Now On View, Harrogate
Drawing From Life
Unseen Life Drawings
RedHouse Gallery is honoured to present Drawing From Life; a selection of unseen life drawings from the Estate of John Middleton.
Born in Sheffield in 1944, Middleton triumphantly achieved the life of a true artist – one that was devoted to painting without compromise. This first collection has been co-curated with his family and showcases a profound appreciation for the figurative, beyond his more familiar abstract output.
Drawing From Life offers a glimpse into another side of Middleton. These sensitive portraits blend his masterly control of watercolour with a refined interpretation of line and structure. A deep understanding of fabric and form chimes with his abstract practice and is combined with an intensional use of negative space, creating dynamic images that are suspended somewhere between exploratory sketches and fully formed compositions.
“He often said that his work can be looked upon in two very distinct ways or categories. The physical and the metaphysical, or the conscious and the subconscious. His figurative work is very much of the physical world, the detail to capture something the eye sees, the exactness of a single line in his work reflects this while studying one of his models. The fluidity of the figure. An art in itself.”
Toby Middleton
Middleton rarely dated his paintings, adding to the timeless nature of his work and positioning his practice somewhere between old master and contemporary visionary. There are influences of Art Nouveau, Art Deco and the Aestheticism Movement, with Aubrey Beardsley and Egon Schiele noted as some of his greatest influences. Completely self-taught, he worked predominantly in watercolour and gouache, creating works that boldly embraced the metaphysical through explorations into dreamscapes, the subconscious and the spiritual, in his words “A world where meaning is in the eye of the beholder”.
Drawing From Life provides a window into the intimate practice of life drawing, showcasing a collection not seen outside of Middleton’s studio before.
To purchase artwork please contact sales@redhouseoriginals.com.
The exhibition is now on view in the gallery, please request the full catalogue here.
