124
114 Colin Middleton RHA RUAMBE (1910-1983)
Sleeping Beauty (1976)
Oil on board, 61 x 61cm (24 x 24”)
Signed, Inscribed with title verso
Sleeping Beauty
forms part of the Westerness cycle of paintings that is arguably the last great series of works
Colin Middleton completed, although it was painted slightly later than the bulk of the group, which were
exhibited together in 1976.
The Westerness Series (the title was inspired by ‘Finnegan’s Wake’) brought together many of the elements
that had dominated Middleton’s work at various stages of his career. The suggestion of a vast, empty
landscape was perhaps inspired by Middleton’s travels to Spain and Australia in the early 1970s and he had
also written in the early 1970s of his interest in expressing the withdrawal of the soul into a wilderness such
as this setting suggests.The consciousness of design evident here in the repeated use of geometric slivers of
bright clean colours, as well as in his fascination with pattern, surface texture and material are all traits of his
design training that Middleton never abandoned.
Above all, this cycle explores concepts of the female archetype that dominated Middleton’s career.
Increasingly through the 1960s this form became interrelated with the landscape and here this ambiguity
continues; the female body remains sexualised and her carefully described clothing hints at a context more
fully explored in other Westerness paintings, but the contours of the body are deliberately reminiscent of
the rhythms of landscape.
In paintings such as
Sleeping Beauty
Middleton has found a manner of creating a world that suggests the
physical and tactile but remains ultimately immaterial.These are paintings about metamorphosis rather than
surrealist works and suggest a mystical synchronicity within the natural world.
Dickon Hall
€20,000 - 30,000
