RORY MACDONALD

After completing my postgraduate Art History degree at the University of St Andrews I have been working full-time as an artist. As both my parents — Alan Macdonald and Carolynda Macdonald — are professional painters, I have been taught to paint from an early age. However, it wasn’t until after university that I started to paint full-time in my parents’ studio space in Carnoustie. Their extensive experience has been passed down to me through a traditional studio education since I started working as their assistant in 2010. I continued my artistic training in tandem with my academic work at the University of St Andrews and I have now exhibited in the UK, USA and Australia.

My artistic practice fuses my formal art historical education and the traditional mode of oil painting in order to reframe Renaissance and Baroque painting in the twenty-first century. Through juxtaposition and adjustment of scale I intend to alter the perception of works by canonical artistic figures — such as Diego Velazquez or Luca Giordano. These painted figures are removed from their original context and placed into the palm of a hand, at the top of a cloud or submerged in inky black water. It is through this change that I intend to charge these historical works with alternate meanings which have a contemporary relevance.

My largest art historical work centred on the walking art of Hamish Fulton, whom I interviewed during the writing process of my postgraduate thesis. In addition to walking art, I have written extensively on documentary photography, land art, non-Western modern art, and portrait miniatures. It is with this contemporary focussed art historical background that I approach the work of the Old Masters in my own painting: probing my own practice continuously and questioning its relationship with society in the twenty-first century.