Barry McGlashan (RSA) Elect was born in Aberdeen in 1974. He studied Drawing and Painting at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, graduating in 1996. He returned to the Painting Department at Gray’s in 1998 and taught there until 2005 when he left to pursue painting full-time.
His paintings take place between the memories of places visited, old photographs, passages from literature, and remembered scenes from films - with the constant being his interest in the materiality of paint and surface.
‘All these truths and fictions become mixed in painterly distortion and the resulting mutability of a remembered image or event is shared as subject and object. There is a fascinating relationship between the visual of the original source and its changing representation over the intervening time spent painting in the studio. I find an innate beauty in that, like the fragility of recollection… Each painting is a sum of time spent, just as we could be said to be the sum of our memories. Each element, each mark is a layer of time… But somewhere in the centre of all that thinking and making runs a seam of common intention: a desire to explore and evoke shared experience.’
He regularly exhibits both nationally and internationally with examples of his work being held in numerous private and public collections. He has been the recipient of many awards throughout his career and in 2019, was invited to exhibit a special work in the Rubenshuis museum, within the historic studio of Peter Paul Rubens, in Antwerp. Barry McGlashan now lives and works in Edinburgh.
