‘Seeking out a landscape or view provides a sense of perspective… crafting my own alternative worlds or realities that offer me space to play, escape, and repair.’ – Rowan Paton.
Combining a textured blend of paint and print collage, Rowan Paton’s work is characterised by joyous colour and lyrical landscapes that explore a sense of place, time and memory with a personal, poetic narrative.
Range presents two precarious mountains sliding at an obtuse angle, as if the earth has loosened from gravity and begun to drift. Colour drives the composition: saturated violets, blues and pinks sweep diagonally to dissolve into translucent overlays of lime, amber and coral. These prismatic shadows glimmer and glow with rhythmic order, suggesting geological movement through time rather than space.
The photographic mountain image anchors the landscape, yet it tilts and glides across the surface with an avalanche of flowing paint. The destabilised range of solid rockface evokes impermanence and transformation – nature viewed as a shifting, luminous apparition suspended between earth and dream.
Towering mountains, cliffs and ridges were ‘always on her periphery’, she recalls from growing up on Arran and Aberdeenshire, and are a recurring artistic motif. In Rain Spell, green peaks are veiled in a misty downpour of fluid colour, as if weather itself has become visible. Contour lines and rainbow ribbons of violet, teal, coral and moss flood the sky in transparent, showering sheets of rain with chromatic energy.
The form is both solid and dissolving, the jagged mountain partially absorbed into curtains of paint that streak and feather across the linen surface. The ‘spell’ of the title is perhaps less magical than meteorological, envisaging the landscape under stormy weather, altered by colour, water and light.
Through her textured, highly-crafted compositions, Paton often explores the ‘shifting dialogue between the vastness of the natural world and inner contemplation.’
Balancing structured shape and spontaneous gesture, Shored seems like a landscape being held together yet still shifting, braced against erosion or collapse. A visual expression of protection and repair, the palette evokes a flourishing, fantasy forest of trees and plants. Broad streaks and dragged marks create a sense of downward force, pulled and pushed in different directions, the bouncing blue line echoing the oval grey ‘clouds’ hovering above. With an underlying mood of strength and resilience, the solidity of the earth meets the unpredictability of natural elements in buoyant tension.
‘Music is the most important thing to me outside painting; I rarely work in silence. I am drawn to lyricism and poetry, especially Whitman, Morgan, and MacCaig. Words, ideas, and visual triggers are noted, sketched, or stored for future work.’ – Rowan Paton
Walt Whitman’s poetry is profoundly shaped by observing nature through time, past, present and future, merging into an eternal float:
‘The hill-side whiten’d with blossoms of the mountain ash,
The same, late in autumn—the hues of red, yellow, drab, purple, and light and dark green.’
– from Spontaneous Me, Walt Whitman
As a strange, surreal dreamscape, Cloud House II is divided into three distinct layers – rigid mountain peaks, soft billowing clouds and a tiny house – each linked by a thin pink pencil line. The neutral linen backdrop allows the burst of colour to truly pop, from ethereal white through a spectrum of lavender, crimson and fiery orange, spreading with translucent light.
Open to rich interpretation, it touches upon themes of home, family, attachment and perhaps even displacement. The house, a symbol of stability, exists in a state of heavenly suspension, connected by a tenuous thread. This fantastical scene is both whimsical like a child’s fairytale, but also introspective, reflecting emotional loss and remembrance.
Another haunting illustration, Lonely Iceberg skilfully blends photographic collage with abstract painting to evoke a chilling sense of isolation. With extraordinary simplicity, there is such a strong dramatic narrative surrounding this mass of ice, floating on a raw, undefined horizon. The dynamic repetition of translucent turquoise waves captures the swirling current, while the darker blue hue gives an illusion of depth.
The fluidity of the ocean contributes to idea of relentless motion, further emphasising the iceberg’s solitary detachment. Whether this stark image conjures the Titanic disaster or melting ice through climate change, the overall mood is one of stillness, to contemplate the grandeur and vulnerability of the natural world.
‘As a keen collector of objects, vintage patterned fabrics, chairs, clocks, ceramics, flowers, and plants, I like to construct invented worlds for them.’ – Rowan Paton
Bird of Paradise presents a decorative still-life in which giant, electric green Triffid-like leaves dominate the room with sci-fi imagination. The eye is then drawn to the floral fabric of the armchair, perched on a neon-pink, checkerboard floor; a vacant chair is symbolic in itself, denoting absence and solitude.
The botanical theme is followed through the smatter, scribble and splash of colourful petals with joyful, abstract expression. This variety in application, from precise pattern to gestural mark-making, painterly and playful, is like a moment caught between reality and fantasy. A Bird of Paradise plant represents tropical beauty, love and freedom; here, its exaggerated scale hints at the growth and wildness of nature that cannot be fully contained in this domestic setting.
In 1923, when George Mallory was asked why he wanted to attempt to climb Mount Everest, he replied, ‘Because it’s there’.
A shimmering, bejewelled peak stands centre stage in Cloud Mountain, enchantingly framed in a patchwork quilt of geometric clouds, fields, rivers and lochs, a wash of shapes in vibrant pink, orange and green. Rather than ad hoc, this is designed as a cool Cubist composition of fragmented, overlapping stripes and rectangles; a mirror image of the conical mountain is reflected in a mauve triangle and note the tiny square forest of trees.
Paton’s artistic perspective is viewed through a lens of sharp imagery, vibrant colour and philosophical reflection. The majestic scale of the glacier-sculpted monument is like a metaphor on a theme of exploration and discovery, surrounded by the living, evolving world of nature.
The title Great Escapes epitomises Rowan Paton’s poetic vision of these lyrical landscapes and homely interiors of jugs, plants and cakes. The duality of life and existence, indoors and out in the wild environment.
‘When I am in Edinburgh, I walk amongst the mountains and lochs of that corner that looks across the Minch to the Hebrides… wrapped in the ribbons of memory.’ – from Assynt to Edinburgh, Norman MacCaig
With thanks Vivien Devlin for this review.
