Artist profile

Calum McClure was born in 1987 and graduated in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art in 2010.

Through painting, monotype and etching McClure explores ideas of place, transience and nature. The places where he walks and gathers images, through taking photographs, are predominantly parks and gardens, places that can be public or private; once private but now made public in the case of the country estates, places of botanical research or the private celebration of nature. He thinks about these places as modern Arcadias; into which people can escape for a few hours every week.

Some of McClure's images are abstract, others quite clearly representational, produced from intense scrutiny of detail, views of particular places all with their possibility for further imaginative exploration. What interests him when in these places is usually something apparently simple, the shape of a branch overhanging a pool of water; the way rain falls; changing light; or shadows patterning the ground.

McClure is an artist who dreams as he sees and concentrates deeply as he paints, enabling others who view his work to be transported in a similar way. The images are positive, beautiful and lyrical, those of a precious environment to be nurtured, contemplated and celebrated.