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The Red Studio comes from McClure’s hugely successful 1969 Edinburgh Festival Exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in Castle Street in which there were two major themes – sensual nudes or models in an interior and still life/picture on an easel composition. The constructed settings are an imaginary combination of the artist’s studio and living room in Dundee, with the picture space defined only by the angles and perspective of furniture, rugs, a window, hung paintings or a wall-mirror all set against a single, strong flat background colour used for both wall and floor. Again, a painting on an easel usually appears, usually the one for which the model is sitting, although not always. In The Red Studio, you are being invited into the artist’s studio with the artist reflected in the mirror as he paints the seated model. The blanket box is one painted by the artist inspired by similar furniture he saw in Norway in the impressive Museum of Folk Art. Anne Redpath of course had also painted furniture inspired in her case by similar French examples and indeed the lamp in the background here is sitting on a tea-chest she painted and which the artist owned as well as the tall vase and mandolin. Robin McClure, 2014
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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