Hugh Buchanan | C-Beams Glittering in the Dark

Having worked as a set designer with Ridley Scott and George Lucas I have long felt Hugh Buchanan’s paintings have a cinematic quality to them. Both our disciplines explore volume, space, form and light. I have often referenced Hugh’s work with directors and directors of photography when discussing set design and lighting. It comes as no surprise therefore that his latest work displays stronger ties to cinematic film design.

These new paintings, created during the recent lockdown, continue his fascination with Classical architecture but explore and embrace a more fantastical quality. They are suffused with an ethereal light, normally the domain of Science fiction concept artists and illustrators. Mapping the subject by using a projected grid, a delicate mesh suspends the form with a technicolour intensity that conjures up images of gaseous nebulae beamed from the Hubble telescope - evoking the romance of Powell and Pressberger and the imagery of the science fiction master illustrators Syd Mead and John Harris.

For me they bring to mind the formative experience of watching Ridley Scott’s ‘Bladerunner’ which had its European Premier in 1982 at the Playhouse Theatre, Edinburgh. I recall walking through the city at night, after the screening and its elegant Classicism became imbued with the dystopian drama of the new cinematic vision of a future Los Angeles that I had just seen on screen.

If you have ever wondered, remembering Rutger Hauer's valedictory speech, what ‘Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.’ might look like then you should check out Hugh Buchanans latest series of paintings.