Jonathan Christie | Scratching the Surface
A catalogue to accompany Jonathan Chistie’s June 2021 exhibition, Scratching the Surface.
We are delighted to present Jonathan Christie’s second solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery. We first met Christie when he exhibited with St Jude’s as part of our 175th anniversary celebrations in 2017. His was a distinct, compelling phrase in the rich orchestration of the group.
Christie’s paintings are all inspired by real places and objects but reimagined, adopted into his careful scheme, perfectly balanced to serve his composition but removed from reality in a dreamy state where all is possible.
Deploying watercolour, graphite and sgraffito on a gesso board, he will incise, distress, glaze and wash, but is always guided by the powerful impulse of drawing. In this way his paintings emerge from change and development, traces of their genesis apparent at completion.
About Jonathan Christie
‘For these four Ghost Ship paintings, I had in the back of my mind a sentence that the mariner and naïve painter Alfred Wallis put in a letter to his patron Jim Ede in 1935: ‘What i do mosley is What use To Bee out of my own memery what We may never see again as Thing are altered all To gether Ther is nothin what Ever do not look like what it was sence i Can Rember…’ Jonathan Christie
