Artist: Derek McGuire

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My pictures are primarily a relationship between my found sources within a setting.  I have an extensive visual archive and ideas collected from newspapers, the internet and literature and from my own photographs and videos.  Sketches from source contain observations of movements,moods of nature and extremes of weather. Importantly, I don’t paint what I see but what I have seen, heard, read, felt or experienced.

Painting allows me to show combinations that may not exist in the world, to create imagery out of thin air, to imagine possibilities and suggestions.  I play with the paint to find meaning, trying to fathom out the connections between my image, surface and technique. Each work is a performance which may or may not come off. It’s a method of chance, risk and edginess.

Darker and lighter sides of personal experiences, memories and hopes are exposed. Mood changes and imaginations in the paintings always stem from a foundation of fact and experience.  There can be a sense of melancholy and sometimes menace or danger. I hope to question the audience with my view of life, complete with its nervousness, anxieties and sorrows.

CV

Derek McGuire was born in Cowdenbeath in 1964. 

He graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with First Class Honours in 1986.  Postgraduate diploma
with Distinction in 1987.

Awards include scholarships to Yale University, USA, major prizewinner at the Royal Overseas League
and the Alastair Salvesen Scholarship toTravel to Australia.

Recent solo exhibition in Patriothall Gallery, Edinburgh.  So far in 2009 his work has been seen in RSA
Spring Show, The Dovecot Gallery and the inaugral exhibition at the new Albany Lane Gallery.

Derek has taught at Edinburgh College of Art since 1991, and has just returned from an Erasmus funded
trip to Estonia to teach at Tallinn University.