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Colin Middleton RHA RUAMBE (1910-1983)
Metro, St. George’s Day, Barcelona, Wilderness Series No. 27 (1972-74)
Oil on board, 60 x 60cm (23½ x 23½”)
Signed, inscribed with title and dated 1972/74 verso
Exhibited: “Colin Middleton Exhibition”, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Catalogue No. 151 where lent
by Kate Middleton,
Ulster Museum, Belfast January/February 1976; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin March/April 1976
Literature: “Colin Middleton” by John Hewitt, full page colour Illustration p.47
“Contemporary Irish Art” by Roderic Knowles, full page illustration p.71
A new sense of vast scale seems to lie at the heart of Colin Middleton’s
Wilderness Series,
presumably
inspired by the sea journeys he undertook to Spain, Australia and South America in the early 1970s.
That suggestion of almost invisible horizons and large expanses of sky, expressing Middleton’s idea of a
wilderness to which one could retreat from the modern world, is noticeable in
‘Metro: St.George’s Day
’,
which also uses the rather nautical motif of surfaces laid in long planks stretching towards the horizon
that recurs throughout the
Wilderness Series
.
This painting, however, is dominated by its complex and ambiguous foreground structure, a painted
dressing table that appears vast in the empty landscape and against the figure that walks across it.The
roll of material draped behind her, another feature of many
Wilderness
paintings that recalls Middle-
ton’s training as a damask designer, questions this assumption of scale, as does the thin-stalked flower
(perhaps one of the single red roses sold in Barcelona on St.George’s Day) that rises from the table.
The various open cupboards and the receding window in the mirror suggest a mysterious world that
perhaps has some partial reference to the vast underground spaces of the Barcelona metro system in the
title. Middleton visited his daughter Jane there and although the mood of the painting does not seem
to reflect the lively celebrations of the Catalan St.George’s Day, it might show the artist’s vision of hu-
man life in the modern city, where the individual is often overwhelmed by the structures of urban life.
Dickon Hall November 2014
€15,000 - 25,000