Melinda McGarry is a painter living in rural East Elrington, Hexham, working from her home and studio barn.

McGarry is inspired by the detritus she encounters while walking in Northumberland, and through the medium of paint, transforms these apparently superfluous objects into subject matter for her large-scale paintings. McGarry creates these still lives with her collected material in concert with a range of collage and transfer processes in a spontaneous and improvised manner, often with a sense of urgency. Paradoxically, McGarry states that “I want people to linger when looking at my paintings, to try and ascertain the object; to slow down and to appreciate the texture, colour, and lack of clarity in my paintings”. There is a clear relationship, then, between the time McGarry spends collecting her material and the time she hopes her painting’s audience will spend making a visual journey across the surface of her paintings. This practice of walking and collection echoes that of one of McGarry’s influences – Kurt Schwitters.

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The objects McGarry is drawn to, resonate in terms of their colour, shape, or degree of deterioration and decay.  Discarded packaging and used palettes are often employed as a means of imprinting texture onto the surface of her paintings as a way of helping to build a broad visual vocabulary in terms of colour and mark-making. McGarry takes this process further by cutting old paintings up and using these redundant sections as collage material for new paintings.

Along with Schwitters, McGarry’s painting has been influenced by Henri Matisse, Joseph Cornell, Jane Freilicher, and Giorgio Morandi. McGarry also cites the poet and writer Raymond Carver as being a significant literary influence. 

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