Statement

Bridget Macdonald is an artist capable of integrating autobiography and myth to create subtle images that are suffused with quiet mystery. Large scale charcoal drawings which first attracted the attention of museum curators and collectors, have been joined in recent years by luminous landscape paintings. Together they form a body of work in which she continues to explore her chosen themes. These have developed from the figure, to the figure in the landscape and most recently to the landscape itself and its place in our imagination. Her subject matter often has poetic sources and in an earlier phase she worked directly from the poems of Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound and Basil Bunting, responding to their vivid imagery and many layered, cross referenced autobiographical works.

This link between literature and the visual arts has been a characteristic feature of her work. Over the years she has used the classical literary concept of the pastoral as a framework on which to build her particular way of working with landscape. Her own farming background and present life in the country around the Malvern Hills are blended with references to Virgil, Claude, Poussin, Samuel Palmer et al to make an allusive and resonant mix of the real and the imagined. As Sheila McGregor wrote in a recent catalogue essay, ‘It is the tension between things observed and things remembered, between the immediacy of a specific visual stimulus and a process of retrospective distillation, that gives her work its power’. The lighthouse at St. Catherine’s Point on the Isle of Wight, which lay just beyond the farm where she was born, recurs in her work, accurately rendered but also associated with an archetypal tower. An image of a white farm house on the Herefordshire/Worcestershire borders, seen from a distance across an idyllic pastoral landscape, summons up the deep nostalgia which is so much a part of the English view of rural life. Like many of the handsome farmhouses which sit so harmoniously in the landscape it is no longer inhabited by a farmer but this paradox only increases its fascination for her. It is important to Macdonald that her paintings hint at the darker realities of loss, dispossession and death which have always been part of the myth of Arcadia.

Formally her work reflects her abiding interest in the art of the Italian Renaissance and she employs certain techniques absorbed from her study of that period – in the paintings thin glazes create deep pools of shadow, and contrast with light filled skies; in the drawings the feeling for light and dark is typically achieved through the use of charcoal with its range from velvety black through silvery mid tones to the contrasting white of the paper.

Biography

The link between literature and the visual arts has been a characteristic feature of Macdonald’s work over the past 30 years. She has used the classical literary concept of the pastoral as a framework on which to build her particular way of working with landscape. Her own farming background and present life in the country around the Malvern Hills are blended with references to Virgil, Claude, Poussin, Samuel Palmer et al to make an allusive and resonant mix of the real and the imagined. As Sheila McGregor wrote in a catalogue essay, ‘It is the tension between things observed and things remembered, between the immediacy of a specific visual stimulus and a process of retrospective distillation, that gives her work its power’.

Landscape as a place of history and memory is therefore the source for many of her works. The lighthouse at St. Catherine’s Point on the Isle of Wight, which lay just beyond the farm where she was born, is a recurring subject; as is the orchard which she and her husband have planted in the beautiful and fertile Suckley Valley on the borders of Herefordshire and Worcestershire.

Born in 1943 on the Isle of Wight, Bridget Macdonald trained in Fine Art from 1983 to 1987. Since then she has built up a career which has been marked by major solo exhibitions in public galleries such as Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Worcester City Art Gallery, Derby Art Gallery, The Rotunda Gallery at Birmingham University, and QuayArts on the Isle of Wight. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Worcester City Art Gallery and the House of Lords at 1 Millbank.

In 2016 her exhibition This Green Earth at Worcester City Art Gallery featured her works hung alongside paintings, etchings and drawings by Claude Lorrain, Samuel Palmer and Peter Paul Rubens borrowed from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and Manchester Art Gallery. She has shown regularly at Art First since its inception.