Local artist’s first major solo exhibition
Horizons: Luke McTaggart at Bailiffgate Museum & Gallery
1 November to 11 December 2022 and 10 to 29 January 2023
‘Horizons’, marks Luke McTaggart’s first major solo exhibition and is comprised of a body of work created over the course of the past year. The paintings themselves are derived from a narrow geographical area of just a few square miles around Amble, a landscape that Luke has grown up in and that he still walks and cycles through almost every day. His paintings explore his relationship to this landscape, one dominated by the presence of the area’s huge skies and varied topography.
For Luke, the past year has been marked by a shift away from working outdoors to instead developing a studio-based approach that relies more heavily on memory. He gives a great deal of attention to the composition of his works, and the act of locating a horizon is a compositional problem that he resolves in each painting.
Sometimes he seeks to emphasise a harsh division between ground and sky, such as in ‘End of the Pier’, and other times he obscures it completely in the area’s characteristic hazes and fogs, such as in ‘Yellow Boat in A Fog Bank’. The paintings themselves often undergo radical changes and alterations until he arrives at an image that seems to resonate with his experience of the weather, feeling and mood of that place. He thinks that this approach could be summed up in short as ‘straining memory through matter’.
End of the Pier by Luke McTaggart
Luke McTaggart is a painter from Amble. In July 2022 he graduated from Northumbria University with a First Class Degree in Fine Art and is now embarking on a career as a full-time artist. Prior to that he has exhibited his work in the area and been the recipient of a number of awards. He was given a Highly Commended Award for his painting ‘Northumbrian Dusk (Fields Beyond Amble)’ at the 2022 Woodhorn Museum Open Exhibition and more recently was the Alnmouth Arts Festival Poster Winner.
Yellow Boat in a Fog Bank by Luke McTaggart
For a full list of opening hours and events, please visit www.bailiffgatemuseum.co.uk
