Duncan McCormick makes paintings that are pointedly and deliberately upbeat and optimistic. His chosen subjects are, as he says, “like long-remembered daydreams”: memories of childhood holidays at Salcombe Bay on the Devon coast become more redolent of California and the Mediterranean; Scottish mountain landscapes under snow are re-imagined as Alpine scenery; and deserted streets and empty gardens are bathed in permanent summer sunshine.
Starting with a thin, flat application of pigment, McCormick applies the quickly drying acrylic paint swiftly and assuredly, maintaining the sense of spontaneity that is essential to his work – the point, as he says, is “getting the colour onto the canvas”. The riotous, luminous tones enhance the dream-like quality of his work.
These paintings are part of McCormick’s conscious response to the onset of Covid and lockdown. Having married and become a father of twins, he and his wife had moved from the London suburbs to rural North Shropshire. With his isolation redoubled by the outbreak of Covid, his subject-matter moved from complex narratives, laden with symbolism, to more simplistic and deliberately escapist scenes, and instead of the oil paints that he had applied in numerous layers he sought the immediacy of painting in acrylics.
McCormick talks freely about the influence on his art of many artists, some of whom he reveres and some of whom remain an unconscious (but still acknowledged) influence. David Hockney falls into the latter category; McCormick apparently actively disliked his work in his youth before coming to understand and appreciate its long term influence on his own painting. McCormick also cites Howard Hodgkin for his absolute sincerity and mastery of colour; Frank Auerbach who he has always admired for his immediacy; the Irish painters Louis Le Brocquy and Jack Butler Yeats are longstanding personal favourites; while Peter Doig has been a source of inspiration since seeing the Channel 4 documentary on him in 1993.
Duncan McCormick was born in Birmingham in 1977 and attended Hallfield Preparatory School and then boarded at Ellesmere College in Shropshire. Showing an especial talent for art he did a foundation year at Bournville College, Birmingham, and later took a degree in art and drama at St Martin’s College, Lancaster. Thereafter he alternated between devoting time to his art and the need to earn money, working in the theatre in his early days and latterly as a professional print-maker with his own screen-printing press. Today McCormick’s paintings hang in some of the most important private and corporate collections – in 2018 Morgan Stanley commissioned a series of 11 paintings for the offices in Canary Wharf - while in the past year his paintings have achieved notable prices at auction, where bidders have included collectors from Taiwan, Turkey, Hong Kong, Europe and America.