Calum McClure has made paintings based on places and ideas from his new home in Italy. During the process of moving there he began reading the works of Italo Calvino (to improve his Italian) the resulting series of paintings and monotypes take direct inspiration from images conjured by the author’s writings, in particular Marcovaldo. The book is a series of twenty short stories, the first of which takes places in the spring, the second in summer, and so on for five complete cycles of the calendar. Calvino’s eponymous Marcovaldo is depicted as a man with a rural background now living with his wife and children in a large city. The painting Dov’è più azzurro il fiume? (Where the river is bluer?) takes its title from one of the book’s chapters. As with many of his other escapades Marcovaldo’s will to pursue the activities of the countryside in the city does not end well, and the beautiful blue river, on the city’s confines, where he attempts to fish tench, turns out to be down river from a polluting paint factory. In this oil we see McClure blending different types of brushstrokes, free flowing ones which suggest nature and tighter more ridged ones which could suggest the built environment.
About Calum McClure
Calum McClure was born in 1987 and graduated in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art in 2010. He was the winner of the 2011 Jolomo Painting Award, has had five successful exhibitions with The Scottish Gallery and was an invited artist at the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy in London in 2012. Recently he has been included in an exhibition of prints at the Royal Academy, London; had work in the major Scottish art societies’ annual exhibitions; had work exhibited at the RA Summer Exhibition; won a prize at the inaugural W Gordon Smith Award for painting; and most recently exhibited two pieces with Flowers Gallery, London.
