Christine McArthur, spring summer autumn winter

About

”Fifty years of sketchbooks in her studio provide the bedrock for the observational oils and pastels, collages approaching abstraction, delicate and intense watercolours, and the embroideries which have continued to punctuate her career.

This exhibition of Four Seasons continues this fiercely independent point of view. Ten years of art school life and then teaching instilled in her the concept of the year beginning in September. Her three sisters – teachers and educational librarians – reinforced the timescale of the academic year. The seasons, and their order, have always been important to her, as a cook, as a poet and, most obviously here, as an artist. They control what is available to draw and paint. The annual burst of colour in the new anemones, snow drops and hellebores – winter flowers. Summer poppies, autumn fruits. The pressure to paint them all before they disappear for another year. 

And balanced against all of these, the timeless and season-less Japanese gardens, all embroideries, a slow medium which forces patience and contemplation but which brings to the fore one of McArthur’s most consistent assets – an innate sense of pictorial design.”

                                                                                                                               Roger Billcliffe, 2024