Showcasing a selection of hyperreal landscapes, The Scottish Gallery presents a new series of landscape paintings by Philip Braham in his upcoming exhibition Prescient Nature. Braham’s work ranges from crisp, detailed paintings to capture vivid landscapes.
Braham takes inspiration from the concept of life being a continuous journey along a river, which connects with everyone and everything, uniting us together in an infinite lifetime. For Braham, his painting practice is a loyal act of attention and engagement with the world around him.
Prescient Nature reflects Braham’s draw on current affairs, with nature rationally being unable to foretell events before they take place, yet there being an expectation of this. Inspired by this significant cognitive link, Braham documents this forewarning in his paintings. His works in both painting and photography are informed by the Northern European engagement with landscape as a metaphor for the human condition.
Reflecting on his practice, Braham comments:
We sometimes casually say that a landscape or an artwork speaks to us when what we mean is that it triggers a recollection or excites an emotion that makes us feel connected to it. But that is not quite correct, because that would suggest a relationship of subject to object, perceiving and perceived, when what is in-play is a complex array of signifiers in which we are complicit agents in the exchange. […] My approach to painting is to let things be as they are, without leveraging anything […] for me, painting is a faithful act of attention and correspondence within the flux of the world, a still point full of possibilities.
The Scottish Gallery
6 Dundas Street, Edinburgh
EH3 6HZ
8th February – 2nd March 2024