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Fiona McIntyre

Fiona M E McIntyre born 1963 Nairobi, Kenya. Great grand daughter of painter Malcolm Drummond (Camden Town Group). Trained in drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art (under David Michie), graduating in 1985. She spent seven years in Sweden working at studios in Malmö to develop painting and printmaking and made regular excursions to Iceland, whilst married to first husband Dr Bjorn Karlsson. In 1990 Fiona was accepted into the innovative print studios of Bertil Lundberg, who had been a member of the Imaginists (Swedish Surrealists) and set up Grafikskolan in response to a visit to the experimental Atelier 17 run by Stanley William Hayter. Fiona was taken on as a 'practicing artist' and encouraged to develop a powerful series of expressionist copper etchings and drypoints. Later Fiona went on to do Post Graduate European Fine Art in Barcelona where she continued to experiment with printmaking using photo etching techniques, carborundum and silkscreen. Since returning to England in 1993 Fiona has used her experiences of wild, unspoilt Nordic landscape to inspire and inform her painting. She is interested in the rhythm and poetry inherent in nature without seeking to be literal. Drawing is crucial but by removing herself from observational sketches made in the landscape she seeks to find something original and transformative. Over the years Fiona developed techniques using modern acrylics but has recently chosen to work in oils again with the aim of creating fluid paintings with her recognizable broad brush marks and layered mark making. Her work has evolved out of Scottish Colourism, Nordic Expressionism and the techniques employed by Spontaneous Abstraction. McIntyre describes her influences as including the painters Cadell, Francis Bacon, Munch and the Icelander Svavar Guðnason but also the Canadian Group of Seven who made gestural, colourist paintings of the Canadian outback. Since 2004 Fiona has lived in Gloucestershire where she paints the agricultural patterns, tangled trees and changing skies of the Cotswolds. She also uses her studio as a base to make excursions to other landscapes and coastlines. Fiona has exhibited in the UK, Sweden, Norway and Spain and is represented in public collections including Fjarhitin Engineering - Iceland, Malmö General Hospital and Bohuslän Art Museum - Sweden. First major solo exhibition 'Painting Land and Sea' at The Montpellier Gallery, Cheltenham 2012, catalogue foreward by Peter Davies.'True to her Scottish origins, the energetic and gestural painter Fiona McIntyre is a colourist, extolling the virtues of painterly spontaneity to capture often elusive effects of multivarious landscapes in flux. Within the environments that have moved her, she complements observation with improvisation and interpretation. Using decisive sweeps of paint or charcoal her works have the earthy gravitas of the (early) Van Gogh - inspired Cumbrian painter Sheila Fell while also, in terms of her strong palette, evoking the chromatic romanticism of Innes and John.' by art critic and writer Peter Davies, Montpellier Gallery catalogue 2012.