Callum Innes

LBB

Great Jones Alley

Callum Innes was born in 1962.  He is a Scottish abstract painter, a former Turner Prize nominee and winner of the Jerwood Painting Prize. He lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland.

He is best known for his use of monochromatic colors and clean bilateral divisions of the picture plane in both watercolor and oil. Steeped in the formal language Barnett Newman, Innes explores the metaphorical nature of revision and subtraction in painting, scrubbing off layers of partially dried paint with turpentine to excavate the gradient of pigments below. “Painting is long-term. I make a great deal of work, and I edit a great deal of work out,” he has explained. “A lot of work is not back to the drawing board but into the dustbin. I always see the possibility of going for the next step, changing something like the pigment or the color, or the structure of the piece.”