Adams Important Irish Art 27th May 2015 : Large Image & Place Bid Click Lot Title.

106 / 172

Oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cm (20 x 24’’)
Signed with artist’s device, signed again and inscribed with title verso
There are occasions when Colin Middleton’s background as a damask
designer created problems in his work as a painter, but in the later work
in particular, he is skillfully able to draw on it to enhance rather than over-
balance a composition. Pattern does dominate El Nene but the figures
do not lose their solidity and weight nor does the space ever become too
flat. The abstract coherence of the mother and child gives them a great-
er universality because they do not become too particular. Middleton’s
post-war work had often created women who were inextricably a part
of the landscapes they inhabited. By the 1960s this had become less
emotive and more detached, as he abstracted the female form to a point
at which it became a synthesis of the natural landscape and womankind,
invested with the monumentality and fecundity that we see in this work.
Dickon Hall
€15,000 - €20,000