The 10 Years Story of 'Timeless Purple'

Richard Strachan shares with us the insightful journey of one of his most meaningful pieces, currently hanging at the gallery.

"Circumstance, chance and the journey are all natural considerations in painting and happen-chance has conspired especially fortuitously in my most recent and oldest work 'Timeless Purple'. The piece was created for a showcase exhibition of large works for the Cardiff gallery Oriel Canvas in 2005. The show was sponsored by the Arts Council of Wales and provided works which went on to win a national prize (the Aspect Prize).

The body of work was a series of five, high gloss, five foot square paintings, this was intended as a human scale which would reflect the viewer in their entirety. This way, the viewer becomes a literal part of the picture and is forced to consider their position metaphorically to the architectural landscape described. In this case the mundane frame of a door is celebrated as a transcendental space through nebulous glazes of colour, built in thick gloss layers, giving a physical quantity to the illusion. The pallet of the show was primary and saturated, taking the space further out of the ordinary as an expressionist investigation into colour.

Shortly after the Cardiff exhibition, I returned to Edinburgh and took a studio in the Out of the Blue complex in Portobello. In the chaos of the move, the purple painting became buried in the store room, and while the others were widely exhibited, this painting did not resurface until approximately ten years later, when I was forced to evacuate the space. Primarily based on two perspective planes, this work, is an elemental investigation into the relationship between two surfaces. Shapes, cubist representation and exploded mirror image, are described in acrylic paint as a base for the painting, while the play of light, rendered in gloss, contributes to a further fracturing of spatial levels.

The painting was made using spray equipment, firstly, to create an acrylic ground coat and subsequently, layers of pigment suspended in a clear gloss paint. Dulux use this clear base for their dark colours but it is a thick oil based substance and subject to yellowing, therefore it has to be used sparingly. It is likely that a combination of factors, including an earnest use of paint, the instability of purple as a colour, the place the painting had been stored and/or the fact it was wrapped, resulted in the painting turning brown. This is the brown of aged paint competing with an acrylic colour field of plastic purple and creates a sensory colour as illusionary as any I have aspired to create. The areas that remain purple, where no gloss paint was applied, give a clue to the history of the work and by luck, are the perfect compliment to brown.

Time is clearly present in this painting but in this instance, conspired favourably and must be  embraced in the same painterly spirit as I would the happenings, chance and logistics that dictate a day as a time period. There is also an existential poetry present in that the painting lives within the same time period of the studio as a space. The encompassing theme in my work is one of a simpatico between expression and structure and the reworking of this piece is a positive stance on flexibility, reaction and adaptation during the period I occupied this space. Time and space are key to this paintings journey and something exciting happened which seemed to insist that I should retain revisit and restore the panel.

I had worked on the painting in 2005 and it continued to evolve as influenced by its environment. It seemed important to embrace this process by revisiting the composition and assert an ownership over the process again. I chose to recreate two areas of the painting. The shape of these areas is not arbitrary but considered in respect to both, the decisions I was making at the original time of painting and insights I have gained since. Both shapes appear on the original perspective plane but one represents a new position in space.

Environment and moment have been allowed to dictate the flat red colour of these shapes and to further root the painting into history, by acknowledging the circumstances of its reworking. I am fortunate that friends were around to help and share the space in Portobello, and as I picked through the final jobs, we played table tennis. The playful spirit of the game, and the manufacture red of the bat seemed to articulate perfectly the end of the period spent in the studio for both, me and the painting. As a work that spans my entire career as a professional artist, ‘Timeless Purple’ has become a symbolic key that articulates my personal journey as a painter." 

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