Frances Macdonald: Recent Paintings

This exhibition marks twenty-five years since Frances Macdonald and Portland Gallery first began working together. Over that time, Macdonald has always remained true to her style, unswayed by fleeting fashions of the art world. Her paintings are as timeless as the landscape that surrounds her home, Crinan. For those collectors who have visited the family-run hotel over the last 56 years since the Ryans owned it, Macdonald’s paintings offer a way to return.

Macdonald’s work has a clear dialogue with the tradition of the Scottish Colourists – artists such as Cadell, Peploe, and Maclauchlan Milne. Yet her paintings are unmistakably her own: tactile, elemental, and grounded in the lived in experience of the landscape rather than its picturesque surface. Macdonald sculpts paint into form, translating wind, tide, and rock into tangible texture. The impasto surfaces of her canvases are as physical as the terrain they describe. While Scotland remains her enduring muse, this exhibition hints at a spirit of exploration – from the birds of the Galápagos to scenes glimpsed in France. Wherever she travels, her trusted palette knife and painter’s eye goes with her.

For any enquiries, please contact Florence Batchelor