Description
Balloch’s Mirrors is a landscape view of Loch Lomondfrom a shore near Balloch. A place of immense beautywrapped with myth and legend. I used to go there with my family in the summer while we lived in Milngavie: a small suburb in East Dunbartonshire.
Balloch’s Mirrors deploys a reduced palette of cool and warm blue hues, relying on optical mixing to build colour and shift temperature, value, and saturation.
A cloudy sky populated by settlements of speech surrounds the landscape view,stretchingonto the depth of the canvas. It is a pictorial spaceof words backing the landscape’s torn-like elements.The wordy background was made with masking fluid to preserve the white of the canvas, leaving the ground exposed when removed.
During the process, the composition started to resemble areflection, in which the bottom part shape was rendered very similar to the upper half.
The landscape’s elongated form is divided visually by a middlesection, a bedrock from the lake shore that crosses the canvas horizontally, producing a reading of halves. This middle section is also the positionfrom where the scene wasobserved.
The upper viewof the lake framed by foothills and clouds was handled in quite a traditional way, very much to the style ofsome old British watercolours.Layers of cool transparent pigments over white ground produce a luminous effect.
The bottom half is an imaginary layered arrangement in which an underground watery world appearsto resemblesome elements of the upper part, in which torn patches of warm blues and turquoises intersperse some roots.
In Ballock’s Mirrors,the real and imaginary converge to construct a landscape that evokes time contingency by aligning its parts, suggesting movement and constant change configuration.
The state of constant flux indicates the psychological, political, and cultural space of production,conveyed by the fluid nature of its components that appear unhindered by gravity, conferring an airborne status. This unfixed condition is an advantageous position not constricted by a single perspective, generating a creative space of endless possibilities.
Ballock’s Mirrorsrespond to a particular place of production, not just a physical one; it was painted in a Victorian flat conversionin post-Brexit Britainby an emigrant artist.Therefore, it makes sense when I see this painting framing our table in a wall divided by decorative wood moulding in a high ceiling space.
I had something very different in mind for this painting, but it took its course for a reason. So, my landscape project ended up being a portrait.
