Work Roderick Newlands. MA.RCA.
Roderick Newlands. MA.RCA.
Evoking the sensual, the life-size organic and mechanical forms in Roderick Newlands large paintings hold a deft conversation with the twisted and contorted figures skillfully draughted in his compelling drawings. Shown for the first time together in Norfolk, Newlands paintings and drawings span a period of 30 years and provide a glimpse into the work of this quietly celebrated artist.
Born in Aberdeen, Newlands graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1978 and has won a number of significant prizes including the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA), the Meyer Oppenheim Prize and a RSA Carnegie Travelling Scholarship and was awarded a Fellowship to Cheltenham College of Art. The skill and technical brilliance of the now Norfolk based artist tells further in his many inclusions into the RA and RSA summer exhibitions.
Like Roberto Matta(D) (who counts a number of Newlands’ works in his collections,) the artist plays with space and light. His family of bold, energized images cut across the featureless backgrounds. References to things past inhabit Newlands’ canvases. Childhood memories of his father, an agricultural engineer, mending ‘monstrous mechanical contraptions’ in a dark barn with only a hand-held lamp for light bring to life the monumentally present figures in his work.
It is figurative elements that also feature in Newlands drawings. Hands, larger than life and wrung together play with haunted faces, figures scarred and scored and at times Newlands’ pencil works so hard that the paper almost tears. Parts of heads and bodies tease us with their textures, a beard so fine contrasts with a distorted face and heavily worked parts play with those that are just implied.
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