'I started out copying Bugs Bunny' - Artists set for double show

The Herald Scotland

14-05-2025

'I'm a bit uncomfortable calling myself a hyperrealist or a photo-realist,' Mr Wilson tells me. 'I just aim for as real as possible.' Nor does he study or follow the work of the artists who popularized or championed the form, such as American trio Chuck Close, Richard Estes and Duane Hanson. Instead he prefers graphics-based art and name-checks people such as Sir Peter Blake.
Bordeaux and Blue by Colin Wilson (Image: free) So what's the appeal of so precise and naturalistic a form of representation?
'It's something I've always admired,' he says simply. 'It's like a magic trick. It looks like it's real, then you realise it's not, and I've always found that magical and very technically impressive. I think everyone starts out trying to copy – I started out copying Bugs Bunny – then you go to school and copy simple objects, and the aim is always to make it look like what you see. I always found a lot of comfort in that, because you know when it's good because it looks like what it's meant to look like. There's a great satisfaction in it.'
The precision he shows in his work extends to the creation of the source images, which can take a day to set up and photograph. 'There's a lot of grape prodding and cheese nudging,' he laughs. 'It can be quite tedious. But at the end of it, it's ready to go and I get so excited about picking up a paintbrush, especially if I'm trying something new. It's like a puzzle, and that's always exhilarating.'
And of course the what is as important as the how. Everything to be photographed has to be perfect – fruits ripe, berries fresh, glasses clean and glistening, champagne bubbling and doubtless properly chilled. 'You have to photograph things at their absolute best. Just yesterday I was photographing a Camellia from the garden and already today the head has fallen off!'
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It will live on, though, in his art.
Flowers are also a concern of Samantha McCubbin, though that's where the comparisons end. In her studio in Glasgow's East End she paints loose, semi-abstracted studies of riotous floral blooms, and she uses oil paint rather than acrylic. Her works are bursting with colour as a result and have a quality rare in still-lives: a sense of movement. It's even reflected in their titles. Frenzy Of Flowers, Petals Unhinged and Sway Of The Night are just three examples.
For Ms McCubbin, who studied fashion before turning to painting, the appeal of floral subjects begins with the fact that she loves flowers. Who doesn't? But there's more.
'I'm drawn to their folds, their movement, the richness of their colours, and the variety of shapes,' she tells me. 'I also find contemporary flower arranging inspiring. There's a sculptural, expressive quality to how flowers are composed that really speaks to me. But ultimately florals are just the starting point. My work isn't about creating an exact likeness of a flower, it's about what painting them allows me to do with the medium itself. Flowers give me a structure to work from, but then the process becomes about following the movement of the paint, responding to the gestures, the brushstrokes, the surprises – and the happy accidents along the way.'
One such happy accident was her discovery of square boards to paint on. She immediately liked the contemporary feel of the format and it made sense compositionally, centring her subjects. Increasingly she is experimenting with different sizes, though the bulk of the 45 works she will show at The Lemond Gallery – her largest suite of paintings to date – are in the square format.
Lavender Meadow by Samantha McCubbin (Image: free) Impressionist painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet are obvious touchstones – there is a pair of paintings in the upcoming show inspired by a trip to Monet's garden at Giverny – but two more surprising influences are Howard Hodgkin, whose colourful abstracts often overlapped his frames, and the endlessly inventive German painter Gerhard Richter, once described as the Picasso of the 21st century.
'I have always loved their bold and expressive use of paint and the way it speaks for itself,' says Ms McCubbin. 'It really resonates with how I want to work. There's a sense of emotion and immediacy in their process that I connect with.'
Two painters, two very different approaches to the creation of art. But unifying them is a quest to capture the sublime – or, at the very least, the good things in life.
Colin Wilson and Samantha McCubbin show new works at The Lemond Gallery, Glasgow from May 17 (until May 25)