Dr. Barbara RAE CBE RA
"RAINBOW" 1990's
Mixed media on canvas
6ft x 7ft

The Richmond Hill Gallery Ltd

15A Wish Ward, Rye TN31 7DH
T: 07540 222603

info@therichmondhillgallery.com
www.therichmondhillgallery.com

"Rainbow"
Mixed media on canvas
6 ft x 7 ft 72 x 84 inches
Provenance
“Rainbow” from Rae’s Arizona collection. 1990s
1999 Exhibited at Barbara Rae Painted Desert Exhibition Art First London
2000 Exhibited Scottish Gallery Barbara Rae Arizona show
2006 Richmond Hill Gallery Rae solo show
Previous owner Marianna Penturo
2016 sold to current owner
features in the important Book by Lund Humphreys major works "Barbara Rae"
on page 110 –111 .
£ POA
please contact the gallery for further information

Incantatory colour, richly painted surfaces and bold compositional strategies are distinguishing features of Rae's work. For years her adventurous spirit drew her to Arizona's Painted Desert, different in every way to the saturated,wind-driven coastlines of the Irish painting. The visual drama of the Painted Desert provided her with the change to work close up to the earth. She explored the mysterious narrative of archaic man in the form of ancient pictograms and petroglyphs etched onto rocks, while simultaneously standing back to convey the intensities of light and colour in the landscape as a whole. This Irish/American landscape tangent is the subject of Barbara Rae's first exhibition in New York. - Art First 1999
Rae was born in Falkirk, Scotland in 1943 and identifies strongly with Scottish art and artists. In the interview with Andrew Lambirth which opens the monograph she cites the influence of Glasgow painters Bill Burns and Joan Eardley, and the liberating effect of moving from Edinburgh to Glasgow in 1975 to teach at Glasgow School of Art. ‘If Edinburgh is a bit like Florence, then Glasgow is Venice. There’s an opulence and appreciation of materials and gesture and mark in Glasgow, whereas Edinburgh is much more considered, draughtsman like and quiet.’
Despite her Scottishness, the appeal of the work is its universality. Scotland is her home and her departure point,but she’s a consummate traveller, whether art, journeys through France,Ireland, Arizona, Malibu, Italy, South Africa and Spain. You sense in the sumptuous paintings her enjoyment of new environments, her studied response to a particular light, her determination to capture a newly discovered landscape before it fades. And then the subtle creative process of abstracting the landscape into a work of art which revels in ‘the pure pleasure of painting’.It is ‘reality transfigured’,

" I ride shotgun on Barbara's extended excursions into the badlands of the Southwest because that's what they are: dangerous places. The narrow endless side roads are forbidding. They seem to glide across the desert scrub until they climb up to the sky. The landscape whispers with Shamanic chants,glistens with shards of ancient pottery, and weeps ruins of failed settlements. Travellers get lost and disappear, a few get murdered. If a crazy panhandler doesn't jump your bones the scorching sun will do all its can to incinerate you. No, sir, the wilderness is no place for an "Anglo's" wheels to breakdown.
There's no place either for politically correct speech. No one here is a "native-American." Freeway tourist traps shout "Indian Jewellery For Sale." Here you are Navajo or Hopi or Apache.
After the monstrous gash of the Grand Canyon, and the well-preserved giant scoop of the Meteor Crater, a catastrophe of interest to scientist and geologist, boring to an artist seeking complicated inspiration, you must look elsewhere for startling surprises, the ones not in travel books.
The places to marvel lie far from designer-trainer tracks, hidden in savage terrain littered with the bleached bones of man and animal: the pueblos of Acona on the edge of New Mexico, the Hopi mesas and the Painted Desert in Arizona, and the Valley of Fire in Nevada. Sit upon a fossilised tree in the fierce heat of the Painted Desert is an other-wordly experience. Around you are carpets of tiny, richly coloured flowers, bright minerals glint on layers of volcanic dust, dinosaur skeletons give up the odd calf bone or vertebra.And the silence is profound. The steady beat of a lone raven's wings on still air sounds like Fate approaching your door. It is life among eons of death.
Renegade dust routes have warnings for names, Bitter Springs, Coyote Creek, Bad Medicine Butte, and Last Chance Water Hole. In those shifting tracks you find the footsteps of Barbara Rae, followed by her very alert companion,and a thousand ghosts."

Dr Barbara Rae CBE, RA, RSA, HRE, HRWS, RGI FRCA, FRSE,HFRIAS,
is recognised internationally as an outstanding colourist.

Recipient of numerous awards, scholarships, and honorary degrees, her work is exhibited in national museums, and public and private collections the world over. Solo exhibitions include Edinburgh during the International Festival of Arts, to New York, from Dublin to Oslo, from London to Chicago to Taos, New Mexico, and to Mexico itself.

Rae was educated at Morrison's Academy, Crieff in Perthshire, Scotland, studying at the Edinburgh College of Art, later lecturing at Charles Rennie Macintosh’s School of Art in Glasgow after some years as a secondary school art teacher.

In subject matter Rae's studies are of a socio-political nature, traces of human existence and artefacts weathered by time and fortune.She records time passing.

She is not interested in topography. Though pattern and structure in the background can be a dividend enriching the composition it's just as often ignored as incorporated in the image. Her point of departure is the history of a place and its people. Abstract expressionist themes are given maximum intensity: ancient Celtic standing stones bracing ominous dark skies;an abandoned farmhouse in famine racked west of Ireland; old ships in modern docks; ancient Anasazi rock art in the remotest parts of the Arizona Desert;sun-blasted vine terraces on a Spanish hillside. She distills the presence of mankind.

The beauty of her art is often subversive, and she is admired by her contemporaries for her ability to convey an image in a single fluid brush stroke. She works with acrylics and collage for her canvases, never oils.

Rae travels the world in search of inspiration, spending weeks meeting the people of a chosen location, researching local history, all before opening a sketchbook. She develops the studies as prints or paintings in her Edinburgh studios. Her output includes portraits, tapestries, ceramics, jewellery, and even a Royal Mail stamp.

She arrived at art school with her creative voice well formed. No artist influenced her. However, there are artists whose work she admires such as Spanish painters Antoni Tàpies and Joan Miró, as well as the celebrated American abstractionist Richard Diebenkorn, whom she met and befriended.

Definitive books on Rae's oeuvre to date are: 'Barbara Rae –Major Work'; 'Barbara Rae – Prints'; and 'Barbara Rae – Sketchbooks', the last two published by the Royal Academy of Arts, London.