Contemporary Art, Furniture & Craft Gallery · Licensed Café
SALLY McLAREN RE is a distinguished printmaker, painter and etcher. Born in London, she studied at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford and at the Central School of Art in London. She won a scholarship to study in Paris at the famous Atelier 17 of Stanley William Hayter, returning to teach at Goldsmith’s College of Art.
She is a Fellow and Founder Member of the Printmaker’s Council of Great Britain, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers now known as the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers (RE).
She has exhibited widely and her work is held in numerous collections around the world, including the National Print Collection, the Government Art Collection, the Scottish Arts Council, the Museum of Modern Art in Macedonia, the Cabo Frio Print Collection in Sao Paulo and New York Public Library. In recent years, two monographs of her work have been published, The Response of Landscape and In Search of Stillness, which is in the collection of the National Art Library at the V&A, and is available at the exhibition. Sally McLaren lives and continues to work in Wiltshire.
Now in her 90th year and producing large, joyous, youthful carborundum prints, Sally’s unique artistic voice sings out even from the first prints she made while studying at the Central School of Art, London, in the late 1950s. Her first ever untitled black and white etching showed in that year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and we can see all the key works which marked turning points in her career since then.
Immensely knowledgeable and technically adept, Sally has always drawn inspiration from the natural world and landscape. Her experimental approach has taken her through different periods and styles through the decades, exploding in the fabulously colourful freewheeling work she is producing now in collaboration with master-printmaker Andrew Smith.
The insistence on the evocation of the actual has given way to an insouciant light-touch mark-making of dash and line, paint scribble and feathery touch, near diaphanous mistiness and the most evocative adumbrations of field colour, tonal greens and brilliant yellows, the all-eye-embracing blueness of the sea as a boat pitches.
ART CRITIC MEL GOODING
