Snow on the Hills painting by Northern artist TM McGrath
We’re delighted to announce that T M McGrath (Tom), has been shortlisted for the prestigious Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Tom’s exciting and insightful paintings of the northern industrial landscape are featured on Artmeltd as one of our leading Northern Art proponents.
We’re all thrilled here that Tom’s painting has got this far from 12,000 applicants with up to 2 submissions each. We can’t exhibit the actual painting from the ‘Northern Town’ series yet, but the above image ‘Snow on the Hills‘ is also from the same series and is available for sale in the gallery.
The ‘Northern Town’ series is a development from Tom’s previous work around the northern industrial landscape heritage of city centre mills. In this series Tom concentrates on a different style – what he calls the ‘through the glass darkly’ effect, where the paintings reflect the overall impression of a thought or memory. The current paintings display the impact of industrial building on the small towns and cities which are set in the northern hills. ‘Snow on the Hills’, shown above, uses the signature palette of muted greys, blues, brown, purples and pinks and blends them into swirls of impasto imagery which conveys the stillness of the winter scene, where all industry has long gone. The submitted Royal Academy Summer Exhibition painting is in this style.
The Northern Art genre is constantly evolving from its roots in L S Lowry’s work, which demonstrated the colour and vibrancy of the working mills, thronged with action, to later artists showing the darker sights and images of working class life in mills, pits and factories at the 60’s,70’s and 80’s. Today’s northern industrial landscape art can now look at what this architectural heritage has left and marvel at how it is gaining its own stark beauty as structures reabsorb into the stunning northern landscape.
We’ll report later on the expedition to London to personally deliver the framed art work for judging to the Royal Academy, another fantastic tradition, but meanwhile keep your fingers crossed for a good result and enjoy the Tom’s other works featured on the site.