Richard Strachan

Strachan graduated from Gray’s School of Art (Aberdeen) in 2001 and currently teaches at the Edinburgh College of Art. He has been awarded grants from both the Welsh + Scottish Art’s Councils has exhibited nationally and was awarded the Aspect Prize in 2006. His paintings are often exhibited as academy submissions and he has been awarded prizes from the Scottish Society of Artists and professional membership of Paisley Arts Institute.
The architectural nature of the work roots the paintings in a dialogue between pattern and perspective. Self has been placed centrally in this debate through nebulous colour glazes, chance happenings and the physical appearance of the viewer in the high gloss finishes of the paintings.

As opposed to being a cold and empirical approach to painting the functionality of the advanced software interface provides a flexible and intuitive platform where a range of alternative interpretations of a single space can be considered. The artist can then investigate patterns between the construction lines of the compositions, generating motifs that converse with the role of the composition in describing perspective. The populist history of pattern and motif thus converge with the more emotive and instinctual moment of mark?making and experimental colour choice as part of the expressive personality of the work.

Concurrently the unique contribution of the computer is represented in terms native to it’s self (pixilation) whereby lines drawn from a perspective point fracture, create strobing patterns according to specific algorithms. Representing process as aesthetic in this way is a broadening of an enquiry, which has in turn, provided chance happenings and exciting possibilities for development, extending the work to three-dimensional multi?layered Perspex constructs.