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Framed dimensions: 63.5 x 89 cm
signed and dated lower left; signed and titled verso
In many of his later still life compositions, McClure plays visual games with the ‘painting within a painting’ genre, a technique also employed by his Edinburgh School contemporary Robin Philipson and others. In Green Marble and White Jug, there is a classic tipped tabletop still life, another genre typified by Redpath and Gillies, where the still life objects are arranged and shown as if viewed from an elevated angle. It’s a visual illusion of a still life painting, sitting on an easel and where the perspective is skewed, and the deep outlined shadows of the painting offer a three dimensional view. Is it a picture of a painting on an easel or of objects on a tabletop? McClure creates further confusion by mischievously allowing details to escape out over the edge of the suggested canvas on the easel and into the painting’s ‘real space’.
McClure was one of a group of highly regarded young painters that included James Cumming, William Baillie, John Houston, Elizabeth Blackadder and David Michie all of whom graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1950s. Their formative years benefited from the examples of a remarkable concentration of talent in the capital, both on the Art College staff and in the annual exhibitions of the RSA, RSW, SSA or SSWA. In addition, The Scottish Gallery was regularly showing established artists such as Anne Redpath, William Gillies, William MacTaggart, as well as younger artists like Joan Eardley and Robin Philipson. McClure and many of his Edinburgh College peers soon joined them. McClure had his first one-man show with The Scottish Gallery in 1957 and the following decade saw regular exhibitions of his work.
He was included in the important surveys of contemporary Scottish art which began to define the Edinburgh School throughout the 1960s and culminated in his Edinburgh Festival show at The Gallery in 1969. But he was, even by 1957 (after a year’s painting in Florence and Sicily) at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, alongside his great friend Alberto Morrocco, applying the rigour and inspiration that made the college such a bastion of painting.
The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1957, 1962, 1966, 1969 (Festival), 1989, 1992, 1994, 1996 (70th Birthday Exhibition), 2000 (Memorial), 2003, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2022
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