I have painted finches for many years now, but in this small series I was thinking about Joseph Cornell’s bird related boxes. I started to think differently about the space that surrounds my painted birds, making this space less present, more evocative. I think of the pearls as playthings for the birds.

There are several different areas that interest me in Pearls before Finches: art history, portraiture, natural history, botanical painting, and jewellery. Fragmentation and recontextualization of historic artworks are central to my ideas of connecting past, present and future.

Throughout this year I have been exhibiting six works in the exhibition Suppose You Are Not, a show curated by Selen Ansen from the collection of Omer Koc at the Arter Museum in Istanbul. The exhibition seeks to investigate how an important private collection can be presented in a public institution. Pearls Before Finches is therefore a mini homage to this huge exhibition, bringing together different areas of my work as if already installed in a collection.

The titles of my paintings are clues to the connections I want to make. For example, Jekyll Plant an impossibly hybridised flowering plant, connects Robert Louise Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the horticulturist, garden designer, artist and writer Gertrude Jekyll.

A group of three rose petal paintings Dewdrops, Drops relates to the baroque goth beauty and inventiveness of Pearly Dewdrops, Drops a song by The Cocteau Twins.

The main formal links in Pearls before Finches are the small spots of light found in the highlights on pearls, in dewdrops, in the eyes and lips within portraits, on a young bull’s muzzle, the glitter of gold plate chain or the sparkle of diamonds.

One of the reasons I enjoy exhibiting at The Scottish Gallery is the quality of their jewellery. It makes sense to me to be in the company of beautiful jewellery. I think of my hanging oval details, such as Portrait of David Hume after Alan Ramsay as jewellery for walls and for wearing.

Derrick Guild August 2024

Derrick Guild

Photography by Jed Gordon

Born: 1963

Place of Birth: Perth

Born in 1963 in Perth, Scotland, Derrick Guild has been the recipient of many awards for his unique work. Guild’s paintings and objects reference European still life of the 15th to 19th centuries. The drama, allegory and naturalism inherent in this period of painting speak to Guild of ever-present dilemmas of the human condition. His works are classical, formal and at the same time contemporary in their sense of dislocation and ambiguity.

‘In my work I am trying to create fluidity between the past and present. I make still life paintings using oil on canvas and objects that use a wide range of materials including cast resin, oil paint and miscellaneous materials. In the paintings, I am trying to harness the look and feel of the great European still life tradition. I want to hijack the high drama and emotional integrity that resonates in the work of that era. I aim to marry that look and feel to contemporary ideas and thoughts that include religion, colonialism, genetic modification, sexuality, commodification of nature, fecundity, humour, appropriation, addiction, beauty, absurdity, surrealism and realism. This list is always growing and is never closed. I feel the still life format easily allows narrative and metaphor, complexity and simplicity to be conveyed. Whilst every painting can be read alone, I feel that they are each a single sentence in a much longer and ongoing dialogue. The objects are in a sense three-dimensional versions of my still life paintings. They have developed from the realisation that an object resonates differently when it interacts in a space as a real object. I am trying for a more heightened sense of realism so that the experience of the object is not filtered through the two-dimensional canvas.’ – Derrick Guild

Pearls before Finches

Derrick Guild

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