![]() ![]() These are striking pictures when seen from several yards or even feet away (and in reproduction). From the depredations of colonialism to the ghoulishness of genetic engineering, Guild’s aberrations encapsulate a long Western history of manipulating and mishandling nature.Ī careful artist, Guild isn’t as witty with paint as he is with his subject matter. Likewise illusionistic, they are two potatoes and a fig leaf, upgraded: the fig leaf with the addition of pearl earrings, one of the potatoes with jewels where eyes would be, and the other, cleverly titled Two Sugars (2009), seemingly dipped in chocolate like a strawberry. Three resin sculptures accompanied the paintings. Ascension Plant I (2007), for example, shows a root and stem of cactus and aloe shooting forth lilies, violets and various other flowers. What seem at first to be unremarkable bouquets reveal themselves as strange hybrids, with flowers of different varieties blossoming in tandem off the same stalk. Each painted sheet is stained, torn and dog-eared, as if recovered after centuries of handling and folding, and bears a colorful, realistic rendering of an impossible plant. ” On each of six canvases (they range from about 3 to 6 feet per side), Guild painted, in oil, enlarged trompe l’oeil depictions of botanicals on paper before black backgrounds. The main event in scale and ambition was a series of botanical paintings titled “Ascension Plant. In a recent exhibition, Scottish artist Derrick Guild presented work that he made during and soon after the nearly two years he spent on Ascension Island, a British dependency in the Atlantic just south of the equator, about halfway between Brazil and Gabon.
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