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RESPECTED Scottish artist Gordon Mitchell is to hold his first major solo exhibition in Edinburgh for five years.
Mitchell, whose last Edinburgh solo show was the inaugural exhibition at the members’ gallery in the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA), said he was delighted to be showing in his home city once again.
The exhibition will open to the public at the Morningside Gallery on April 1 and run until April 16 with 39 of Mitchell’s works on show.
Now 70-years-old, Mitchell has had a long and successful career as an artist exhibiting in the past with the likes of Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston.
He is an elected Member of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour (1997), the Royal Glasgow Institute (1998) and the Royal Scottish Academy (2005) and is noted for both his virtuosic hyper-realism and rich iconography.
“People call me a surrealist but I am not really,” said Mitchell. “My paintings are a bit strange but because I am quite a realistic painter I make things that are unbelievable believable. They are quite narrative – there’s often a story about them.”
His ideas often come from a story he has read in a newspaper and are sometimes quite political but often he just sees an image in his head and wants to paint it.
“I start painting and see what happens,” he said.
Born in 1952, Mitchell grew up in a housing scheme on the south side of Edinburgh, the son of a policeman.
Even as a child he didn’t seem to require much sleep and when his mother sent him up to his bedroom in the early evening he would just draw and paint.
“I was always good at drawing,” he said. “My father used to draw things he was about to create, like fireplaces, so he was quite technically gifted and my grandfather was a signwriter so I suppose I had this inbuilt inclination to do draw in a neat, orderly way.
“I’ve also got a kind of photographic memory so I can look at something and recreate it later on. That is why my paintings are quite figurative and quite neat. I would love to be an expressionist painter that hurls paint at canvasses but I smashed two vertebrae when I was young so I sit down to paint all the time.”
Top of the art class at school, Mitchell continued to win prizes at Edinburgh College of Art, winning a postgraduate scholarship when he finished. He then went into teaching but continued to paint and finally went full time as an artist in 1989.
This proved to be a good decision as he was quickly offered a solo exhibition during Glasgow’s Mayfest at Roger Billcliffe’s gallery in the city. This won an award for the best exhibition in Mayfest with most of Mitchell’s paintings selling fast.
Mitchell has continued to stage an exhibition with Billcliffe every two years and jokes that everyone in Glasgow has two or three of his paintings.
For the past 12 years he has exhibited at the Portland Gallery in London and is a self-confessed workaholic who is usually in his studio before 7am.
However, he has still found time to become involved in many artist organisations, holding the post of president of Visual Arts Scotland, SAAV (VAS) and the Scottish Arts Club.
He was also convener of the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts for six years and his affiliation and reputation in the city has led many people to think he is Glaswegian even though he was born in Edinburgh.
At the moment, Mitchell is president of the Scottish Artists Benevolent Association which gives grants to Scottish artists or their dependants suffering from ill health.
His work is held in major institutional collections including the Scottish Arts Council, Royal Bank of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh.
Mitchell said he was looking forward to the show at the Morningside Gallery.
“I’m really proud to be having a one man show in Edinburgh again,” he said. I’m pleased to be showing at the Morningside Gallery as it is a lovely gallery and I hope the exhibition will attract a new audience.”
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