Meg Buick: Recent paintings and prints

About

Opening Event: Thursday 1st December  7-10pm.

Afternoon Event:  Saturday 3rd December 2016   3-6pm 

An afternoon reception with mincepies, mulled wine and an opportunity to meet the artist

A ragged dog paws the ground uncertainly, head ducked in damaged submission, 
a dogged rag, enduring all. 
A lone white cow pauses before a factory/castle and lows at it’s rising walls. 
It elbows the sky.
A horse humours its rider, a slumped burden. The field is felt, but stretches away indifferent.  
A scratchy laugh, a dappled sigh

Mercer Chance is proud to present paintings and prints by Meg Buick, in which we see a world beautiful yet ashen, a pastoral abandoned, a foreboding of ruin. Though pervaded by a deep and resonant melancholy, it is never bleak, for in the suggestion of movement, of the shared journey, there is always hope.

Animal manifestations wearily tread onward, sometimes bearing a human animal, bowed with guilt for the crimes of it’s kind. Through sadness we are redeemed, reunified in companionship, to search on together.

In Meg’s touch there is Monet - to corral chaos into coherence, to allow every mark an unpredictability unmarred by overbearing intention. And yet, even within this diffuse atmosphere, these permeable boundaries, the picture-plane is often structured with the precision of Piero and the devotional gravity of Bellini.

It is a spirit world, more fundamental than religious fictions, not transcendental in terms of an escape from material reality but through and within it; embracing texture, weight, accumulation of matter and experience. Though they are richly worked, the images are drawn with the simple, ancient authority of a cave painting. Athough in many ways timeless, they are also shaped by the anxieties of our era, and seem to drop our modern consciousness into the phantom of a pre-industrial past, to wander as ghosts in a landscape that is slipping away faster than ever before.  

Meg Buick was born in England and is currently based in Bristol. She completed her study at The Royal Drawing school in 2013 and has since received many awards including the Richard Ford travel award to Madrid and the Royal Society of Artists scholarship to Rome. She has exhibited her prints widely across the UK taking part in numerous print exhibitions and has work in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.