Dusk: Andrew Mackenzie

5 february - 2 march 2022
  • Andrew Mackenzie artwork
    Andrew Mackenzie, Dark Woodland (Red Structure), Oil on panel, 100 x 200 cm

  • &Gallery is thrilled to present the second solo show of Scottish artist Andrew Mackenzie. The exhibition features an ensemble of 11 paintings and 13 drawings.  

     

    To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. (Shepherd, 2011, p.1)

     

    There is no mistaking an Andrew Mackenzie painting. Silhouettes of trees loom out of dark foreboding landscapes. Scots pine, Douglas fir, the brittle bare branches of ash, elder and birch create a lattice work of organic connections fanning out across the picture plane. Each image punctuated by lone trees and sparse linear structures often spotlighted in vibrant oranges, reds, and magentas. And, while the visual essence of earlier work persists in this new series, we also see a subtle but important change taking place. Stridently contrasting trees have become quieter, more restrained, drawing us in to these visionary yet haunting worlds. 

  • exhibition by Andrew Mackenzie
    Andrew Mackenzie, Into the Wood (Velvet Deep Dusk), Oil on panel, 40 x 79cm

  • DUSK, when colour and shadows deepen before folding into the darkness of night, is the time-of-day Mackenzie likes best. The charcoal drawings and oil paintings in this exhibition speak of winter walks in the wooded landscape close to his home in the Scottish Borders. The viewpoint is human in scale. From rough frozen ground we look out across flat bodies of water or up at plunging waterfalls.  In Dark Woodland (Red Structure) our gaze travels between the solemn trunks of tall trees as their crowns stretch above us beyond the complexity of Mackenzie’s meticulously rendered paint-woven surface. Repeated lines of pristine white paint traverse thin pale lilac washes as irregular patches of snow dust the land before us. These landscapes may be figureless, but they are very much about our inescapable entanglement with the natural world. 

     

    In this body of work the readily identifiable architectural scaffolds of earlier pieces have given way to increasingly abstracted linear forms. Each one is nestled seamlessly within the geography of the local landscape. With this visual shorthand for the human made Mackenzie has found a method of disrupting commonplace ideas of nature as separate from us - something to be looked at and admired from afar. Instead, these succinct hieroglyphs point to a continuing history of place creation where humans and their environments are unshakeably interwoven.  

  • Andrew Mackenzie painting

    Andrew Mackenzie, Reservoir (Wall), Detail, Oil on panel, 107 x 180 cm

    Parallel to the topographies he depicts Mackenzie’s paintings evolve slowly as a result of both human intervention and the twists and turns of unpredictable material processes. A crisp, deliberate line of brick red alludes to the physical presence of a snow pole or fence post while a thick smear of paint, like the felt sense of encroaching darkness, arouses echoes of the preverbal, of our deep corporeal enmeshment in the ongoing cycles of nature. Mackenzie says of the process of painting:

     

    “I often have an idea of what I’m going to do, but once started the work takes on its own life and momentum. I have to listen to the work – often I feel like it’s the painting that is leading me or telling me what needs to happen next.”

     

    In the first quarter of the twenty first century when the impact of human induced climate change is becoming increasingly incontrovertible DUSK quietly invites us to reassess how we dwell in and of nature. 

     

    Shepherd, N, ([1977], 2011) The Living Mountain. Edinburgh; Canongate

     

    Valerie McLean

    Artist, educator and writer based in Edinburgh. She teaches painting at Leith School of Art and Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art. She has exhibited her paintings widely and her writing has been published in artist books and journals.

     

  • Andrew Mackenzie studio view

    Andrew Mackenzie in his studio

    Dusk is my favourite times of the day, partly because it is a transitional time, a threshold between day and night. I don’t associate it with melancholy, but instead love the way colours deepen; shapes and forms simplify as the light is limited. Dusk is the darker stage of twilight. I like the way your eyes adjust to the light as it fades. The sun has already set, and it is that point when the light is almost gone. It is cyclical and -as the Flaming Lips put it – is an illusion caused by the earth spinning round. Dusk for us is sunrise for someone else.

     

    When the children were small, I would often go for long walks in the landscape around where I live in the Scottish Borders once they had gone to bed and enjoy being out till it got dark – an experience I remember vividly from childhood. Being out at that time of day, and experiencing the world get dark, is an important part of growing up. 

     

    As the poet Jorie Graham says:

    ‘What neurologists call ‘unstructured outdoor play’ – hide and seek, catch – all the play that moves towards dusk, which activates a more ancient part of the brain, a different memory storage and retrieval, a capacity for imagination, intuition and empathy – has almost disappeared from our world.’ 

    ‘Dusk was a thing you felt you could see into and play into until dark blanketed you’.

    (Quoted from Earthlines Magazine, Aug 2012)

     

    The other factor is that this sense of Dusk emerged from the paintings as I made them. I often have an idea of what I am going to do, but once started the work takes on its own life and momentum. I have to listen to the work – often I feel like it’s the painting that is leading me or telling me what needs to happen next. 

     

    I have made several drawings and paintings over the past few years which explore the feeling of dusk, including Dusk Barn from 2019 show with &Gallery.

     

    Dusk, however, is not necessarily a literal idea in the paintings (some are more dusk-like than others) – it is more suggestive of a certain state – metaphorical of transition and betweenness.

  • Andrew Mackenzie drawings for sale

  • Available works on paper

  • 3D Tour - Virtual Exhibition