Colin Middleton MBE RHA RUA (1910-1983)
Tree in the Wind (c.1973)
Oil on board, 61 x 61cm (24 x 24'')
Signed

Provenance: With David Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, label verso

 

In the early 1970s, Colin...

Colin Middleton MBE RHA RUA (1910-1983)
Tree in the Wind (c.1973)
Oil on board, 61 x 61cm (24 x 24'')
Signed

Provenance: With David Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, label verso

 

In the early 1970s, Colin Middleton embarked on a number of journeys that became very significant in his work, first of all a six month trip around the world, with a lengthy and productive period staying with his daughter, Alison, in Perth, and then the first of several visits to his daughter Jane, in Barcelona.　

Although Tree in the Wind does not seem related to a specific place, and appears likely to be drawn from an Irish landscape, it has an unexpectedly surrealist quality that was more broadly sparked off in Middleton’s work by this intense period of travelling in 1972 and 1973. The prepared surface of the board and the particular language of repeated shapes and marks that Middleton evolved as signifiers and shorthand in his landscape paintings in the 1960s, are used in a less structured manner than usual, to create a sense of disruptive energy that is increased by the jarring unevenness of the horizon line to right and left.

In the tree, Middleton creates a form that almost seems to prefigure his own Westerness series from later in the decade, in which figures seem to emerge from the physical substance of the landscape. While Middleton’s visual language remains distinctively individual, it remains true to the specific nature of the landscape or the moment it records, and always retains its direct expressiveness.

Dickon Hall, April 2026

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