At first glance, Christopher Orr’s little black oil paintings appear to have survived from another era. The Scottish artist creates a dramatic lost world in which figures, situations, and items taken from well-known mid-century print media appear to have wandered into the sublime landscape dreams of a nineteenth Century Romantic by using an earthy colour scheme of browns, reds, and ochres and creating surfaces on which parts of dried, scraped-back pigment are contrasted with richer, fresher seeming passages.
Translucent pigment is applied in layers to create solid figures, but in other places paint has been removed to show the canvas underneath.