Calum McClure, ‘Pool and Red Sun’

Calum McClure was born in 1987 and graduated in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art in 2010. He was the winner of the 2011 Jolomo Painting Award and won a prize at the inaugural W Gordon Smith Award for painting. He was an invited artist at the annual Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 2012. More recently he has been included in an exhibition of prints at the Royal Academy, London; had work in the major Scottish art societies’ annual exhibitions; along with having other work selected for the RA Summer Exhibition in various years; he has also shown work with Flowers Gallery, London in their annual winter exhibition of small scale work. His work is held in public collections including Pallant House and many private collections both in Scotland and internationally. His most recent solo exhibition ‘Poco Più In Là’ at The Scottish Gallery in January 2023 featured twenty paintings, focusing on images from near his new home in Ragogna in Northern Italy, where he now lives and works. 

Calum is a painter who immerses himself in his surroundings, their various histories, and the artistic process of representing them. He understands how paint can convey the poetry of suggestion and is absorbed in the infinite possibilities of the medium. His work evokes atmospheres, especially through the representation of light, shadow and reflections. Some of his images are almost abstract, others quite clearly representational, produced through intense scrutiny of details in the landscape and vistas, views from particular vantage points all with their possibility for further imaginative exploration. He 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 and celebrated.