Enjoy the brochure that accompanies McAlpine Miller's debut exhibition at Castle Fine Art, Bruton Street.
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Scottish-born and a graduate of Glasgow School of Art, McAlpine Miller displays all the characteristics of his home nation – tenacity, determination and a wry sense of humour. ‘Unlike a lot of artists I am a painter who owns up to living in 2013 – I do live in the real world and my art reflects this’ he comments. He freely admits that he has been toiling at the coalface of the art world for the last twenty years and has only recently won the critical recognition he deserves. Here we proudly present ‘Altered Images’, McAlpine Miller’s beautifully executed debut exhibition of never-before-seen original art with Washington Green Fine Art. A distinctive and striking collection, featuring stylish, cool ‘supermodel-esque’ women, superimposed over brightly coloured cartoons, in an illusionary world of comic book characters. Taking the idea of the central figure and revealing an alternative opinion of that character, this collection hopes to expose the ongoing nature of the ‘transparent life’. Beauty is only ever skin- deep and our ability to hide behind the façade has become something of a 21st century art form. Highly celebrated and widely identified beauty hides the ugliness of our reality; war, hatred, anger and religion make up our every day. These realities combine to challenge us and perhaps create a greatly unstable world. By uncovering our real issues we discover ourselves. Undressed to the world, yet layered to the world. The illusion continues...
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FOREWORD by Estelle Lovatt
It is so exciting to see McAlpine Miller’s latest artwork.
At first sight I wondered what it was, exactly, that McAlpine Miller’s newest artworks remind me of. Then it hit me. It’s the high-tech look. In them I see something of both the very modern and the nostalgic, in sync. It is the merger of today’s science of technology with the prowess of ‘live’ cartoon action that is at the heart of his new body of artwork. And it is the clarity of these forms of his, both human and animated, that invite me ‘in’ to his frame, to be a participant. As if in a play on the stage, his actors are framed in the scene through architectural elements that challenge today’s 3D space but, realising the art history of centuries past, it is as if you’re looking at a Roman Fresco that’s up to date with 3D Projection Mapping, but also stereographic 4D. The similarities between his traditionally-painted canvases and today’s Social Media micro- electronics are what integrate his pictures. It’s as if waves of electrical quantum photons (light) take the place of both the traditional Old Master’s Classical or the Modernist’s Impressionistic prism, on level pegging. By taking the cartoons of yesterday and brightening them up with the cartoon colours of today, his sense of hue is as sophisticated as a Renaissance painter’s in softening natural looking skin tints that appear to be blended with today’s CGI pixelated palette. From traditional looking Antique White to Saddle Brown he pulls his visionary-art right bang-up- to-date through colours that are so .... of the ‘now’; of today. Walk up any High Street, look in the fashion-chain store’s windows and you’ll see all the models dressed in the same lively, exotic, lush Pantone colours that McAlpine Miller squeezes from emerald green to chilli powder pepper red, canary yellow, tangerine tango, hot pink and peach puff. He uses colours that look as though they’re on a video display but they’re not, they’re on his canvas. Here is an artist who really understands what tomorrow’s Social Media is all about. His treatment of pictorial space is brilliant through the combination of multiple spaces and pictorial surfaces ‘released’ (painted) on ‘multiple platforms’ (picture planes) with an apparent Pixar style of animation about them. In eye-catching overlapping of graphics therein lays the McAlpine Miller Modernity.
All the things that David Hockney can do with an iPad in terms of colour, collaged composition and cut-and-paste layering, McAlpine Miller takes full circle by doing New School in an Old
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School style all, incredibly, with his oil paints! McAlpine Miller is taking Hockney a step further, by taking it a step backwards. Being far more complex, with traditional oil paints. His paintings have a 3D look about them. Seemingly composed through the employment of graphical cropped images edited under a CGI mouse-move, but it is all done with his sable paintbrush not the magic wand of Photoshop. With this, he paints pictures that connect with you, today. McAlpine Miller is one of the best artists of our time, painting about our time, in the best way I’ve seen. This is how he is changing the course of Art History - much in the same way that Da Vinci, Monet and Picasso did. The art of tomorrow starts here ... Constantly looking around him at our everyday, McAlpine Miller has a set of references that are totally different to other painters. It’s as if, he says, ‘these realities combine to challenge us and perhaps create a greatly unstable world. By uncovering our real issues we discover ourselves. Undressed to the world, yet layered to the world. The illusion continues...’ It appears as if he has tagged all this in Pixar animation, transforming, for example, the imagery of Stan Lee, founder of Marvel Comics, and Hanna-Barbera of the 50s and 60s, with Steve Jobs and George Lucas’s Pixar Animation Studios of today. As in, ‘Taking the Trash Out’, where Hanna-Barbera is alive in Hoagy’s Alley wearing this new summer season’s high wedge sandal. It is not just about taking the trash (rubbish) out, it is about the unwanted material – the waste – as the leftovers of our forgotten civilization, about to be recycled for posterity into today’s computer jargon of the ‘trash’ of the PC world. As he points out, by, ‘Taking the idea of the central figure and revealing an alternative opinion of that character, this show hopes to reveal the ongoing nature of the transparent life. Beauty is only ever skin-deep and our ability to hide behind the facade has become something of a 21st century art form.’ McAlpine Miller achieves all this through his all-action comic book colour palette painted with his idiosyncratic, painterly, Old Master skill, together with the industrial precision of a commercial graphic illustrator, over, the prominence of what I’d say is surely his own, Social Media edit look. All blended with Chiaroscurism’s use of shade and light. Unique to McAlpine Miller, there are two kinds of light in his paintings. The light of day, where he makes everything known and available. And the internal, spiritual, light which is when he paints all that which we can only just about imagine in our dreams. I’d be happy to live in a McAlpine Miller picture.
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To help you, he splits his multi-focus Cubist compositions into single-viewpoints of flat, fixed, fragmented planes that sculpt his storyboard characters over overlapping perspectives; exposing them as collaged Pop Art mass culture, that looks physically disturbed by an Expressionistic revelation of images, through to an Abstract subsistence of layer-upon-layer of veiled-on oil paint revealing, informing and identifying a connection that is pure lifestyle. This is all perfectly clear as McAlpine Miller’s wholesome flesh-and-blood bikini-babes retreat to an ever-eternal return that connects the past to the present, and even the future. There is also something of the conservative, I’d say spiritual, in his compositions. From the triptych, ‘Three Times a Lady’, surfaces the early Christian art formatting popular for church altar paintings from the Middle Ages. McAlpine Miller’s canvas is rich in a visual legacy enabling him to project his content-aware prominence, found only in today’s world of celebrity-worship icon advertising. Amidst all this he uses highly distinctive, iconic, 1950s Americana which he blends with Romanticism. From the portrayal of the beautiful Movie Star from the Golden-olden- good-old-days-gone-by, off-of-the-Silver-Screen, to today’s multicoloured computer-animated, backlit fluorescent light of the iPad, it’s all pure cinema.
McAlpine Miller is both the painter and public entertainer that, if Jessica Rabbit were alive today, I’m sure would be the artist whom she’d want to be framed by.
©Estelle Lovatt FRSA
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Taking The Trash Out Original Oil on Canvas | 97 cm x 71 cm
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Spot Me Now Original Oil on Canvas | 127 cm x 96 cm
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Hats Off To The Leaders Original Oil on Canvas | 142 cm x 100 cm
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Attention! On Your Feet! Original Oil on Canvas | 142 cm x 100 cm
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Teacher's Pet Sketch Pencil on Paper | 100 cm x 54 cm
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Teacher's Pet Original Oil on Canvas | 152 cm x 77 cm
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A War Babe Of Our Time Original Oil on Canvas | 86 cm x 64 cm
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Taking On The Dare Original Oil on Canvas | 102 cm x 72 cm
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Here To Save The Day Original Oil on Canvas | 102 cm x 72 cm
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A Typical Feminine Trait Original Oil on Canvas | 102 cm x 72 cm
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Three Times A Lady - Triptych Original Oil on Canvas | Left/Right Panels 118 cm x 97 cm, Middle Panel 118 cm x 81 cm
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Woman Of The Night Original Oil on Canvas | 102 cm x 72 cm
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Flaunting Oneself In The Face Of Progression Original Oil on Canvas | 91 cm x 61 cm
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Leader Of The Gang Original Oil on Canvas | 102 cm x 76 cm
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Salute To The Captain Original Oil on Canvas | 102 cm x 66 cm
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Sunbather To Fear Original Oil on Canvas | 102 cm x 72 cm
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Oh My Gun Has Gone Original Oil on Canvas | 107 cm x 80 cm
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Leaning Against The Automobile Original Oil on Canvas | 78 cm x 56 cm
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The Shirt Off Her Back Original Oil on Canvas | 86 cm x 64 cm
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The Power From Within Original Oil on Canvas | 117 cm x 86 cm
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All The Fun Of The Circus Original Oil on Canvas | 86 cm x 64 cm
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Metamorphosis Original Oil on Canvas | 102 cm x 92 cm
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True Holiday Spirit Original Oil on Canvas | 86 cm x 64 cm
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Eastern Delight Original Oil on Canvas | 76 cm x 54 cm
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Lean On Me Original Oil on Canvas | 81 cm x 56 cm
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Savage Sketch Pencil on Paper | 86 cm x 56 cm
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Savage Defender Original Oil on Canvas | 127 cm x 96 cm
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Hats Of II Original Oil on Canvas | 127 cm x 54 cm
Hats Off I Original Oil on Canvas | 127 cm x 54 cm
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Hats Off Sketch Pencil on Paper | 100 cm x 54 cm
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Ungentlemanly Intensions II Original Oil on Canvas | 127 cm x 64 cm
Ungentlemanly Intensions I Original Oil on Canvas | 127 cm x 64 cm
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Feeling The Pain Original Oil on Canvas | 70 cm x 60 cm
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REVEALED
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Sunshine Rays From A Far-Away Land Original Oil on Canvas | 92 cm x 66 cm
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Resistance Is Futile Original Oil on Canvas | 92 cm x 66 cm
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My Life Is Mayhem Original Oil on Canvas | 92 cm x 66 cm
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Stretching The Boundaries Original Oil on Canvas | 92 cm x 66 cm
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ALTERED IMAGES Signed Limited Edition Graphics
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Taking The Trash Out Limited Edition Giclée of 95 | Image Size 28” x 20” Limited Edition Boxed Canvas of 95 | Canvas Size 40” x 29”
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Spot Me Now Limited Edition Giclée of 95 | Image Size 28” x 20” Limited Edition Boxed Canvas of 95 | Canvas Size 40” x 29”
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Attention! On Your Feet! Limited Edition Giclée of 95 | Image Size 28” x 20” Limited Edition Boxed Canvas of 95 | Canvas Size 40” x 29”
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Hats Off To The Leaders Limited Edition Giclée of 95 | Image Size 28” x 20” Limited Edition Boxed Canvas of 95 | Canvas Size 40” x 29”
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BIOGRAPHICAL HIGHLIGHTS
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Biographical Highlights
2013 A new collaboration with London Fashion House Lulu & Co on a series of designs. Launch Autumn/Winter 2013 2012 Artist in Residence at: The Savoy Hotel, London Various exhibitions at: The Hay Hill Gallery, London Exhibition at: State of the Arts Gallery, Hong Kong Confirmed worldwide publishing deal with: Washington Green Fine Art
2000 Exhibition at: Catto Gallery, London
1999 Exhibition at: Catto Gallery, London Exhibition at: Duncan Miller Fine Art Exhibition at: Glasgow Art Fair
1998 Commissioned by: BBC, Bravissimo, McVities, Persil, Renault, Virgin
2011 Various Solo and Group Exhibitions at: Art & Escape, London Exhibition at: The Hay Hill Gallery, London Exhibition at: State of the Arts Gallery, Hong Kong 2010 Exhibition at: The Hay Hill Gallery, London Exhibition at: Cross My Art, London 2009 Co-founded art gallery: Art & Escape, London Exhibition at: Kings Road Gallery, London Exhibition at: Affordable Art Fair, London
1997 Commissioned by BBC Exhibition at: Gagliardi Gallery, London
1996 Shortlisted for: Provost Award at Kelvingrove Art Galleries & Museums 1995 Exhibition at: Connought Brown, London Exhibition at: Duncan Miller Fine Art, New York 1994 Exhibition at: Connought Brown, London Exhibition at: Duncan Miller Fine Art, New York Exhibition at: Ruth O’Hara Gallery, New York 1993 Exhibition at: Art Bank, Glasgow Exhibition at: Connought Brown, London Exhibition at: Chicago Art Fair Exhibition at: Gagliardi Gallery
2008 Private sale: 10 works to British collector
2007 Commissioned by: Decoratum Gallery Exhibition at: Charlotte Street Gallery, London Exhibition at: Catto Gallery, London
Exhibition at: Glasgow Art Fair Exhibition at: Dublin Art Fair
2004 Commissioned by: Paul McCartney 2004 European Tour
1992 Exhibition at: Art Bank, Glasgow
1991 Exhibition at: Trinity Gallery, London Exhibition at: Poleski Gallery, Italy
Exhibition at: Glasgow Art Fair Exhibition at: Dublin Art Fair
2003 Exhibition at: Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London
1990 BA Honours: Painting and Drawing, Glasgow School of Art
2002 Exhibition at: Glasgow Art Fair Exhibition at: Dublin Art Fair Exhibition at: New Contemporaries, Business Design Centre, London Exhibition at: Catto Gallery, London
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The images contained within this literature are an artistic representation of the collection. To best experience our art, we recommend you contact your local gallery to arrange a viewing. © Washington Green 2013. The content of this brochure is subject to copyright and no part can be reproduced without prior permission. washingtongreen.co.uk Price £25.00
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