Previously unseen paintings from a prolific Dundee artist go on show to the public for the first time this weekend.
Previous exhibitions of Vincent Rattray’s work have been held but until recently no one not even his family realised just how prolific he was.
Astounded, especially at the huge number of paintings he created of his beloved home city, family members have now organised the exhibition of his newly-discovered work at the Hannah Maclure Centre gallery at Abertay University.
Like his best friend, the musician Michael Marra, Rattray romanticised and celebrated the world around him, his paintings often reflecting both the humorous and the darker side of nature.
Through his paintings he rearranged the world, saturating scenes with colour and manipulating perspective.
Rattray was born in 1954 in Dundee and died in 2000 and his love for the city was amply illustrated through his multitude of paintings of local scenes.
In the preparations for the exhibition, which opens with a preview tonight, one painting was even discovered inside another, being used as the backing board for the frame.
Clare Brennan, curator of the Hannah Maclure Centre said: “It’s a great honour to put many of these paintings on show for the first time at Abertay University.
“Everyone, including Vince’s family, has been astounded by the huge number of paintings he created.
“His style is totally unique, taking freely from cubism, surrealism and expressionism where it helped him to portray Dundee’s patchwork architecture and the eccentric characters he knew.”
Rattray graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone in 1987 with first-class honours and he was the recipient of the Royal Scottish Academy’s Maclaine Watters prize.
His son Evan said: “One obvious influence on my father’s painting is of course Dundee. He loved the place, the people and its humour.
“Quite often people say that they find his work slightly unsettling, which I can understand, but I don’t think that was ever really his intention. Whenever I went to his studio he was always urging me to find the humour in his paintings.
“I think that was important to him. Maybe he thought unsettling people was funny!”
Michael Marra revered Rattray’s work, once recounting a story of Vince telling him: “The only way someone can really relax is to allow nature to reveal itself, rather than going looking for it.”
The exhibition, Synchronise Our Eyebrows, runs Monday to Friday, 10am-5pm, until April 26.