Page 13 - Art First: Kate McCrickard: New Romantics

either in Paris or in the countryside over weekends and holidays. In the heat
of summer she works late into the night. This is when her dreamy, literary lady
in the café turns into a prostitute conversing with two cancelled white men.
One of them is so old he is already a skeleton who has grown a beard (page 26).
Humour abounds. There are hints of a feminist stance, but always one balanced
by compassion and curiosity. Monkeys and cats and dogs take the stage now
and then; fellow creatures who express their affection when amongst humans
(Two Witches and a Monkey, 2022 and Witch Tronie (page 34).

New Romantics is a theme that has emerged throughout McCrickard’s work fairly
recently. It touches a nerve, feels a pulse, a zeitgeist, a mood, call it what you will,
that is gathering momentum in the arts right now, and looking at the work leading
into this exhibition and included in this publication, you may well wonder if you are
in Berlin in 1923 or in Paris in 2023. Or perhaps Vienna in 1915 when Egon Schiele
painted his Death of a Maiden (a central Romantic theme–think of Schubert’s music
too) alongside a host of other psychologically expressionist works that beautifully
conjure a Freudian, post-Hapsburgian Vienna on the eve of World War I. Edvard
Munch had dealt with the theme of course, in 1894, in a memorable drypoint
show ing a comely nude standing in a passionate embrace with a skeleton (there
is a copy in the National Galleries of Scotland). McCrickard’s painting (page 22)
is filled with an intimate tenderness in which the nude maiden snuggles into the
bony arms of her skeleton lover, his bone-hand gently cupping her breast and his
trousered legs sprawled diagonally across the picture plane. There is an orange and
green striped oval form which encloses them, womb-like, yet in a surreal confusion,
it morphs, lower right, into something from which another limb seems to emerge,
and above the trousered leg a second skeleton head appears. Neither of these
detracts from the central subject however, as they serve a general intuitive composi -
tional purpose and are part of the complete liberty the artist feels before her canvas.

11