The Burning Heart: Barry McGlashan

The John Martin gallery is delighted to announce a new exhibition by Scottish painter Barry McGlashan who has produced an extraordinary group of paintings exploring the artist and his studio – The Burning Heart.

At the heart of this body of work lies a curiosity about the inner sanctum of the artist’s creativity and often the most private of places: the artist’s studio. McGlashan spends much of his time immersed in his own studio and contemplating the almost spiritual connection he feels to this creative space led him to imagine the studios of other artists across time. Bottecelli pauses at his drawing board with the shadows of Dante and Virgil looking on, the eggs broken ready to be mixed for tempera. Philip Guston smokes feverishly in a starkly lit space surrounded by canvases. The tan brogues of Henry Moore are just visible behind a table from where he gazes at a series of maquettes lining the studio walls. These scenarios are constructed from fragments of evidence he has researched and observed but also through mutual experiment and striving for the perfect painting.

These imaginings invite us into the private world of the artist, revealing much of the concerns and creative practices of McGlashan himself. Where many of us see only a finished masterpiece, viewed upon a gallery wall, he imagines the individual experiences, processes and creative environments of the artists who made them. This concern with creative context leads McGlashan to consider what lies beneath the surface of the finished work, the unseen hours of toil hidden beneath every layer of paint.