Bridget Macdonald is an artist capable of integrating autobiography and myth to create subtle images that are suffused with quiet mystery. Large scale charcoal drawings which first attracted the attention of museum curators and collectors, have been joined by luminous landscape paintings. Together they form a body of work in which she continues to explore her chosen themes. These have developed from the figure, to the figure in the landscape, to the landscape itself and its place in our imagination. Her subject matter often has poetic sources and the link between literature and the visual arts is a characteristic feature of Macdonald’s work.
Over the years she has used the classical literary concept of the pastoral as a framework on which to build her particular way of working with landscape. She is interested in the idealization of the countryside which is part of our culture and has its sources in ancient texts such as the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil. Her own farming background and present life in the country around the Malvern Hills are blended with references to the artists who were so influential on how the rural scene is depicted: Claude, Poussin, Samuel Palmer and others to make an allusive and resonant mix of the real and the imagined.
As Sheila McGregor wrote in a catalogue essay for the exhibition Inland at Worcester City Art Gallery in 2006, ‘It is the tension between things observed and things remembered, between the immediacy of a specific visual stimulus and a process of retrospective distillation, that gives her work its power’.
The lighthouse at St. Catherine’s Point on the Isle of Wight, which lay just beyond the farm where she was born, is a constantly recurring subject, as is the orchard which she and her husband have planted in the beautiful and fertile Suckley Valley on the borders of Herefordshire and Worcestershire.
Formally her work reflects her abiding interest in the art of the Italian Renaissance and she employs certain techniques absorbed from her study of that period – in the paintings thin glazes create deep pools of shadow, and contrast with light filled skies; in the drawings the feeling for light and dark is typically achieved through the use of charcoal with its range from velvety black through silvery mid tones to the contrasting white of the paper. Still lives appear at intervals, mostly of blossom and fruit from her orchard but also as a means of mastering another traditional genre.
Born in 1943 on the Isle of Wight, Bridget Macdonald trained in Fine Art from 1983 to 1987. Since then she has built up a career which has been marked by major solo exhibitions in public galleries such as Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Worcester City Art Gallery, Derby Art Gallery, The Rotunda Gallery at Birmingham University, and QuayArts on the Isle of Wight. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Worcester City Art Gallery and the House of Lords at 1 Millbank.
In 2016 her exhibition This Green Earth at Worcester City Art Gallery featured her works hung alongside paintings, etchings and drawings by Claude Lorrain, Samuel Palmer and Peter Paul Rubens borrowed from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and Manchester Art Gallery.
In 2020 she exhibited at the Courtyard Arts Centre in Hereford, in what amounted to an extensive retrospective. In 2027 a solo exhibition is planned at Southampton City Art Gallery, further details nearer the time.
She has shown regularly at Art First since its inception and for these exhibitions and others, visit the listed exhibition section.