Ingleby | Brandon Logan | Dog Rose

It’s not often that an artist appears with a genuinely new way of making abstract art, but Brandon Logan (b.1996) did precisely this with his degree show from Edinburgh College of Art in 2019, and just four years later he has cemented his growing reputation with his first museum show - at the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, in the Orkney Islands where he grew up, and where he has since returned to live and work.

Logan’s ‘paintings’, as he describes them, have a sculptural presence, hanging away from the wall on raised batons. They acknowledge the place that he’s from, finding their colours in the streets of Stromness and the Orkney landscape, and nodding to the islands’ rich traditions of weaving and tapestry, but as he says:

‘I always think of them as paintings because I have a specific interest in what paint can do. I’m obsessed with the simple transformation of fluid, liquid colour, to solid, that can take place in my hands. It is like magic to me every time’.

It is a distinctive process which involves the flooding, sealing and fusing of warps of string using the gradual application of layers of paint. The string support allows for colour to be suspended within, resulting in works with an open, fretted structure and an innate delicacy.

His first exhibition at Ingleby builds on the body of work exhibited at the Pier and presents what the writer Cal Flyn has described as ‘a strangely affecting practice’, that somehow connects the history of minimal abstraction with a sensibility born of, and belonging to, the Scottish islands.

"I am aware that my works are sometimes referred to in the context of traditions of weaving but my notion of them as paintings has only got stronger, and with that the preoccupation of colour and an idea of it as solid, bodily material. So I don’t tend to think of the works in relation to tapestry or weaving, as they are skills I simply don’t possess. Poetically, however, George Mackay Brown’s ‘An Orkney Tapestry’ deals with time as less of a linearity and more as a cloth, with fine threads running in separate directions to ultimately form a densely woven history of the islands."

- BL

"Having grown up in Orkney, and continued living there into adulthood, it’s difficult not to be aware of the same atmospherics of light and colour upon water and land which have been utterly central to other Orcadians whose work I admire - Sylvia Wishart, Margaret Tait, George Mackay Brown."

- BL

While the most immediately clear thing a painter might draw upon is the colour, which arrives in the islands in strange quantities and qualities, I’m influenced too by the cycles which dictate that arrival, and much of daily life with it - weather, seasons. Colour in that sense become a bodily thing which we receive in doses determined by the turning of the year."

- BL

"The titles themselves draw upon personal happenings, memories, thoughts about certain people and places, desires, fears. They are always personal, and there is a worry sometimes that by assigning pieces of language to works which I insist are abstract, I am pointing towards representation. Some titles are tongue-in-cheek, and alliteration often creeps in. They are separate things ultimately, so I try not to worry and allow room for play in that area, if the title was lost but the work remained it would be just the same work in the end."

- BL