Artist: Jack McGarrity

Jack McGarrity paints at the hour of threshold: sunset, dusk, the moment before dark. His canvases catch light at its most unfixed. A sky that might equally read as coral, violet, or simply bright. Fires bloom on shorelines; distant towns glow like embers in a blue field; a figure stoops in a meadow, lit from below by something he is holding or tending. Even his domestic interiors, a sash window at night, a radiator, the dim red of a parked car glimpsed through a back wall, partake of that same ethereal quality, opening like a window onto a scene that feels fleeting, and yet, briefly, wholly within grasp.

McGarrity studied Painting and Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art, near where he was raised in the west of Scotland, before relocating to London to continue his studies at the Royal Drawing School. In 2018 the Richard Ford Award took him to the Museo del Prado where he developed a sustained admiration of Goya — a compositional weight that still moves through the larger paintings. The following year, three months in Florence on the John Kinross Award deepened his engagement with painting’s older traditions. He joined the Messums Emerging Talents Programme with a solo exhibition at our Wiltshire gallery in 2021.

What has emerged since is a body of work unusually committed to atmosphere. But the sensibility is increasingly McGarrity’s own figures absorbed in small, almost ritual acts. From stacking stones, watching a fire, to untangling something from its rigging: set against landscapes that hover between observation and memory.

Materials matter here. McGarrity works with oil alongside flashe, the matte, almost fresco-like vinyl paint, on jute, on linen, and most recently on the back of stretched tea towels. The found cloths are part of a new series exploring landscape and nostalgia, where the domestic provenance of the support seems to leach quietly up through the image. The larger canvases, Withered Fires, Stumped, & Shoreline, are built through layers he allows to remain partly visible, so that the surface keeps a record of its own becoming.

There is wit in the work too. The Wonder of You, the first half of a planned diptych, finds an Elvis impersonator mid-curl on stage, sincere and slightly absurd at once — an interest in performance, doubling, the second-hand gesture made strangely affecting. McGarrity’s world is one where things sit slightly off register from the world we know: a paper map blows across a town from nowhere, a fire on the headland might be welcome or apocalyptic, two figures balancing stones might be doing something very ordinary or very old. The pleasure of the work is not quite knowing which.