Alan Cotton

About

There are certain places where the special contours of a
landscape trigger Alan Cotton’s creative imagination. The
West Coast of Ireland is one such place. It forms the main
focus of this exhibition, filling Messum’s gallery with the potent
blues and violets and rich grey-greens characteristic of the
countryside that skirts the Atlantic ocean. Here the weather
is the main protagonist, and the skies, heavy with rain-bearing
clouds or streaked with pearly light, dominate many of Alan
Cotton’s paintings. He has explored the territory of Kerry,
Connemara and Donegal with a passionate intensity, steeping
himself in its history and internalising the shapes and colours
of winding lanes, rocky walls and coastal cliffs. Elsewhere,
whether Provence, Tuscany or Transylvannia, Alan gives us
a rich travelogue of colourful impasto imagery evocative of
terrain and a sense of place.