Joe Grieve Will Be the First Artist Selected by Colstoun Arts to Exhibit at Scotland's Newest Arts Space

Since establishing Colstoun Arts in 2022, Colstoun House has opened its doors to multiple artists as part of its ongoing residency programme. In 2024 it is set to welcome artists from Germany, Korea, China, France and the UK.

The Colstoun Artist Residency was the first step for Colstoun Arts’s Director McLean (Mackie) Sinclair-Parry. 

Having helped to develop the family’s businesses in events and hospitality, Sinclair-Parrystruck out on his own. He is particularly interested in supporting emerging artists and has worked with over 30 artists in a variety of capacities ranging from studio direction to career consultancy.

In 2022, Sinclair-Parry worked with London based landscape painter Joe Grieve, then inviting him to Scotland as Colstoun Arts’ first resident artist. Through Grieve, Sinclair-Parry met London gallerist, Jack Trodd, BWG Gallery (Brushes with Greatness), who now co-directs the artist programme.

The plan is now to develop a series of 3 to 5 exhibitions a year including a residency group show, an emerging artist solo show, an established landscape artist group show, and a new collaboration with RSA to show work by Scottish artists focusing on landscape and nature.

The first artist to be selected from the Colstoun Artist Residency to mount an exhibition is Joe Grieve. The exhibition entitled The Other Side will comprise predominantly large-scale oil paintings, some involving a drawn figurative compositional charcoal underlayer, that consider Grieve’s immersive relationship with, and memories of, landscapes within the British Isles, and their corruption and fragmentation over his lifetime.

Grieve holds a First-Class Honours Degree from the City & Guilds Art School in London. He held his first solo exhibition at the Artisan Space in 2019 and contributed paintings to the group exhibition Into the Cosmere in 2021. After graduating in 2022, Grieve held his first sell-out solo exhibition Somewhere Near Perception with BWG Gallery. In 2023 Grieve held a large-scale 73 painting solo exhibition Between Place & Time with BWG Gallery on Soho Square, London. His painting is held in collections globally, with artwork on 5 continents and in private collections in over 20 countries.

On his practice Grieve says, “My artwork is an ever growing and changing culmination of my recent exploration into the land that surrounds me. I find myself instinctively drawn toward landscape painting because of the emotional reverence and painterly freedom it enables. My process is a balance between instinctive, reactive movements and slower heavily considered marks. The laying of paint, the push and pull between fast and slow results in the varied expressions of the landscape.”

“I am interested in the social politics of land, specifically the fight for increased ‘Right-to-roam’ laws in the UK. 92% of the England’s countryside and 97% of its rivers are not covered by the right to roam.

“This disconnection astounds me, and the effects of this seep into my work. I see my paintings as fragmentations of complete landscapes as if I’ve had to use what’s left of the land publicly available in England and create the rest in my mind. Looking at the land through an abstract lens, I’m more interested in communicating the chaos rather than recreating what the eye sees. I think of this distorted reality as an analogy of our damning social climate and our ever-growing disengagement from nature. Despite this distortion, I wish for the painted scenes to be beautiful, mirroring my feelings toward the natural world. A constant focus in my work is sunlight, both the representation of it in the scenes and the effects it has on nature. The fleeting moments of sunrise and sunset are often the most beautiful and ethereal; this is something I aim to capture in my work. 

“My work can be read as a modern interpretation of the Lebensreform movement of the mid-19th Century and the 20th Century back-to-nature movement. I endeavour to explore the urgency of returning to more natural ways, responding to the consequences industrialisation has borne and the negative impact we are a race are having on the planet. There has never been a more vital time to understand the importance of nature.” 

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