. They don't claim to supply new knowledge, but rather suggest a new way of looking. The effect is disconcerting and intriguing – and to my taste far more visually pleasing than many works by far better known surrealists of the 20th century.
*****
Also exhibiting in McNaughtan's is Kirstie Hustler's Inner Landscapes.
Originally from Falkirk, Hustler studied at the Leith Academy of Art and now works in a variety of styles from detailed drawings to atmospheric coastal scenes and some abstract pieces.
She is interested in 'inscapes' and 'instress', terms coined by the 19th-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and interpreted by Hustler as: first, 'the inner and outer essence which make each thing its own unique self'; and second, the powerful response to that perceived self which is later recalled and expressed through art.
[img_assist|nid=1829|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=197]Her work thus tries to capture not only the appearance of, say, a landscape, but a more complete impression of its time and place and reality ... as well as what it felt like to witness it. An example is the evocatively titled Waiting for the Ferry (right), whose towering cumuli, approaching rain and shadows scudding over the sands I particularly enjoyed. I also admired the intriguing greens, blues and golds of Evening Inscape and The Yellow Field by the Sea (below).
Although markedly different in styles, Hustler's and Taylor's works sit very well together in this intimate gallery space. Partly this is a happy accident of scale and colour, but there are also unexpected parallels in approach. Taylor's mirror-maze accumulation of forms does not sound that dissimilar to Hustler's technique of 'building compositionally, layering colour, finding and losing ... line and shape, and seeing the world in a dreamlike way'.
I recommend readers sleepwalk over there as soon as possible. AM
Ewan Taylor – Psychedelic Collage – and Kirstie Hustler – Inner Landscapes – show at McNaughtan’s Bookshop & Gallery, 3A–4A Haddington Place, Leith Walk from 7 June–5 August, open 11am–5pm, closed Sundays and Mondays.
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