In common with works by Arthur Armstrong, Norah McGuinness and Nano Reid, Still Life at My Window by George Campbell is an abstract composition based on elements of everyday life. Campbell employs techniques similar to those used McGuinness and Armstrong, such as introducing slanting, rather than pure horizontal or vertical, lines in the composition, and contrast dark forms against light. These techniques lend the composition monumentality and movement. In Still Life at My Window,  an oil on canvas dating from around 1968, a curtained window, with buildings and a blue sky beyond can be discerned in the background.  In the foreground, the dark outline of a table, with a bowl of fruit and other objects, can also be discerned,  although the subject matter has dissolved into a painterly exploration of relationships of colour, texture and form. In common with Armstrong´s Studio 2, Campbell incorporates into Still Life at My Window a canvas mounted on an easel, a painting within a painting, investing this work with another layer of meaning and enquiry.

Although born in Arklow, Co. Wicklow, in 1917, George Campbell, son of the painter Gretta Bowen, grew up in the city of Belfast. Mainly self-taught, he began to paint during the Second World War. Campbell was one of a group of  Belfast artists, including Gerard Dillon and Daniel O´Neill, who brought a new progressive sense of purpose to the Dublin art scene in the 1940´s.  Making the first of many visits to Spain in 1951, in the years following, Campbell produced abstract paintings based on both Spanish and Irish landscapes, as well as still lives and other subject matter. He became adept at flamenco guitar and, through a series of radio broadcasts in the 1960´s, introduced Irish audiences to the vitality of Spanish music and culture.

-PM