Andrew Rucklidge: Edge of the Wild Country

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Andrew Rucklidge, "A Tale of The Ragged Mountains," 2020

oil, acrylic and egg tempera on tonned gessoed linen, 26" x 50"

This selection of paintings by Andrew Rucklidge continues his depiction of contested landscapes. Colours continuously shift in and out of their descriptive function, are they depicting mountains and clouds or are they applied in a purely abstract way, letting the observer bring what they will to them.

"I started making handmade oil, distemper, egg tempera, encaustic and watercolour paint about twenty five years ago. Initially I was researching ways of continuing to paint with oil while eliminating toxic thinners and fast-drying mediums entirely from my practice. I became a student of Max Doerners’ The Materials of the Artist and quickly learned that many underpainting techniques could provide innovative creative options while also leading my work away from industrial readymade paint and into more uncharted heterogeneous mixtures.

In the case of my paintings, the initial condition is an explosive drop of liquid pigmented handmade paint, and while subsequent marks harness that element of chance, they are continuously re-recorded by mechanically moving liquid oil/pigment over them with a hard metal edge. In this respect, they become indexical in nature (with index defined as a unique trace or precipitate of an event or chance occurrence) and share more similarities with, for example, photography or wind and a weather vane than with iconic painting. This becomes another layer of disruption in that the marks become very resistant to decoding by employing extensive glazing and veneering in the finish." Andrew Rucklidge

Andrew Rucklidge lives and works in Toronto, where he also teaches in the Department of Painting and Drawing at OCADU. He received his MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art in London 2003 and since then has shown internationally at The New Contemporaries in London, Store Gallery in London, John Connelly Presents in New York, Frieze Art Fair, Zoo Art Fair, The Armoury, NADA Miami, Volta Basel, Art Chicago, Berliner Liste, Art Cologne, DC Dusseldorf as well as the Scope Art fairs and Art Toronto. In 2013, he received both the K.M. Hunter Visual Artist Award and the Laura Ciruls Painting Award.