Duncan Gray attends Project Ability‘s Aspire programme.
Up until quite recently, Duncan’s practice was a wilderness-obsessed, environmental consciousness. His paintings resembled a slow-motion spanning of the world’s most inaccessible peaks. Duncan’s mountain tops are luminous, in brand-new white with ruddy colour applications that slowly give way to abstractions that drift from the landscapes they represent. The open foregrounds and swaths of sky show a remote earth where human life appears to have vacated. They have a presence of power and solitude, challenging the viewer to imagine being part of these dangerous yet beautiful mountain tops.
In the last year Duncan has worked on several figurative pieces. The same strength of form and hint at abstraction come through beautifully in his portraits. Still using the same type of pen and line work, Duncan’s portraits are striking with their boldly simplified shapes and line work.
