BRICK, BLOCK, INK, STONE

Craig Coulthard’s exhibition, featuring new works produced over the last two years, is currently on show at Leith’s Sierra Metro gallery. The title Magical Thinking conjures that thinking-into-being which is the crux of his artistic process. Craig and I speak about this, the omniscience of the artist, and his aim to find a resting place between the pragmatic and the mystical.

A recurring symbol here, emblematic of this magical thinking, are the Pictish stones that proliferate these works, replacing the human figures of the ukiyo-e prints that so inspire Coulthard. Ukiyo-e was a Japanese art movement of the 17th-19th centuries which addresses locations and individuals of significance with a modest reverence characterised by graphic linework and flat spaces.

Craig and I discuss the gravity of the Pictish stones—he speaks of the finality of the linework that carves them and results in a strange solemnity. We speak of the ancient completeness of these stones and of how the weight of their lines signifies something mysteriously definitive.

This sense of certainty holds an appeal for Craig, who’s reverence for the craft of the original process is evident in his delicate, minuscule brushwork. In relation to craft, Craig talks about Chinese scholar stones and their Japanese counterpart, suiseki—stones collected throughout millennia by literati as representations of the natural world. These stones liberate nature from the Western notion of the sublime. John Mendelsohn writes in artnet.com, ‘nature made art in its own image, an eccentrically evocative fractal of itself.’ In the suiseki tradition, these stones are categorised as either landscape or animal figures—we see Craig employing the Pictish stones to perform the figurine function in his work in an anachronistic cultural fusion between the ancient Picts and Edo-era Japan.

We also speak about how he discovered these stony source materials and of how two years of national lockdown provided a strange space for research. Digitisation of collections like that of London’s National Gallery, now make it possible not only to view paintings, but also to zoom-in and virtually mine them for detail and minutiae. The work of Renaissance painter Carlo Crivelli features in Coulthard’s exhibition, adding 15th century Italy to our view. Craig speaks of the importance of not relying solely on his own powers of imagination, but of looking outward, digesting source materials, bringing two years of work together.

I too have now trawled through National Gallery archives, zooming into Crivelli’s weird world: a late-Gothic golden environment where God looms, asynchronous and out-of-sight. A key manipulation of the original paintings are the crops—Coulthard beheads Saint Jerome and Sir Thomas Aquinas just below the eyes, leaving only the pious slightly-pursed mouths and inverting the focus from the saints to the architecture in their hands: one painted doorway has a second holy man lurking in the darkness, a delightful detail carried over from the original. The effect is humorous, a post-modern wink-and-nudge that reaches a climax in Lookers Disco’ a monochrome painting that advertises a church like a rock-band.

By working with this lexicon of magical imagery and applying anachronisms, Craig creates a collage of surreal elements that, as he states in the exhibition’s press release, exist ‘somewhere between diagram and dreams.’ We speak about demystifying, how certain symbols and icons become too revered over time to carry their original essence. Craig’s treatment of these images, enmeshed in that ‘daily reverence’ of the ukiyo-eprints, is a kind of antiseptic in the wounds caused by time’s arrow.

Magical thinking is no match for time. Craig artifices ageing in the application of crackle-paste, creating gorgeous tiny chasms in the canvas that hold not only paint, but a chimeric history and reflection of an exploration of in-between states of being and liminal spaces. Stand close and observe, follow the bold linework that traverses place and time from the Pictish stone to the Japanese print, culminating in the contemporary homages we find here. Take a moment to be still and marvel at the brick, block, ink and stone.

Cheryl McGregor is a freelance arts writer, poet and collage artist currently living in Dundee. Examples of her work can be found @cherylmcgregorwriter

Magical Thinking, new work by Craig Coulthard, curated by Hugo Barclay, Sierra Metro, Leith, Edinburgh 3-24 September