f-Holes! – Alasdair Wallace

A project show of work-in-progress, a turning of the studio compost. New work, old work, new work based on old sketches, old paintings newly reworked.

My paintings usually accumulate themselves over several extended periods, sometimes over many years. Differing time scales are integral to my working method. In my studio there are always many works-in-progress which overlap or overtake each other, always in some kind of conversation. Some pieces can stall for a long time until they ‘make sense’ again alongside newer work. There are plenty of tangents and capricious forays along the way but somehow everything is drawn back into what feels like a continuous body of work in some slow elliptical orbit.

My images are invented in the studio and within the processes and materials of painting but the initial stimuli often come from oblique observations of observed objects and situations. The kind of everyday things that consistently snag my vision and stay in my mind as an image. I enjoy painting indirectly, from memory. I enjoy the conjuring of an image, the ’scrying’ in paint to fix something which can carry an emblematic quality but without portentousness. Intuitively I seek imagery which retains ambiguous possibilities and can live in the imagination of the viewer.

Alasdair Wallace studied at The Glasgow School of Art from 1987 to 1991. On graduation he travelled to Italy with the John Kinross Scholarship from the Royal Scottish Academy. He has received numerous other awards since then including the Guthrie Medal from the RSA, the Walter Scott Award from the RSW, The Armour Award from the RGI. In 2018 he received the W Gordon Smith Award at the annual exhibition of the Society Of Scottish Artists in Edinburgh. In the summer of 2019, Glasgow Print Studio hosted Wallace’s largest solo show to date and the first in his hometown of Glasgow in two decades. He continues to live and work in Glasgow and exhibits in London, Scotland and internationally. In 2017 his work was included in ‘INK’, an exhibition curated from the archives of Glasgow Print Studio by AHM (Sam Ainsley, David Harding and Sandy Moffat). Wallace exhibits regularly in the SSA and RSA annual exhibitions in Edinburgh and in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London. Other group shows include the Lowlands Artists Collective project at Glasgow Print Studio 2017 and at Oxford House, Glasgow 2021; ’The Art of Scotland’s Political Reawakening’ at North Kelvin College, Glasgow; ‘The River Runs Through It’ at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum as well as several survey shows at The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, London. His works are held in a number of collections including: The Walter Scott Collection, The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, Cromarty Arts Trust, The Royal Scottish Academy, North Lanarkshire Council, Grampian Hospitals Art Trust and The City Of Glasgow College.