Visual enlightenment

Leonard McComb (born Glasgow 1930, of Irish parents) is a figurative painter of rare particularity and achievement. He is also a sculptor and his work spans a broad range of utterance: polished bronze, oil on canvas, pastel, pencil and gold leaf on paper (in his affectionate portrait of fellow painter and friend, the late Carel Weight, for instance), meticulous line drawing and etching. He is represented in the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery, is an acclaimed teacher (he was Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools, 1995–8), and has shown regularly in mixed exhibitions since the mid-1970s. He doubted much of the work he did before that, and destroyed a great deal of it in a dramatic bonfire. He is something of a perfectionist and exhibits only rarely in commercial galleries; in fact his last dealer show was 12 years ago. As a consequence, although he is a favourite at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the breadth of his work is not generally known to the public. A fine introductory show of what he does (it was at the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh last October to December) has just opened in Ipswich. I went to view the work in his south London studio before it was packed up for its trip to Suffolk.

One of the most striking images is a relatively small portrait-format oil on canvas of poplars called ‘Autumn Trees, Provence’ (2002). It simply presents five silvery trunks and their upper branches against a mesmeric blue sky. As a painting it is as much about intervals as a musical composition, and the main problem in making it real for McComb lay in rendering the trees convincingly sculptural. I asked him what colour he used for this vision of eternity. He is, as one might imagine, very particular about paints.