Catalogue Essay
"As Kingfishers Catch fire"
Louise McClary's colour and darkness
In the paintings on the studio walls there are shapes suggesting wings or hands or leaves. These ambiguous, self-contained forms have the slightly startled, aureate quality of clues to a mystery of which you've only just become fully aware, like objects gleaned from a forest floor or beach. They are fragments expressing a larger, invisible but intuitively present whole. And although they are generic rather than specific shapes - winglike, plantlike but not actual wings or flowers - you imagine their free existence inside the painting. Like someone bringing the fresh night air in the folds of their clothes into a warm room, they appear from somewhere. So these paintings are both intimate in appeal and expansive in effect.
Michael Bird
(Extract from catalogue essay to accompany 'ECHOES"
solo show at Waterhouse and Dodd, Cork Street, London 2006)
"As Kingfishers Catch fire"
Louise McClary's colour and darkness
In the paintings on the studio walls there are shapes suggesting wings or hands or leaves. These ambiguous, self-contained forms have the slightly startled, aureate quality of clues to a mystery of which you've only just become fully aware, like objects gleaned from a forest floor or beach. They are fragments expressing a larger, invisible but intuitively present whole. And although they are generic rather than specific shapes - winglike, plantlike but not actual wings or flowers - you imagine their free existence inside the painting. Like someone bringing the fresh night air in the folds of their clothes into a warm room, they appear from somewhere. So these paintings are both intimate in appeal and expansive in effect.
Michael Bird
(Extract from catalogue essay to accompany 'ECHOES"
solo show at Waterhouse and Dodd, Cork Street, London 2006)