21st Jun 2022

Snapshots of Summer: New work by Charlie Yates following his 4th solo show


Charlie Yates at The Watermill Gallery


After selling out at the gallery, Charlie Yates now has new work on display. 

Untitled by Charlie Yates, £2400

Charlie recently had a solo show, his fourth since graduating in 2019 from the renowned Glasgow School of Art. The show took place in The Watermill Gallery (an actual former watermill) in Aberfeldy. The Times reviewed it with 4 stars, writing:

The seriousness with which he takes his vocation is impressive… The title of the show comes from Yates’s experience of flying. High above the clouds he senses a clarity of vision, detached from the complexity and chaos of life far below.

Several works — for example, A View from Below, a blurry, almost abstract image of cloud, sun, space — illustrate this perspective. It is not difficult to imagine Yates snapping this image on his iPhone and using it as the basis for a worked-up oil in the studio.

Charlie’s latest body of work is now on display at NewBlood: you can see available works here

At times this body of work really speaks summer to us: capturing the sun’s  incredible effects on colour, of bleaching and making vivid. These prismatic scenes are imbued with a muted sense of wonder. As the review notes, sometimes Yates works from photographs. His paintings have that quality of looking at the past: the opacity of memory. The toning and shading give the effect of a partially screened lens, funnelling our vision through time.

These paintings are ambiguously as much as specifically of a place and time – but this is precisely what the painter uses to make these works believably of a place and time. He harnesses, with aplomb, the beguiling mood of nostalgia: the longing for places half-real, half-imagined. 

More about Charlie Yates:
Charlie Yates – first solo reviewed in The Times

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