We are delighted to have represented Duncan McCormick for the past year, an artist whose paintings are enjoying a great surge in popularity in his mid 40s.
Duncan 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 the sun always shines as it often seems to in people's childhood reminiscences - "those blue remembered hills", "the land of lost content" etc from A E Housman’s ‘A Shropshire Lad’.
Coincidentally (I think) Duncan now lives and paints in rural isolation in North Shropshire. These paintings were originally 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.
