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Glasgow Canal

Printmaker: Reeves, Philip Thomas Langford, RSA PPRSW RGI RE · 1931-2017

Glasgow Canal

Following his training at Cheltenham Art School and the Royal College of Art in London, Reeves came to Scotland to take up a post at Glasgow School of…

Following his training at Cheltenham Art School and the Royal College of Art in London, Reeves came to Scotland to take up a post at Glasgow School of Art.

The present print is one of a series of representational landscapes executed by him of Scottish scenes and which prefigure his move into abstraction.

The canal featured is the Forth and Clyde Canal constructed in the 1790s and which ran for part of its length through the city of Glasgow.

Reeves made a number of artworks in different media of the canal at Port Dundas in the north of the city, over time paring the images into increasingly abstracted forms.

In the catalogue for an exhibition of Reeves work held in the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow in 1991 to celebrate his 70th birthday Reeves wrote; "When I first moved to Glasgow I found it very striking in a monochromatic way; blackness, wet streets with reflections on them. I got interested in the canal as subject matter and did pictures of Port Dundas, the canal basin, that has been swept away now."

The present impression appears to be a later pull.

© The Artist's Estate