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The Red Studio comes from McClure’s hugely successful 1969 Edinburgh Festival Exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in Castle Street in which there were two major themes – sensual nudes or models in an interior and still life/picture on an easel composition. The constructed settings are an imaginary combination of the artist’s studio and living room in Dundee, with the picture space defined only by the angles and perspective of furniture, rugs, a window, hung paintings or a wall-mirror all set against a single, strong flat background colour used for both wall and floor. Again, a painting on an easel usually appears, usually the one for which the model is sitting, although not always. In The Red Studio, you are being invited into the artist’s studio with the artist reflected in the mirror as he paints the seated model. The blanket box is one painted by the artist inspired by similar furniture he saw in Norway in the impressive Museum of Folk Art. Anne Redpath of course had also painted furniture inspired in her case by similar French examples and indeed the lamp in the background here is sitting on a tea-chest she painted and which the artist owned as well as the tall vase and mandolin. Robin McClure, 2014
David McClure was born in Lochwinnoch in 1926. He enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art in 1947, from which point he was to be associated with a group of highly regarded young painters including James Cumming, William Baillie, John Houston, Elizabeth Blackadder and David Michie.
McClure’s work sits solidly within that well-documented tradition of 20th century Scottish Painting characterised by strength of colour and confident handling of paint. As a bold and inspired colourist McClure had few equals. He is best known for his colourful, painterly still lifes and flower-pieces, his subject pictures of children’s dreams or religious figures and later his nudes and studio interiors. Landscapes too were a significant part of his work, inspired by harbour scenes from the East Neuk of Fife or the East Coast fishing villages above Dundee. In later years he produced lyrical coastal landscapes of north-west Sutherland.
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