Colin McAllister
Colin McAllister lives in Wivenhoe, England. His recent exhibitions include ‘Global Weirding’, at The Sentinel Gallery, Wivenhoe (2022), and ‘Watching the World’, at The Minories, Colchester (2017). McAllister’s group exhibitions include ‘Colchester Past and Present’ at both The Sentinel Gallery, Wivenhoe, and Level Best Gallery, Colchester (2023) and ‘Levels of Detail’ at the Old Grocery, Wivenhoe (2023). After fourteen years employed as an art facilitator working with disabled adults, McAllister is now a freelance artist showing and delivering workshops in Colchester and surrounding areas.
Born in 1984, McAllister spent the first years of his life in North London before moving to Colchester at the age of three. He received his diploma in Graphic Design and Digital Media from the Colchester Institute in 2002 and completed a BA in Computer Animation from Portsmouth University in 2006. While McAllister initially planned to work in the animation industry, he re-discovered his passion for drawing via a series of collaborative experimental artworks with fellow Portsmouth students. Despite having no formal fine art education, McAllister returned to Colchester to begin a career in illustration. Along the way, he has documented much of the city’s redundant buildings, discovered his distinctive style as a satirical artist examining the plights facing mankind, and achieved local renown as an exhibiting artist and workshop leader.
McAllister’s series of Colchester Scenes started as an exercise in perfecting the craft of light, shade, and perspective. The project has since taken on a life of its own, providing an invaluable history of the cityscape leaving its industrial roots behind. McAllister rarely draws from life, instead opting to take multiple perspective photographs of his subject. Using graphic design software, McAllister constructs unique reference images for his drawings, creating new ways of seeing overlooked buildings. The scene is then illustrated in black and white India Ink.
This combination of modern technology and traditional fine art is core to McAllister’s practice. His series of dystopic scenes, exhibited under the moniker SNUBLiC, revolve around the big questions facing modern society – or, in the words of the artist, ‘things that scare me’. In this series, McAllister tackles existential threat in the form of climate change, sustainability, corrupt governments, and the dark side of technology. Each of these works follows weeks of research and dogged media consumption to build complex narratives on paper. Drawn in a stylised representational manner, McAllister uses warping perspectives to give a sense of grand space. Layers of detail build satirical worlds, opening a dialogue between the viewer, artist, and research material. Several recent additions to the series find a second life online in the form of digital interactive artworks, giving the viewer a unique insight into the artist’s reading, concerns, and mind at the time of drawing. McAllister creates these interactives in Adobe Animate, utilising skills from his degree in Computer Animation.
