Linda McGuire: actress and artist
I DO so hate ‘art’ jargon, even worse when artists feel they have to use it. It’s written in those dreadful press releases or accompanying exhibition notes. “My work is really an existential experience grounded in my need for self-gratification and a love of the homogenised culture that currently dictates inauthentic values.” What a load of tosh! Any artist worth his or her salt should just keep quiet and let their artwork do the talking. Linda McGuire is an artist and a successful TV and stage actor in the UK. She can also ‘talk’ through her canvases, but, it’s her honesty about her art that is refreshing. She doesn’t shower you in verbal semantics and incomprehensible claptrap; when she speaks about her work, you know you are with someone who has a great thirst, an all-consuming need for self-expression, and that’s what art is all about – painters will always speak better through paint than pompous press releases.
The other thing that ticks me off is when people want to find meaning in everything and everybody, with abstract works always under attack by those deeply sceptical to any form of modernity in painting.
Linda’s canvases burst with creative and sexual energy; she speaks her own words through colour and shapes, in a way that would be impossible to verbalise.
“I came to Cyprus because I knew I could paint here.
“OK, it’s a tight matriarchal society with women nearly always promoting, ahead of themselves, the needs of their men, who manage to groom their sons to lose most of the core elements, the fundamental values of being a good human being, like decency, honour, and truth.
“That’s the extreme side of living here, and through this experience, I was able to confront certain issues and so go without hindrance or interference and probably as a reaction to this mothering of man to create a form of innocent expression through paint and colour.”
That’s the essence of her work, a bit like being presented with a huge box of quality chocolates, each one with a different flavour, texture, and taste. You don’t give a damn who made the nougat parfait or the Belgian cream truffle, just that they offer pure pleasure, albeit fleetingly, unlike a painting which keeps on giving.
Linda can also draw. She showed me a piece of work which was purely representational, detailed, and very good. This she damningly described as being “completely soulless, a form of expression that did nothing for me, then I changed, closed my eyes and went instinctive and developed this particular series of paintings, which in effect work from the gut”.
Most of the canvases are titled after local children who gravitated to her open-air studio, and many of them would be invited by Linda to add their own tiny colour markings on the canvas. This she describes as “quite an inspirational influence on my work, as each child contributed its own personality to the paintings”.
The child within has always been something that gets slaughtered along life’s long highway, but in Linda McGuire’s paintings we have the opportunity to relish a good chunk of childishness, married with her subtle desire to create within the space between art and life.
To this end, her exhibition, in partnership with friend Clare Galloway, is colourfully autobiographical, such is her love and feel for colour and shapes.
Importantly she also has passion, the only sad thing is she will be leaving Cyprus in a few months as her creative sojourn on the island has been worked through, and she now needs to get back to London to audition for more acting roles.
The exhibition is entitled ‘Hallowed Innocence’ and opens at the En Plo gallery at Paphos Harbour on Friday November 12, and runs until Sunday November 21.
