Collection: Jack Frame

Glasgow School of Art graduate Jack Frame looks poised to fulfill the lavish potential promised by his 2007 sell-out degree show. Frame's top-three finish in 2009's prestigious Jolomo Awards for landscape painting has brought him to the attention of a wider audience, yet it would be wrong to pigeon hole him simply as a landscape painter. Certainly, looking at his recent paintings of trees, often delicately rendering on sheets of Perspex or glass, there seems to be so much more to them than a mere depiction of a landscape. Like Turner, he is always chasing the ether of atmosphere and the trees themselves appear to take on human qualities.

 It's as if, through the vehicle of the natural world, he is searching to place humans in context; to under-stand our place in an increasingly sterile global landscape. His truly beautiful depictions of a cherry tree in full blossom, in the studio before heading off to the Jolomo Awards exhibition, invokes a mixture of emotions, sending this viewer off on a march around her memory banks in search of half-remembered lines of poetry about the fleeting nature of youth and beauty. Describing himself as 'magpie' in his approach to his art, Frame is also a romantic in the way he engages his artistic sensibility, always striving to strip away the heaviness of a scene, be it in a landscape or figurative painting.