Harry More Gordon

For his new one-person exhibition, his eleventh with Francis Kyle Gallery, the distinguished Scottish watercolourist Harry More Gordon has assembled flower paintings and still lifes, mostly produced over the last two years: they encapsulate as well as pass witty comment on the full span of his idiosyncratic enthusiasms, allied to incomparable technical skills, honed over close to a half a century of unswerving commitment to watercolour.

Since More Gordon’s portraiture in the ‘conversation piece’ manner achieved definitive recognition in his major 2005 retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, he has focused largely on his fondness for still life, in part reflecting his newly discovered taste for travel to the Far East, which has fuelled his irrepressible fascination with the human figure and the vagaries of costume and fabric. A painter’s fantasy if ever there was one, but one only to be indulged by an artist with More Gordon’s prodigious skills, ‘Ladies’ fancy-dress ball: bring on the girls’, features a triple-tiered chorus line composed of a portrait painter’s wish list of female sitters from across the centuries, from an Empress Theodora in mosaic to Gainsborough and Lawrence’s grand society ladies by way of Millais, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

The artist’s sense of impromptu theatre, so characteristic of a fancy-dress occasion, has never, however, been confined to paintings of people. Chance encounters between incongruous and unlikely objects, from the man-made as well as the natural world, give a similar frisson to his still life and flower paintings. The protagonists in one of More Gordon’s more complex still lifes, (be they masks, fabrics, ceramics, insects or flowers) sometimes seem to perform for our delight a subtle ballet of wonders, sometimes seem engaged in a conversation among themselves, as they compete for our attention against a white background, raked theatrically in a post-Matisse perspective, held together by a lustrous fabric executed in impeccable trompe-l’oeil.

Elsewhere sparer groupings of objects – it may be a feather, a fallen petal, a bird, a berry – interact like the observations in a haiku to impart a message of beauty and impermanence. More Gordon’s light touch can seem almost a provocation as these exquisitely rendered objects hold us in their gaze rather as in Las Meninas Velázquez turns his subjects around so that the viewer becomes the painter’s focus of interest. Such a role reversal, slightly unsettling, may help to explain More Gordon’s deployment of trompe-l’oeil in challenging us to distinguish between a real insect, for instance, and one made of glass, a flower motif on fabric and a freshly cut flower come to rest on its surface. Though nothing is quite what it may seem in this world of theatre and make believe, it remains clear the artist continues to derive much of his satisfaction from masterful rendering of a flower or fruit with all the poetic intensity of a Mughal miniature, so freshly achieved it is as if he has just laid down his brush, which indeed is sometimes still visible carelessly abandoned in a corner of the composition.

In their humour and delicacy, brief encounters of this kind (for instance in the composition with this title, in which two ducks gracefully confront each other in an exotic setting) add up to something in the way of a self-portrait of the painter: a changing parade of cherished objects along with flowers from his abundant garden, which he has used to create a journey through the senses full of personal associations, sometimes to be recognised as we spot a familiar vase in a new composition. ‘Still lifes they may indeed be,’ comments Rhoda Koenig, ‘but how More Gordon’s watercolours jump for joy!’

Biography

HARRY MORE GORDON has some twenty exhibitions in Great Britain, the United States and Italy since 1971.  He has been represented for the past twenty five years by Francis Kyle Gallery, where he has held eleven one-man exhibitions. He has also contributed from time to time to the Gallery’s theme exhibitions, notably Blue and White: still life on a classic theme by contemporary painters. Alongside his still life and flower compositions, Harry More Gordon has made a specialty of painting ‘conversation piece’ portraits of families observed in their own environment, traveling widely in Europe and the United States to fulfill these commissions. A major retrospective exhibition of his portraits in watercolour was shown at the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland in 2005.

In 1987 More Gordon was one of Ten British Watercolourists shown at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao, when two of his paintings were acquired for the Museum’s Permanent Collection. In 1993 his work was included in Art in Bloom:  flowers in historical and contemporary painting, shown at Kirkaldy Museum and Art Gallery.  More Gordon’s work is represented in the Permanent Collections of the National Gallery of Scotland, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, the Scottish Arts Council, Flemings Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Comment

Harry More Gordon’s watercolours of his friends, acquaintances and their possessions present a reassuring world of comfort and elegance. With an acute eye for the telling detail, More Gordon selects the favourite possessions of his sitters to complement their portraits and reveal their lives and characters. Part of the pleasure of More Gordon’s portraits are the carefully observed still life details which transform each portrait into social commentary. His eye for the particular is most beautifully expressed in his watercolours of flowers, china and objets d’art drawn from the gardens and cupboards of his and his wife Marianne’s early Georgian manor house on the edge of Edinburgh.

Harry More Gordon worked as a graphic artist and freelance illustrator before becoming Art Director of Vogue. He returned to Edinburgh College of Art, where earlier he had been a pupil, to become Head of Illustration. Initially he used pen, ink and coloured biros to make his illustrations but a visit to Patrick Proctor’s studio, to have his own and his wife’s portraits painted, changed his technique for ever. He observed Proctor using watercolour with no preliminary pencil underdrawing.  More Gordon experimented with this very difficult process and transformed his own working method. The resulting body of work has given pleasure to many and, for social historians of the future, research material of great value.

JAMES HOLLOWAY
Director
Scottish National Portrait Gallery

‘Brightly -  indeed, explosively - coloured every flower sings out, asserting its identity with absolutely no self-esteem problem. In the battle for attention, the only loser is a vase of carnations , decisively put down by an amaryllis so aggressive that it refuses to be contained by the picture plane. But More Gordon tilts that plane himself, flattening and compressing space so we can look into the heart of each exuberant blossom or study the weave of a carpet that refuses to be quiet…More Gordon brings to mind the late Victorian Orientalist John Frederick Lewis, whose tall vases of poppies and lilies seem far too fresh and wholesome for the harem…While no one could accuse him of turning his sitters into flowers, the flowers here have as much personality as if each was sitting for its portrait.

RHODA KOENING, THE INDEPENDENT

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