Rory MCEWEN

The British botanist and plant collector Martyn Rix has written of Rory McEwen that ‘The paintings of single vegetables have been one of Rory’s most enduring and influential legacies...a series of vegetables, peppers, mushrooms and especially onions…were observed carefully in various stages of sprouting and decay.’ Drawn in February 1972, this fine watercolour is a detailed study of a mushroom, depicting its structure and texture with great accuracy. The artist has chosen to show the mushroom from underneath, noting the intricate gills beneath the surface of the cap. The present sheet was presented by the artist, two years after it was drawn, to the art critic and writer Marina Vaizey (b.1938) in July 1974. A few months earlier that year, a work by McEwen had been included in an exhibition curated by Vaizey at the Arthur Tooth & Sons Gallery in London. In her introduction to the catalogue of that exhibition, Vaizey wrote, ‘Rory McEwen explores with zest the complexities of ordinary observable things, underlining the strangeness of what we may take for granted.’

As his friend, the artist and cartoonist Glen Baxter, recalled of Rory McEwen’s work, ‘The big paintings didn’t really get me, other people had done big things, but the small ones on vellum nobody could touch; he was in a class of his own there...I find them so beautiful and so powerful, and also because they are so intimate. Nobody could get that incredible power into those small pictures that he did.’