Journey to find strangeness in the shadows

Since launching his career at the Compass Gallery in 1972, under the wing of the late Cyril Gerber, its owner, Jim Tweedie, has acquired a loyal and enthusiastic following.

His work, well-crafted oils and acrylics, painted on canvas and meticulously and uniformly framed, are the result of an imagination on a journey of discovery. It’s a pity that English appears to have no single term for the ability to render the ordinary extraordinary, for this could usefully and accurately be applied as a description of Tweedie’s approach.

Parks, cityscapes and other public spaces, painted in his trademark greens, blues and shadowy greys, are transformed into mysterious and wondrous quasi–narratives, where an event, not defined and unpredictable, is always in the offing, just over the temporal or literal horizon.

In a sense Tweedie, who is largely self-taught, is working in a tradition of landscape where reality and what is depicted and constructed by the artist intermingle and coalesce.

In The Approach a very ordinary park with hedges and lawns becomes the setting for a wolf or large dog to emerge, running from the shrubbery while a boy looks on. In Wood at the Edge of Town: Day and its companion piece Wood at the Edge of Town: Night the ordinary world of day with walkers, dogs and geese becomes a moonlit fantasy of white unicorns, stags, owls and doves.

It’s unclear what role these creatures play in Tweedie’s imaginative lexicon; but animals are everywhere, populating his narratives with rather more presence and frequency than people. One senses a deep attachment to nature and a respect for its grace and fragility.

Tweedie is not averse to playing games, drawing attention to his paintings’ own conceit and fictionality. The Dream of the Small Dog, for example, shows a woman walking a small white terrier in a sunlit park. The dog appears three times and the woman twice, somehow challenging the notion that painting depicts a fixed point in time.

Other works acknowledge a debt to his inspirations. The Gleam, which shows an abandoned city street where a solitary figure walks under a full moon, contains what he describes as a “de Chirico arch”, making clear the Italian artist’s influence.

From the evidence, Tweedie has lived a life of quiet contemplation and honest toil, spurred on by his imagination and copious talent.

To October 28