kilmorack gallery blog

BETH ROBERTSON FIDDES | Recollection - Northern Dreams

2019-03-16T02:54:00.000-07:00

BETH ROBERTSON FIDDES | Big Wave Over Rocks | mixed media | 122 x 152cm

In this stunning new body of work, Beth Robertson Fiddes returns to landscapes in Scotland’s far Northwest, St Kilda and Iceland that have remained with her, bringing us face to face with forces of nature and the power of memory. Refreshingly we’re not just confronted with a scene, but with a highly distilled, residual sense of place, held in the mind. Fiddes’ approach to land and seascape is to experience it directly, often incorporating bold first response drawings, collaged into the ground of her paintings. The strength of these marks and the artist’s adept layering of media reflect the immeasurable depth of the landscape. What is so powerful in this latest work, is seeing the artist embrace her holistic experience of the environment and command of technique, exploring how ideas of North, genetic memory and dreams inform how we see. Fiddes has captured what is most essential about our need to connect with the natural world, tapping into an inheritance of understanding that is deeply personal and omnipresent. We’re led into hollows and fathomless pools that trigger the imagination, deep rooted memories and narratives that make us who we are.

The cinematic feel of her paintings is the result of a fluid approach to time and a creative process of immersion, shared with the viewer. There’s natural meld and resist in Fiddes’ unique handling of drawn elements, burnt marks, adhesive, oils and acrylics. Her richly layered surfaces are as subtle and dynamic as the ever-changing land and seascape. This fluidity is an essential part of the artist’s process, in terms of technical skill, experimentation and as a powerful invocation of human memory. Outstandingly drawn from recollection, the emotional undercurrent, psychological gravity and elusiveness of the Northern landscape is the beating heart of this work.

BETH ROBERTSON FIDDES | Dun from Hirta | mixed media | 81 x 122cm

Standing on ancient fissures of rock, we feel we’re in the presence of geological forces more enduring than ourselves, which can be comforting and confrontational. Often the viewer’s foreground is a rocky outcrop, where we stand in awe of nature, in its enormity and indifference to human timescales. These threshold spaces can make us feel exhilarated and equally vulnerable. In Big Wave Over Rock (mixed media, 122 x 152cm) we’re held in a moment of anticipation where the tide draws its breath. The mesmerizing pull of an unfurling wave in liquid emerald and turquoise is immediately compelling. The undertow of ocean currents over the golden russet slip of rock and seaweed is palpable. However, there is a wider sense of recognition in this suspended moment, a subtly gathering rhythm of grey forms and tonality behind the beauty of the breaking wave, a feeling of North that binds us to earthly gravity in the foreground and evaporates into the horizon, sea becoming sky.

BETH ROBERTSON FIDDES | Immersion | mixed media | 76 x 107cm

In Dun from Hirta (mixed media, 81 x 122cm) two points of light, the arc of the cliff edge and the inward glow of the horizon beckon us towards a space we cannot physically enter. The monumental landforms which appear as a bridge remain just out of reach, mirroring the way that St Kilda remains fertile ground in the global imagination. Although the landscape is uninhabited, Dun has a figurative presence of its own. This sense of the landscape as witness is also communicated very powerfully in Immersion (mixed media, 76 x 107cm) where Fiddes’ depiction of a stark, pale ravine creates a space of embrace and reckoning. Based on memories of Thingvellir in Iceland, the artist positions the viewer as witness, drawn into the glacial pool below. Depth of hue and shadow is offset by an apex of light, leading the eye into a shifting atmosphere of mist. Volcanic rifts foreshadow this human amphitheatre, the site of the first parliament, a place of law-making and punishment dating from the 10^th Century. Whether we know its history or not, Fiddes’ sensitive rendering of place follows the natural strata of stone and the complex nature of human experience. It is a breath-taking distillation of the North in vision and execution, founded on memory and dreams.

Georgina Coburn

BETH ROBERTSON FIDDES Recollection - Northern Dreams is on show at Kilmorack Gallery 16 March - 20 April 2019.

Colin Brown - Love Letter to Europe

2019-03-13T01:46:00.001-07:00

Berlin | Colin Brown | mixed media | 80cm x 80cm

‘Collage is all about the recycling, reinterpretation and reprocessing of our collective past, present and future. (…) It is the perfect medium of our time. (…) Today’s collage artists carve out fragments from this frenzy and force the disparate pieces to become one. It is their way of controlling the chaos- or at least pushing the pause button long enough for examination.’

James Gallagher, Cutting Edges-A Survey of Contemporary Collage (Gestalten, Berlin.)

In times of uncertainty and division, art is the only thing we possess to reimagine a different state. Colin Brown’s Love Letter to Europe is a statement of gratitude and positive connection. This new body of work is a celebration of the great cities of Europe, their human history and our shared capacity for reinvention. In a career spanning thirty years, Brown has explored a technique of making art that actively defies all borders. Collage is a creative process of reformation, reappraisal and renewal. The artist sifts their surroundings and fragments of history, juxtaposing images, text and in Brown’s case, pure elements of painting; line, form, tone, colour, pattern and texture, to create a unified composition. Brown skillfully creates open, imaginative spaces inside the picture plane for new connections to be made. Layered, found materials from Europe’s urban centres provide triggers of memory and association, not just for the citizen, but for our universal travels through life. There’s a fluid sense of time in his work, in the weathered patina of Vintage chalky emulsion pastels and vibrant splatter of industrial enamels, oil and acrylic, applied with immediacy and verve. Handwritten pencil meets advertising poster font and images from art history in Brown’s strikingly bold and tensely delicate works. The tension between deliberation and instinct, inclusion and erosion are held beautifully in balance. This positive sense of determination and integrity, striving for balance, is the trajectory of Colin Brown’s practice. It’s the imperative of out-creating destruction, a critical process that feels more urgent than ever on a global stage.

Copenhagen | Colin Brown | mixed media | 40cm x 40cm

In a work like Copenhagen (mixed media, 40 x 40cm) we see materials and imagery anchored to place, but equally transcending it. Fragments of identity are lovingly acknowledged in the presence of a Vilhelm Hammershøi portrait. The woman with her back to us feels like the still, beautifully honed soul of this work. It’s the depth hidden in reserved character, collective and individual, which the artist positions in the high right-hand corner, characteristically accented with vibrant paintwork in unexpected orange, red and blue. History inhabits the image through iconic references. Equally there is an undeniable energy of reinvention present, mirroring the way that cities evolve.

The fabric of Brown’s art are human marks, written on walls and dwellings, excavated by time, weather and consciousness. Like human memory, elements in his compositions emerge and recede, with colour, texture, mark, image and text working as imaginative triggers of boundless connection. Whatever our background or political foreground, imagination unites us. We are all hardwired to connect and create narratives, joining the visual dots to find and define who we are. Cultural identification doesn’t equal nationalism in this work. Regardless of whether we identify Denmark’s famous sons Hammershøi (1864-1916) and Hans Christian Anderson, or the specificity of a Viking hull, human elements are positioned empathically within the composition. The mysterious feminine, the father of fairy tales and the boat to carry us home (or away) are universal triggers we are free to construct our own narratives with. They merge and overlap with each other, receding into the deeper layers of the picture plane to where collective memory lies. How do we know who we are? Art and mythology, which even with the dominance of 21^st century digital consumer culture never went away. The psychological foundations of place and human memory are at play in this work- and play is important, because in making and viewing this work that’s exactly where joy, hope and resilience are to be found. Although the core of this work is distinctly Northern and Danish, the fluidity of technique and ideas is distinctly open. That is what’s at stake in the age we’re living in- the choice to shut ourselves in (and effectively down) or open ourselves up to what makes us human in the best sense, out-creating destruction in the process.

Lisbon | Colin Brown | acrylic on board | 80cm x 80cm

Even in troubled and chaotic times, Brown’s work is resoundingly hopeful. He uses collage as a means of expressing and celebrating the complexity of who we are as human beings. His unique combination of painting and collage presents the viewer with a multi-layered surface of possibility, it’s the beauty of his protest. Historically collage has been used as an agent of disruption, satire and protest, challenging the status quo. During the Weimar period, artists such as Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann and George Grosz used collage as a means of social critique, in a time of economic uncertainty, gross inequality and extremist politics not unlike our own. Early in his career Brown discovered ‘the Dadaist ideal of looking at society in fragments’, a way of re-fashioning the world by juxtaposing disparate elements, sharpening perception. His protest at our proposed separation from Europe is to reveal the rich tapestry of connections at the heart of each one of these cities, from Glasgow to Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, Barcelona, Munich and Lisbon. He does this through the passionate and considered crafting of each composition. Cycles of intense growth, abandonment and decay have always been part of urban and human identity. However, in Brown’s art there is a shared sense of creative renewal, crossing all man-made borders.

Georgina Coburn

Kilmorack Gallery | Love Letter to Europe

Colin Brown's Love Letter to Europe is on show at Kilmorack Gallery from 16 March - 20 April 2019

PAUL BLOOMER | three works for a better world

2018-10-13T03:17:00.000-07:00

I am reminded of a creature that sits on the edge of the world absorbing signs of life and listening to the stories of birds. This is what a great artist should be: an explorer and re-teller of tales, and it is undoubtably what Paul Bloomer has achieved in his latest works. In this series of sixteen etchings Bloomer shows us events from the lives of birds around his adopted home in the Shetlands. This ornithological realm is unencumbered by the wayward vices and borders of human society, a reminder that there are other ways to be. It is also a story about the time-compressed and precious light of Shetland’s ‘simmer dim.’ After this comes autumn and winter. There is a cycle of time that we should live by.

PAUL BLOOMER | watching stone | etching | 21cm x 15cm

Bloomer has been inspired by Goya’s ‘Los caprichos’ where each etching is accompanied with a short piece of text. Bloomer’s ‘Watching Stone’ is accompanied by Rumi: ‘Somewhere between right and wrong there is a garden. I will meet you there.’ The magic of this etching is not just the balanced composition, it is the light (created by rubbing chalk on the etching plate) which is everywhere. Light haloes one oyster catcher and is inside the bodies of gulls that circle healing stones. It is also on the horizon that pulls us in as if, one day, everything will end up there - north of north - the viewer, gulls, oyster catchers and even the stones. It is both a joyful and melancholy thought of the ultimate interconnectedness of all living things.

PAUL BLOOMER | Flight | etching | 21cm x 15cm

‘Flight’ is accompanied by the words of Chief Seattle (1854) ‘How can we sell the air?’ Here dandelion seeds float above the sea towards the light. It is a simple composition with few objects and a straight horizon, but Bloomer gives us the impression of the air supporting the seeds. They are in balance between sea and sky and would fall if against Chief Seattle’s wishes ‘the air was sold.’ It is hypnotically beautiful, a world of vulnerable weightless floating and acceptance of light and wind.

‘Layers of Time’ is different. Here natural forces are strong, and the remains of all epochs are eventually filled away in the geological library . In this etching time dwarfs us and light embraces everything – the birds and the stones which glow in their shelves. The text included with this is ‘these rocks live in an eternal peace that lives through storms and war.’ This is a sensitive work by an artist who looks out from the edge of the world with clarity, aware of the vastness of deep-time and the brevity of a human life.

Tony Davidson, October 2018

PAUL BLOOMER | layers of time | etching | 15cm x 21cm

PAUL BLOOMER on Kilmorack Gallery website

Unlocking Memory and Awakening Conscience | New Works by Joyce W Cairns

2018-10-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

Joyce W Cairns | Conversation with a Kestrel | oil on board |15 x 21cm

Kilmorack’s latest exhibition of works by Joyce W Cairns presents the female protagonist, or witness, in evolving guises. From the beautiful four seasons suite of oils on panel to the monumental The Magic Gate and Other Stories, Cairns’ art brings us face to face with memories that define who we are. Though autobiographical details are present, the critical baseline of her work is humanity and the collective psyche. Her paintings cross multiple thresholds of time and memory, using collected objects as catalysts for the imagination. In The Magic Gate and Other Stories (oil on panel 183 x 244cm) the artist’s mastery of composition leads the mind into an interior landscape of familial relationships. The foreground table and its contents become part of the viewer’s space. There are triggers of association in the children’s storybook once read aloud, a bowl adorned with bountiful post war promise, a commemorative royal mug, a jungle service pamphlet, a greetings card for “Mummy” and a packet of sweets with the pastel fizz taste of youth and innocence.

Joyce W Cairns | The Magic Gate and Other Stories | oil on panel | 183 x 244cm

Arterial, stylised treatment of the rowing boat, upturned as a gateway or birth canal, aligns with the Mother figure on the far left, standing on the ultimate threshold. Whilst many of these references are highly personal, the way we are skillfully led into the work reflects the fluidity and universal experience of human memory. Remembrance tokens are worn around the neck like military identification in the onward march of life. These visual touchstones enable us to make our own connections. Like the work of Max Beckmann, the compression of human figures in the picture plane create a deeply psychological sense of transformative awareness, from child to adult and viewer to witness. Past and present are entwined around the central protagonist, cradling the memory of a pet cat like a child, glancing sideways at the human procession of remembrance behind her. Immediately at her back, the figure of an old woman peers over a prow, one of the guises of the protagonist, sensing her own mortality. The child holding a doll stands at the apex of the composition with a hen on her head, a victim in the anthropomorphised form of a passive, domesticated bird and a recurrent trope in Cairns’ art. The palette of steely nocturnal blue to pure ultramarine, sharply accented with cadmium yellow, red and alizarin crimson heighten the emotive qualities of the painting, as our gaze shifts between human relationships, experiences of youth and age. Cairns’ Father appears in the left-hand corner of the image, as a witness beneath the picture plane. In these dreamlike spaces, we are confronted with awakening conscience.

Joyce W Cairns | The North Star | oil on board | 15 x 21cm

In The Magic Gate and Other Stories the high horizon of Aberdeen harbour and the village of Footdee are thresholds for the soul’s journey on the edge of the sea. The orientation of true North is exemplified in the oil on board painting The North Star (15 x 21cm). The female protagonist gestures inward, to the yellow multifaceted star at the centre of her being, diagonally aligned with the lighthouse guiding her. The brilliant ultramarine of unconscious night envelopes the image, illuminated by pale skin and vibrant cadmium red. It feels like a curtain is lifted on the artist’s navigation through life, plunging oceanic depths of collective self, tenaciously driven to out-create destruction. In the exquisite Conversation with a Kestrel (oil on board, 15 x 21cm) Cairns poetically renders a sharing of secrets in blood-red crimson. The intimate communion with Nature and one’s own nature comes to the fore in an image that is as powerful as it is beautiful. From these smaller scale works to her epic War Tourist paintings, Cairns is an artist who powerfully confronts what it is to be human, revisiting artefacts and memories of the past, to awaken consciousness in the present.

Georgina Coburn, October 2018

The Magic Gate and Other Stories Exhibition Catalogue

Joyce W Cairns | Kilmorack Gallery Artist Page

Some pictures I haven’t done yet | ROBERT POWELL

2018-07-31T07:04:00.004-07:00

work still to be created by Robert Powell

At Dusk we Use the Serinette to Teach the Birds to Sing (or The Twilight Chorus in the Mechanical Menagerie, The Automatic Aviary, The Clockwork Zoo.)

The Triumph of Silence

This picture is set during Orpheus’ last concert. He’s been pretty bummed (understandably) since the underworld incident, and he blames himself (quite rightly) that Eurydice is still down there. All the songs he has sung after he got back from Hades have been unbearably sad - this is the person who sang the sirens to suicide.

At the centre of the picture is a stage surrounded by an enormous stadium. There is a huge cosmic organ (like Robert Fludd’s) putting down some beats and the light show cuts up through the aquatint dark to illuminate the heavenly spheres dancing to their own celestial rhythm. Down below, the crowd is going crazy. Maenads have surged onto the stage (Bacchic super-fans) and are tearing Orpheus limb from limb because he wouldn’t have sex with them all. His head, still singing, is tossed into a nearby river where it floats, still singing, forever more.

Palette: grimy black, dingy orange and vivid purple. Orpheus is drawn a bit like a mid-70s Robert Plant.

The Great Wall

The Ancient Chinese and the Romans shared an interest in geomancy. Both were also enthusiastic wall builders. The Romans had a god of borders and partitions, known as Terminus, who was honoured at liminal spaces and at the fringes of the empire, but was also recognised at the very heart of Rome itself. In fact, their civilisation was said to have started with the building of a wall – this picture shows that wall.

As soon as the wall is built, Remus becomes foreign to Romulus. When Remus steps over the ramparts to tease his brother, without qualm and without hesitation, Romulus kills him. It is the principle of the thing.

Palette: Raw sienna, rodent grey.

Cartophagy

An anthromorphic political map like those that were popular at the start of WW1 where each country is represented as a person in national dress. This version depicts a fictional pair of continents made up of a dozen or so states. Each of these states possesses a gaping mouth and a set of perfectly formed teeth, and each one is engaged in devouring its neighbour.

Palette: Peach, cream, Prussian blue and British Empire pink.

Architecture of Solitude

Apollodorus of Damascus was the architect to the Emperor Hadrian. This picture is in the architect’s studio. There are models of buildings everywhere, large skyscrapers with sheer walls and steep angles that accentuate their height. It is a celebration of the vertical. Grounded by these miniature towers are ramps, walkways and aqueducts. Apollodorus is a proponent of International Classicism.

Like Hitler, Hadrian was a despot who fancied himself as an architect. In the picture he would be shown entering the studio holding architectural models of his own design. They are all mock-Tudor cottages with thatched roofs and little squiggly chimney pots. The emperor is seeking the architect’s opinion on his work. He will urge the architect to “Go on, be honest”, and so the architect will tell the emperor exactly what he thinks of the architecture of nostalgia.

The Influence Machine | hand-tinted etching

Henceforth Apollodorus will be exiled to a remote forsaken place to build shacks for the local ruffians to vandalise, waiting for the orders that will eventually arrive that will condemn the architect to be buried alive in the foundations of one of the emperor’s new buildings.

Palette: tangerine and dove grey

Only Connect

A portrait of the entire population of the world. As of June 2018, that population is counted at 7.6 billion, so I would probably need to have group sittings. The scale would be slightly larger than life to give a bit of grandeur. Each person would be looking at the other 7.6 billion minus one in the eye and -this is clear from the shape of the lips – they would be whispering “I love you”.
Already dead people will not be included, since it probably needs to be kept simple.

Palette – varied but mostly beige.

www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk/robert-powell-artist
Kilmorack Gallery Magalogue no 3

three questions to JAMES NEWTON ADAMS

2018-07-31T07:04:00.000-07:00

James Newton Adams artist

It seems that you have an urge to create. Not just painting but also sculpture and music. Do these other interests feed back into your painting?

I find that moving between creative vocations gives me a fresh perspective; and that it is easier to work back-to-back in the creative world using different media than it is from everyday life.
Whether something I make is 2D, 3D or sound, I aim to please my senses in a way that I hope the listener or viewer will also appreciate. Mixing music and composing songs is like painting, only layers of sound rather than paint are applied. I often find when moving from sculpture to painting that the paint has become thicker on the canvas as if I was still thinking like a sculptor.
Composition is key to all these creations. A song that doesn’t tell a story is as meaningless as marks on a canvas that have no significance, or a sculpture that doesn’t demand attention from the viewer.

You studied and worked in London for many years before moving to Skye in 2004. Was the move a lifestyle or an artistic choice?

I lived in London for over 10 years and it was there I discovered my passion for music and metalwork. I had a business creating curtain poles for a nationwide department store untilI I realised that I could never make a reasonable profit unless I expanded and became something I wasn’t prepared to be.
An opportunity came up in Blair Atholl to purchase the Old Smiddy, and the dream of having my own workshop and gallery took hold. I had trained as an artist and this was my calling. One day I packed up my belongings and left the city, never to return. I remember waking up the following day in a highland village thinking ‘what have I done.’ Life was quiet, and I had left all my friends and urban lifestyle behind.

I love the fun and freedom of your paintings. How do you respond to the labels (faux) naive and primitive? And who are your artistic heroes.

I consciously decided to paint in a ‘faux’ naive way because something about the genre resonated with me. Some of the imagery I had seen in folk art and children’s book illustrations harked back to the time I was born, the early 1970s. The style is a great way to express humour or joy in a more subtle way than simply spelling it out, There is a quirkiness to the Naive that sits between descriptive and pure expression.
When I started painting I discovered the work of Alfred Wallis. I was compelled by his composition and the raw way he painted. Wallis inspired me to let go of my training. I have long been an admirer of many other British naive painters including Lowry, Fred Yates, Simeon Stafford, Gary Bunt and Alan Lowndes. More recently I have been studying the work of John Bellany.

www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk/james-newton-adams-artist
Kilmorack Gallery Magalogue no 3

Swirling Mental Mists - ALAN MACDONALD

2018-07-31T07:03:00.000-07:00

The work of Alan Macdonald captures us like few other artists. Here he tells of a mysterious and inspirational place.

Night Sprite | oil on board | 36" x 30"

When I left Art College, I was so terribly serious about what I was doing that everything I turned my hand to seemed to fall flat. It was with the rediscovery of a childlike love of play, and a tendency to get lost in dreamy thought, that I began to put things right. Recently, it has been discovered that a human brain is far more active when daydreaming than when trying to solve a complex mental problem. That was a relief for me to hear and it would explain why some of my most original ideas have emerged from that swirling mental mist.

Being faced with a white canvas can be an alarming experience and initially your mind scrambles around desperately looking for something to paint. The trick is to let go and allow that something to emerge from within you. I learnt this after briefly dipping my toe into abstract painting, having been encouraged to do so by the wonderful abstract painter Mali Morris. It took a bit of getting used to, because you have to trust your feelings and follow your subconscious. What you seek is like an elusive thread, difficult to put your finger on and constantly flicking just out of reach. Every now and then, if you are persistent, you will get a hold of it briefly and feel the little tug of energy, like a fish on the other end.

Man with a Fertile Mind | oil on board | 28" x 24"

When I applied this abstract thought to figurative painting, the results were exhilarating. I placed figures and objects onto that white canvas with no preconceived plan or design. Everything poured out until I stopped, a little confused and mentally drained. This reminded me of a story about an expedition on Everest, when one of the slightly irritated climbers confronted the hired Sherpas, who kept stopping. “Are you tired?” he scoffed. “No,” came the reply, “we’re just waiting for our souls to catch up.” That’s how it feels after you have spilled it all out onto a canvas.
Well, you soon learn that your subconscious communicates in riddles and plays poetic games that are fascinating and intellectually stimulating. You also cannot avoid what is troubling or rumbling inside. It’s all there in oil on canvas: your loves, your hates, your fears and your dreams. The conscious mind eventually works its way through that twisted maze of imagery, necessarily clarifying and simplifying, without losing the raw energy created by the painting’s violent birth.
Why do I do all this? Because it’s like being taken on a thrilling journey, one in which I have little or no idea of the ultimate destination. The sense of adventure and excitement at the outset is addictive and once experienced, compensates for all the inevitable doubts along the way. When it eventually comes right, you arrive somewhere that is strangely familiar, but which you have never seen before. It’s a distant coast of you.

Alan Macdonald, May 2018
www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk/alan-macdonald-artist/
Kilmorack Gallery Magalogue no 3

The Candy Man | oil on linen | 190cm x 215cm

World Tree | KAPKA KASSABOVA on trees and Ian Westacott

2018-07-28T05:43:00.000-07:00

Kapka Kassabova on the hidden power of trees and the work of Ian Westacott

Lake Mungo and Black Suns | copper etching with Raymond Arnold | 40cm x 108cm

To look at an Ian Westacott tree is to step through a portal. His trees are as powerful as any human portrait, but free of agenda. They are individuals, a forest of one, captured at a specific moment in time at some remote location in Scotland, England, Sweden, or Australia. Here are beings that have borne weather and the consequence of human actions with an endurance that would be tempting to anthropomorphise – though Westacott never does. His erudition and old-worldly sensibility enable him to remain true to the arboreal essence of his subjects. In their presence your mind is stilled, while your eye seeks out the wrinkles, warts, scars, roots, fungi. Here, you recognise a face; there, the shadow of a violent blow remembered by the bark. An offering, a memorial, a celebration, apples like small suns – now it’s here, now it’s gone. Time disappears but the tree is there.

I look at his Scots Pines and instantly I’m transported to my childhood in the great Balkan Ranges, at the top of a firtree sticky with resin, alone and free. But also to Glen Affric, home to one of the last Caledonian forests in Scotland.

‘Everybody has a tree in their life. Everybody climbs one as a child.’ Ian Westacott said when I visited him in his Dornoch studio. ‘Sitting with a tree is peaceful.’

Like sitting with your oldest self. Westacott is softly spoken and seems drawn to secret places within and without. In some ways, he is an artist of the hidden self, a master of archetype. Born and raised in rural Australia, he moved to rural Scotland in his thirties and for years struggled with having nothing to hold on to in a foreign landscape. Then he started looking for historic trees, in which Scotland abounds. Stroke by stroke, he connected to the stories of this ancient land. Just as living in the Scottish Highlands has re-connected my writing to my native Balkans, Westacott’s artistic connection with Australia has been rekindled. Among his recent work are ghostly double etchings of acacias, the only tree that survives in the Australian desert. In these ‘double vision’ etchings, the second vision is created by fellow artist Raymond Arnold. The effect is haunting. These thorny acacias are truly denizens of Aboriginal Dreamtime. And Dreamtime, like the Omphalos, is where the world tree originates.

Lake Mungo Murry Pine

Ian Westacott’s practice strikes me as devotional in its attention to intimate detail, its personal humility, and its cumulative ecstasy. It brings to mind the monastic hermits of early Christianity, crouched in their caves and working for years on a single icon or illuminated page that overtime would become the only surviving record of their epoch. The spiritual intelligence of his trees moves straight into the world of pure symbol. Like the hermit caves, his trees hold knowledge for us – for we are forgetful. They carry the DNA of our past and our future.

The world tree makes the world forest which is home not only to biological diversity and climate equilibrium (as if this weren’t enough), but of the human story too. Myth, folklore, and communal narratives come from the forest of what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. The forest is our shared imaginative identity. In the forests of northern Europe live gnomes, nymphs, the Rapunzels, Rumpelstiltskins, Hansels and Gretels of fairy tales. In southern Europe, creatures of the Slavic imagination roam the narrative forest: the witchy baba Yaga, cave-dwelling dragons, eery maiden vilas only seen at moonlight, and the undead varkolaks and talasums.

But in Westacott’s trees, I also see holograms, the morphic resonance of the slaughtered. The uprooted or dying tree is a theme in Westacott’s work – it is a tree that he sees everywhere he goes. Trees die from the top first, he tells me. It is symbolic of self-harm, and the hole it leaves is our communal wound. I see this everywhere too, as tree populations fall every year across the globe. Across the road from our house in Inverness-shire, a mixed forest of sublime beauty stood where a quarry now eviscerates the earth. Each year, it chomps its way deeper into the shrinking glade, giving the old forest path a sheer drop into the pit. And a length of barbed wire.

The world tree is endangered by human expediency, by a failure of love. When I look at an Ian Westacott tree, I am reminded to lie under the wild geans in the garden and watch the sky move through their crowns. Lest we forget that we are nothing more, and nothing less, than the world tree – our feet planted on the earth, our spirit reaching into the cosmos.
Kapka Kassabova, May 2018

Kapka Kassabova is a poet and writer. Her latest book ‘Border - a Journey to the Edge of Europe’ won the Saltire Society Book of the Year, the Edward Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year and the Highland Book Prize.

published in our Magalogue number three. Please contact the gallery for a printed version.

Worlds of Possibility- The Art of Colin Brown

2018-06-13T08:45:00.001-07:00

Colin Brown in his Stonehaven studio. Photograph: G.Coburn 2018

Worlds of Possibility - The Art of Colin Brown

Nestled in a listed timber building, layered with time and industry, I find Colin Brown working on his latest painting. Natural light from the window streams in on the easel, illuminating layers of detail and experience. For twenty years Brown’s studio in the Northeast coastal town of Stonehaven has been a harbour for his practice. For an artist driven to excavate cumulative human marks, it’s a welcome place of regeneration. Here he can sift materials gathered from his travels and transform them into dynamic, finely balanced compositions.

Brown’s distinctive work combines painting and collage techniques, formal design and accidental marks in ways that evoke the passing of time and experience of generations. We feel that these highly crafted surfaces could be sections of city walls plastered over with signage, subject to erosion and the density of human life. Unlike many post Warhol contemporary artists that use urban fragments, Brown’s emphasis is not mainstream cultural references or commentary. The energy of European cities like Berlin with their human history and vibrant reinvention, free his work from the dead shine of American Pop Culture.

Holi by Colin Brown (2015, mixed media, 40.5 x 40.5cm)

The foundation of Brown’s practice is figurative art and the discipline of painting that dominated Scottish Art of the 1980s. Whilst a student at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, Brown observed a generation of Scottish artists strongly focused on humanity including Stephen Campbell, Joyce W Cairns and Ken Currie. He also discovered “the Dad-ist ideal of looking at society in fragments.” An abandoned jute factory became the ground for three-dimensional collage works and assemblage from architectural elements. The potent vision of German artists of the interwar period including Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, the impasto choreography of American Abstract Expressionism and the sculptural paint handling of Anselm Kiefer continue to inspire him.

Giant Sand by Colin Brown (2013, mixed media, 60 x 60cm)

As a recipient of the RSA John Kinross Scholarship Brown’s experience of living and working in Florence and four years spent in Düsseldorf established strong connections with Europe. Recognised internationally for his innovative use of paint and collage, Brown received The Pollock- Krasner Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York in 1996 and has featured in Fine Art publications; Collage- Assembling Contemporary Art, edited by Blanche Craig (Black Dog Publishing, London) and Cutting Edges-A Survey of Contemporary Collage, edited by James Gallagher and Robert Klanten (Gestalten, Berlin). Brown’s appetite for urban culture, awareness of history and understanding of painterly techniques helped shape his unique style. A vintage palette of chalky emulsion, rich industrial enamels, oils and acrylic paint, combine with layered imagery, collaged text and handwritten pencil script, to create rich fields of association.

Blackstar by Colin Brown (2017, mixed media, 60 x 60cm)

In a Brown painting, weathered cracks of separation are punctuated by energetic drips and splatters of paint. These contrast with images from Indie music, cinema, scientific illustration, sport and art history as triggers of thought and feeling. His work carries no prescribed meaning and the viewer is freed to make their own connections. Brown’s use of recycled materials and mastery of composition place the human mark back at the centre of art to reimagine an age of consumerism. When I see the artist’s studio wall of collected writings and imagery, they present an entire field of synaptic sparks and worlds of possibility.

Georgina Coburn

NORTH | Janette Kerr

2018-05-25T01:51:00.000-07:00

JANETTE KERR is known for her elemental paintings. Here she writes about the sea and why it is an inspiration.

Janette Kerr in her studio

It is the periphery of the land that I am drawn to – the far edges of a place, margins between land and sea which blur with the ebb and flow of tides; areas that feel remote and uninhabited, which seem touched more by the erosion of land, actions of wind and rain, than by human occupation. So Shetland and north to Svalbard are obvious locations for me; exposed to the full force of the oceans, generating high winds and agitated seas, they are places of extremes.

Making work en-plein-air is integral to my working process. I seek immersive experiences - extremes of changing land and sea, and physical and meteorological shifts. I draw while out in boats with waves washing over the deck, crouched with my sketchbook and paints on rocks by the sea, blown across hills by gusts of wind, drenched by spray and sleet, going home with salt-encrusted skin. Sailing from Longyearbyen to Fuglefjorden on a tall ship in 2016, l drew beside glaciers, drifting mist hanging in dark snow-strewn mountains - a thunder-grey and pale blue world.

Stretch out you Arms | oil on canvas

This is all part of how I work. Such physical encounters with places, first-hand observations, are essential to my practice. My paintings move beyond representational and passive - beyond the detached objective world of topographical features - to become active engagements with landscape. They are about movement and rhythm of sea and wind, swelling and breaking waves, merging of spray with air, advancing rain and mist, glancing sunlight, elements that refer to something intangible. They are also tempered by knowledge of nature, a profound understanding of its power and resilience. My images acknowledge the legacy of the 18th century Romantic Sublime, confrontations with nature in its most elemental state.

My painting has always been informed by history and science, reading first-hand accounts of storms and loss of life, of the disastrous yet compelling journeys of travellers in the frozen Arctic. I have spent time with oceanographers learning about the complex topography of the sea, the formation of waves - the impact of depth and terrain as a wave ‘feels’ the bottom of the ocean – and of extreme seas. I’ve talked to Shetland fishermen, hearing about the moder dy (‘mother wave’) - the name given over a hundred years ago to a wave-like motion or swell observed best in foggy weather, and by which they could navigate:

‘…no matter how fierce the gale, how wind-riven and uncertain the billow, the methodical undulations of the moder dy could be seen across the hills and valleys of a wind-tormented sea, always setting four-square towards the land.’

All this has made me far more aware of the dynamic complexity of the sea, which, together with my experiences of being out in it, are woven into the artwork.

Making a painting is perhaps like mapping an uncharted place; a searching for a path, a way through. The artist is adrift on an inward voyage; experience mediated through our body, so knowledge of our surroundings will always be partial and particular. The process of painting, of layering and removal, of veiling and unveiling, is perhaps analogous with the sea. Fleetingly the horizon is glimpsed, then tilts and shudders, simultaneously bringing into focus one level while another recedes, cloud becomes a crest of a vast wave; sunlight seems to burgeon from the depth of the waters not from above. I’m trying to transform something physical into something emotional and visceral.

The ocean is at once extraordinary, exhilarating, desirable, terrifying, and tragic. It is an integral part of the human psyche to enjoy nature and the power of the sea at its most elemental. We are drawn to it. Scientist and ecologist Rachael Carson:

‘Each of us carry in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as seawater. This is our inheritance.’
My art is and will always be a resonance between an internalized world and an external one.

‘And so we re-enter it mentally and imaginatively, recreating a world that, in the deepest part of our subconscious mind, we have never wholly forgotten’.

Janette Kerr PRWA
April 2018

www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk
www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk/janette-kerr-artist

Silence, Vasahalvoya | oil on canvas | 120cm x 130cm

The Power of the Periphery

2018-05-21T03:13:00.000-07:00

Art-dealer and gallery Director Tony Davidson on why not being in the centre can be just what is needed.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W. B. Yeats, from ‘The Second Coming’ (1919)

‘Lovely gallery, but so remote.’ I heard this a lot twenty years ago but less so now. Sitting here today, still geographically on the edge of Europe’s circumference, I feel that the gallery and its artists have a vital role to play. Here at the edge the air is clear – even if, as Yeats warned a hundred years ago, the centre might be a little confused.

Artists of the edge do what all artists should do. They explore feelings about nature, time, life and death; and they do it away from the chaotic distractions of power, money and celebrity that lie close to the centre. Few artists have tackled the personal stories that arise out of war better than Joyce W Cairns. For years she worked out of an old studio buried among the fishing houses of Footdee in Aberdeen. This work couldn’t have come from an urban centre. The artist needed time to unearth memories.

An artist like Steve Dilworth, who explores deep time and the sacred in objects, could not exist at the centre. Not just because much of his sculptural medium is literally washed up on the shores of Harris, but because the Outer Hebrides go beyond antiquity and into ancientness. There is a continuity in their moon-like landscape that exists beyond human experience and into geological time.
There are other artistic voices from the edge that are just as vital for us to hear. The sacredness and secrecy of the landscape is sung in the work of Allan MacDonald, Beth Robinson Fiddes, Jane MacNeill and others. What could be more relevant? In the last ten years wilderness has been given a financial value, and ‘improved’ into the industrial landscape of windfarm, track and pylon. Not long ago people of all political colours would look to nature for a direction. Some of them would tramp past the gallery. The environment is arguably the ultimate political issue of our days.

The periphery includes Russian kinetic artist Eduard Bersudsky, the supreme artist on the absurdities of the human condition; painters of the soul like Alan McGowan and Henry Fraser, and scrap metal artists like Helen Denerley. Even the late Gerald Laing was inspired by life away from the corrupting power of the New York and London art worlds. These artists don’t survive away from the centre merely because the psychological and physical air is cleaner. It is also because their unique qualities are recognised by private and public collectors. They are bought at a more gentle pace than the mass feeding of an art fair, and for more lasting reasons than vanity.

The internet, of course, has given the edge more visibility. Most vital of all, artists of the periphery connect us to what is most important. Like the hermits who chose to sit in unfeasible remoteness, and tell us about the continuity of land and water, the human and the divine, true artists show us what still remains when the centew does not hold.

Tony Davidson
Director of Kilmorack Gallery

www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk

Kilmorack Gallery, March 2018

three questions to LOTTE GLOB

2018-05-20T06:46:00.000-07:00

Danish-born ceramic artist Lotte Glob in an inspiration to many. But what were her inspirations. Three questions to this interesting artist.

Lotte Glob

Growing up you were surrounded by the avant-guarde CoBrA artists. You must have been aware of many mediums - why ceramics?

I think I was born with clay in my hands beside a big bonfire. As far back as I remember I have been playing with earth, fire and water. I drew, painted, weaved and knitted as a child too. Clay and paint was the best. At thirteen the school took us on a trip to a pottery factory where I saw five men throw a big vase on a kick wheel – and when I came home I pleaded to go to pottery classes and to get a wheel. The only praise I ever got in school was when I made a pinch bowl - so I left a year later and went to learn and work at a ceramic studio. I am still as passionate about the possibilities of clay and fire as ever. Nothing has stopped me painting either.

Your knowledge of glazes, clay and the firing point of rocks is impressive; and so is your creative imagination. What comes first: the skill of ceramics or your muse, one of which I assume is nature?

Always the Muse - nature - comes first. The skill helps me play even better - although at times skill gets in the way as I mostly jump into the depth of the unknown where I feel like a beginner - forgetting about previous knowledge.
I guess the knowledge will still be somewhere in the unconscious. I always try new things - it brings excitement and failures as well as good work. Failures take me to new horizons.

There appear to be influences which lie beyond Scotland, Denmark and ceramics. What artists are your greatest inspiration?

As nature, Mother Earth, is my main influence - any artist, be it a ceramicist, painter, writer or musician has an influence. It is hard to single just one artist out. It also changes as you get on in life. Asger Jorn and the CoBrA artists have had the biggest impact on me. From thirteen it was the Neolithic stone age and folk art, Marc Chagall, Emil Nolde and Edward Munch, also Outsider Art. Then I discovered Hundertwasser and Gaudi. Of contemporary artists David Nash, Anslem Kiefer, Gerhard Richter are inspiring artists that spring to mind, but the list is endless.

It Followed Me Home - ceramic - 65cm high

LOTTE GLOB at Kilmorack Gallery

Strange Wood - a poem on creativity by artist PATRICIA CAIN

2018-05-15T08:37:00.000-07:00

Patricia Cain is known for ambitious paintings which explore artistic perception through drawing. Her process is bold and intuitive; and to express it she has written a poem. Sometimes that is just what is needed.

Strange Wood
by Patricia Cain

In Self versus other

the routine is never square-on.

It’s more of a side-on thing.

That’s just how it is.

Inte/exte, a hint, a glimpse. A feeling that

slips out of sight again, whilst making way

for continuous re-approach.

…and then to start putting down:

Swab the decks and

establish a foundation

for self-awareness to disappear.

Faith before action - a probable gift -

underpins the bravado of engagement.

Down with the brisket and mulch and we’re away.

Balancing up means to remain askew,

out of kilter. So, I tip,

hang, suspend via the continuum.

Shiftings, triggers, betterments, pauses,

siftings.

Chalkiness versus the full fat of colour.

Unflowery and quite unimaginative.

E-merging

Me-merging

Salt-laying

Truth-saying

Pack-handling – no,

mercury-scooping

so that when I breathe in,

what is breathed out

is my balance.

Is that how I think?

Transfixed, transposed, trance-(un)aware.

I never should have started

carving out the artistic, autistic

in this absence with focussed intent.

In the mid-sense of togetherness,

many’s the level of speaking.

Many’s a reel of the circumferences

that fuels the tremor of my arc.

It makes my belly hurt,

being re-made through action.

Slips out of sight again.

Reconnecting through that sideways glance -

correlating, berating, syncopating.

Truth-sayer when I don’t want to be,

alone-ness that I don’t want to feel,

expression of high-brow when it unbecomes me.

Some palette of life to be born with.

Humping this cartel of actions,

the eventual detritus might be the killer-of-all.

So outwardly, outer-worldly,

it gives the sidelong squint a handsome face

by suffocating the part played by

‘not knowing what is beyond you’.

My own brand of heroism.

For God’s sake keep the explanation

routed in the act, because

that which is real finds

permanence in the act.

My treatise on obje/subje-ctivity

emerges through bounty and ritual.

No one can tell me what’s right

including me, because it is

what it is, was, happened.

Tell-a-viva. Muddle-headed.

Wide of the mark.

Curiously familiar.

Pitching usually.

All triptych, connected. Slighted,

parted. Thwarted. And still perched.

So, to snare others is chance: a miracle.

A conflux of circumstance: a meeting

outside my ken,

in a strange wood.

Independent of the place of origin.

Patricia Cain RGI NEAC ARWS PS PhD

April 2018

Languages that are made to die | pastel | 122cm x 147cm

PATRICIA CAIN at Kilmorack Gallery

Three Questions to Alan McGowan

2018-05-08T07:30:00.000-07:00

Few artists have as great a command of anatomy as Alan McGowan and there are just as few with his incredible painterly touch. Here are three questions to this Edinburgh-based and nationally significant artist.

Your paintings have always fascinated me. Both for the free yet precise way you capture the human body - and for the psychological depth of your paintings. What comes first: mind or muscle?

They are interwoven with each other - the figure has muscle but that can only be apprehended by me through mind, through my perception and understanding; and the subject has mind but that is only realised in the painting through my muscle, the physical movement of the hand through paint or whatever materials I’m working with. So mind and body are embedded in each other, somehow realised through each other.

You have recently been producing bronze sculpture (with great success.) How have you found moving into the three-dimensional world?

upside-down man | bronze 25cm high

It has seemed like a natural progression. The first sculpted head that I produced a couple of years ago won the Powderhall Bronze Foundry award at the RSA and was selected for the Threadneedle exhibition of figurative art in London, which was a bit of a surprise. It feels like an extension of what I had already been doing in paint but with different challenges and possibilities. I’m interested in mobility and the movement of the sculptural image in space as it turns and one looks at it from different angles is really exciting to me.

The cannon of artists who tackled the human figure goes back a long way and includes some of the greatest artists of all time. Who of these provide the greatest inspiration?

The list is endless, but the main ones would be Rodin, Michelangelo, Egon Schielle, Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Rubens, Rembrandt. Then others like Raphael (drawings), Leonardo da Vinci (anatomy), Bernini, Eugene Carriere, Lucien Freud, Jenny Saville, George Bellows, Gwen John. I am inspired by artists whose figures convey something of what they feel about the world, a kind of emotional charge, and it’s fascinating to me how that can be expressed by a body and again somehow embodied in paint or clay or bronze.

Alexandra x 4oil and pastel on paper | 59cm x 84cm

www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk/alan-mcgowan/

Art without Time | Georgia Coburn on Harris-based Steve Dilworth

2018-05-07T07:04:00.000-07:00

Art writer Georgina Coburn on Harris
based artist STEVE DILWORTH

Scored Stone, 2016dunite | 26cm x 14cm x 21cm

As a freelance writer and art historian I’ve always been fascinated by the unseen in Art. The power of handmade objects to reach within us, beyond our own time and place, originates in an essential process of transformation, experienced through the mind, heart and hand. This authenticity will always be felt and intuitively understood by an audience. We may not be able to put it into words, but we all know a living work of art when we experience it. What initially drew me to Steve Dilworth’s work was the living presence of his objects and the pure intent of making “real things”.

Three years ago, I began work on the artist’s biography. In the first stage of the process I documented his work from the 1970s to the present and then interviewed family, colleagues, public custodians and private collectors of his objects. The relationships people from all walks of life have with his art are revelatory.

Steve Dilworth in his Harris studio

For over 35 years Steve Dilworth has been consistently breaking new ground as one the UK’s most visionary artists. His remarkable work in stone, wood, bronze and once living material is a constant source of surprise and discovery. Dilworth’s approach and unique fusion of raw materials is unlike any other artist I know, contemporary or historical. Although he is often described as a sculptor, traditional modes of representation, symbolism or memorialisation have never defined his practice. It’s true that Dilworth’s objects are aesthetically beautiful and crafted with devotional care, however his global significance isn’t rooted in the visual. What his art reconnects us with goes far deeper than what can be seen on the surface.

Dilworth’s works are not passive art objects, placed on a plinth or mantlepiece and admired from afar. They are held close, passed between generations, used as touchstones of contemplation, comfort and confrontation with all that we love and fear in life.

Woodcock
rosewood, nails and woodcock
34cm x 14cm x 13cm

What strikes people immediately, as Dilworth himself was struck, sinking his hands into the earth forming balls of clay as a child, is the eternally tacit, how we make sense of the world and of ourselves through creative process. Humanity is a tribe hardwired to seek meaning by making. What many people experience in Dilworth’s art reawakens what first drove our prehistoric ancestors to make cave paintings and hand-held objects. His work taps into the collective unconscious and genetic memory in unexpected ways.

Hold one of his throwing objects in stone or wood in your hands and you feel an uncanny balance of form and energy, connecting the core of the body to all things. His art isn’t about ego, but the vital charge of forces greater than ourselves in nature connected to the human nervous system. It’s the inner knowing Dilworth encountered running his hands along a Henry Moore sculpture as a child while no one was looking.

Dilworth’s objects are conceived and crafted from the inside out, with the raw power of material as the vital spark of ignition. What is most valuable or sacred is held inside the object, unseen, yet we sense it is there in its completeness. Like indigenous art from around the world, there is no separation between the physical and metaphysical. Dilworth’s practice excludes nothing, from ritual belief to particle physics. Intense curiosity, experimentation and play have always been an essential part of his process. The artist’s home on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides is a highly sculpted environment where our relativity to Nature and time become clear. It is the perfect imaginative ground for Dilworth’s sublime and revolutionary work.

Georgina Coburn, April 2018

Originally from Australia, Georgina Coburn now lives in Northern Scotland. She is an art historian, writer and critic specialising in Visual Art, Photography and Film.

Stillness and Flow | PETER DAVIS on his own work.

2018-05-07T03:10:00.000-07:00

Shetland-based PETER DAVIS illuminates fresh truths about the landscape with the most simple elements pushed to news highs.

Peter Davis in Iceland 2017

There’s a point at which the act of painting and the inherent action of nature align themselves and that frequently happens in watercolour. I consider it the most natural of all the painting mediums, comprising pigment, a binder which is mainly gum arabic, and water, the drying process leaving the pigment on the surface. Nothing could be simpler, apart from perhaps charcoal or chalk.

The two extremes of stillness and flow and the myriad activity between the two are what make watercolour, for me, the most natural medium with which to depict the extremes of the Northern landscapes. I have painted this subject for more than 35 years and it continues to provide a source of excitement and exploration.

Back in 1980 I took a boat trip out to the tiny island of Copinsay in Orkney. The gradual incline of rock coming out of the sea was an inspiration that came tumbling out as a series of dribbling watercolours in which pigment and water interacted and flowed suggesting but not depicting the land/seascape. It was in my mind a metaphor for what was taking place in nature, the interaction of water and pigment mirroring the sea water and rock.

Since then my work has developed from simple dribbling of paint to pools of slow drying colour. And this slowness is crucial. Patience is one of my least favourite virtues in everything except painting. A wash or a pool of any watercolour has to be left to dry naturally. The humidity in Shetland often means this drying process can take a day or more so I generally have several paintings on the go at once.

Scradda | watercolour on paper | 25cm x 36cm

I have no wish to simply record what I see. I do not seek sedate topographies often associated with the term ‘watercolour landscapes’. Instead I prefer the uncertain balance between abstraction and reality. I want these paintings to be a distillation of the landscape in which the subject itself is so often watery. In the Northern isles it’s the sea and lochs as well as the weather that draws me. But equally so it is the geology, which brings me to pigment. Mostly what is left on the paper after a wash has dried and the water has evaporated are tiny fragments of earthy pigment, oxides in many cases, which accumulate in the textured hollows. Indeed the finished physical results of a painting are often a microcosm of the natural world on which they are based.

Watercolour plays by nature’s rules; it obeys gravity, in most cases, flows, puddles, desiccates, dries and sometimes fades. That has been its misfortune as a painting medium over the centuries. However most artists’ quality pigments now have a permanence that is equal to its rivals, oil and acrylic. And in capturing the relentless rain showers or banks of dark cloud over a threatening sea or the pure soft beauty of a still loch there’s nothing to compete with watercolour and its symbiotic relationship with that natural world. Just because watercolour’s surface and its paper support is less durable than the hard oiled and varnished surface of an oil painting or the plasticity of acrylic shouldn’t mean that it is treated like a less valuable painting form which is often the case. This is something that the artist Turner was well aware of. His elevation of watercolour from a medium of sketching into a highly finished state equal to oils is a case in point.

My approach to painting in watercolour has changed over the last three decades, developing in many ways. Although I still find ‘pure’ watercolour the most interesting and challenging, I have also employed gouache, spray bottles, scrubbing brushes, pipettes, airbrush and a number of different techniques including ice, raw pigment, and also chalk which not only adds highlights to the texture of the paper but also an element of movement over a dried wash. I begin as always with the idea of the stretched white paper surface already as part of the painting and then add coloured washes accordingly. This has removed any ‘fear’ of the white page that I might have had. In most cases I have a basic plan for the finished piece but the medium often has other ideas. I like the unpredictable quality of watercolour and sometimes you just need to ‘go with the flow’. Allowing one wash to dry before laying another, I build up an image that requires care and attention. So I do love watching paint dry.

I’m not a ‘plein air’ painter; my way of working requires a certain control over situations and for me the weather in Shetland is often just too unpredictable for that. I record my experiences outside through drawing and photography then go indoors to the studio and work. And being a control freak I need everything to hand.

There are many variables at work in watercolour painting. Amount and type of pigment, quantity and quality of water, size of brush, surface of paper, area of wash, etc. all affect the finished painting as does gravity. The stretched paper is often at different angles, washes pool, flow, or simply run off. There are also many chance elements, loads of happy accidents and good intentions and so many disasters. But when they work well there’s a magic that no oil or acrylic painting can ever match.
Together these variables enhance my approach to, and my re-presentation of, my chosen landscapes.

Peter Davis
2017

Watchhouse Loch Thawing | watercolour, pigment and chalk on paper | 51cm x 70cm

Despatches from Remote Places | Artist Allan MacDonald on why remoteness is an artistic draw

2018-05-07T02:22:00.000-07:00

Dispatches from remote places

Kilmorack Gallery has been showing the work of ALLAN MACDONALD
for over twenty years. Many thanks to him for this insight into his work.

Setting up paints. Allan MacDonald in Toridon, Scotland

I’m writing this from a lay-by in a forsaken area of the West Coast of Lewis. The wind is a monotone chant, the rain beats out an irregular rhythm, the light is background only, a faint descant. What on earth am I doing here?

The writer Michel Faber once described my work as ‘excited dispatches from remote places’ and there is an element of truth in this. I am drawn to paint in places where the human imprint is small. But where is truly remote? I can get as much a sense of remoteness looking out my back door as I can from driving till the road runs out on the North West coast.

Is there a corner of our world where someone hasn’t been and posted an image on Social Media? Perhaps the moon landings started it all, the ultimate ‘I was there’ images. Where is the last truly remote place? Is it Mars? Is it Heaven?

My continuing attraction to the moon is part of this desire for aloneness. It’s visual, yes, but ultimately spiritual. Not in the Callanish stones manner either. The days of moon worship are past, now we are more likely to worship the person who lands on the moon (a step backwards, one could argue). But our desire for the sacred remains strong. Within this, there must be room for a sense of the Divine. I mean by this a specific sense, not an abstract, subjective perception of the Divine. Can it be found anywhere in contemporary art?
Perhaps the most remote locations now are the inner places within each individual, the exclusive den where the self crouches, beneath the complex strata of life. This is, of course, the very place Divinity looks to dwell, tries to reach.

I recently viewed a film called ‘The Farthest’, recalling the Voyager Satellite mission of 1977. The comments of one scientist intrigued me. He said that what the Voyager mission had taught us was that all along, it wasn’t really ‘why’ we were asking, it was ‘how’. In one sentence, he seemed to diminish an essential aspect of being human. Theologians, philosophers and artists could imagine themselves surplus to requirements. Children ask ‘why’, not ‘how’. Was he implying that we, humanity, had grown up?

Yet it’s possible that the layers of sophistication we cover ourselves in are not helping us grow. Picasso said it took him four years to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to paint like a child. Other artists, from Klee to Miro, drew heavily from childhood art. Philip Otto Runge, the German artist, suggested we should follow Christ’s imperative, to become like little children. Another writer suggested ‘genius is childhood recaptured at will’. How is a great question, but Why engenders the child-like sense of wonder. Perhaps that is what I’m chasing in my paintings, using the remoteness as a catalyst.

One of the joys of painting is the ability to manipulate things. One tree and the moon, a line and a circle, perfect imperfect, near far, finite infinite. A sense of place, if not a sense of time. A mountain massif can become feather light. A solid birch tree transparent. A shapeless snow cloud becomes sculpted

Allan MacDonald
February 2018

moon morning, Torr Na Cluaineoil on canvas | 100cm x 100cm

Winter Woods - the enigmatic world of artist MARK EDWARDS

2017-10-04T04:03:00.001-07:00

MARK EDWARDS work is compelling, more subreal than surreal - buried deep inside us. Tony Davidson, Kilmorack Gallery, explores his paintings

Enigmas and ironies abound in the work of Mark Edwards. It is a joy to bury deep into the labyrinthine folds of a possible narrative; the hats, snow, trees and train. And it is an equal delight to marvel at Edwards’ remarkable techniques, all honed to make his painting vibrate with colour, resolve in composition and twang with tension.

At first sight ‘The Crossing’ (acrylic on canvas, 100cm x 150cm) shows three men standing looking towards a large early-Georgian house from a sparse copse of pine woodland. It is a snowy but clear day. In the distance a train crosses a viaduct. This is the most superficial level at which you can look at the painting. You then spot the middle man is slightly stooped. Is he being helped to his home or drugged and apprehended? Where are the men’s feet – buried in the show? But it is too even for this. Something is not quite right. Why is there no chimney on the house? My favourite missing part of an Edwards building is in another painting, one called ‘Waiting for the Door to Open.’ It will be a long wait for the two shadowy figures outside the house for there doesn’t appear to be a door at all. This playful side to Edwards makes his work filmic, with shades of Graham Greene and Le Carré. Edwards, however, hasn’t seen many of these films – ‘some yes, but not many.’

The Crossing | acrylic on canvas | 100cm x 150cm

Mark Edwards, however, is steeped in books - producing the covers for hundreds of works, including household names such as Kingsley Amis, Beryl Bainbridge, Sue Townsend, Michael Morpurgo and Philip Pulman. A book cover must have many things – all of which are in an Edwards’ paintings. They must have grip and promise, and, if a cover is good, they will be bound together in memory – the déjà vu effect of a Mark Edwards painting.

Below this there are other more surreal narratives. The world depicted isn’t quite like our world. Shadows fall from unexpected light sources. An imagined open door is throwing light onto the scene. Trains can be many things in the winter woods. The more obvious train crosses the viaduct; you see this straight away. Or it can be distilled into its steamy plume behind a wood or, inexplicably, it can come from the ground – a ghost train at graveyard height with nothing visible other than a hazy band across the painting. Most haunting is Edwards’ use of repetition. Is it the same man painted three times in the same painting – quantumly appearing in his own world, populating this empty landscape? Edwards’ repetition of subject only adds to this effect. The man reappears with his Sisyphean task of waiting and watching. A Mark Edwards painting is now no longer the illustration of a story, it is everything. We are looking at the watcher and waiter’s entirety because he is not aware of a larger world. The more Edwards repeats himself, the greater the effect of disorientation.

Waiting for the Door to Open | acrylic on canvas | 50cm x 65cm

Deepening narratives are our response when we look at a Mark Edwards painting. But the magic comes from the more old-fashioned rules of composition and colour. Paint and image-making are Edwards’ real muses. His canvases can be seen as completely abstract compositions – well-placed diagonals dividing the image in a way that is mathematically pleasing. The eternal number three appears many times; in windows, figures, trees and diagonals. There is also a graduation of tone that harmonises and balances the work. This, however, is only one element of Edwards technical prowess. If you look closer there is much more. On the surface is the snowy seen we see and I have described, but under this, through the chinks, we catch a glimpse of warmer energetic fields. Technically this is very clever. It creates a pointillist effect that allows the colours to retain their vibrancy and (like many Matisse paintings) these colours are enhanced by the white of the snow and the black of the men’s coats. Subtle variations in the texture are also there in the diagonals which Edwards loves so much. It can be very hard to fully comprehend how this is done, and therein lies the magic.

The final and deepest layer of the Edwards labyrinth is the layer seen through the chinks of texture. It is a coherent world made up of balls of energetic colour – strings, quarks and atoms. This is the real world of the dark figure. It is also our infinitely divisible quantum world. Who is waiting and watching? We all are.

Tony Davidson

Director of Kilmorack Gallery

October 2017

www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk

2016-09-29T01:01:00.000-07:00

GEORGINA COBURN REVIEW

Kilmorack Gallery SEA exhibition (Scottish Artists inspired by the sea) is up and runs the end of October 2016. There are fantastic works, from WILL MACLEAN's oceanic reminisces and JOYCE W CAIRNS Footdee works to the immersive wave studies of JANETTE KERR, LOTTE GLOB's ceramics and cliffscapes of ALLAN MACDONALD. Some of these have been reviewed by the always insightful Georgina Coburn... many thanks. I have attached the review below as links to the Geogina Coburn's original.

Joyce W Cairns “Farewell To Footdee” (Oil on panel 122cm x 183cm)

The Sea- Scottish artists inspired by the sea

17 September – 29 October, Kilmorack Gallery, by Beauly.

Kilmorack Gallery’s latest exhibition features work by some of Scotland’s finest artists inspired by the convergence of land, sea and memory. Forces of Nature and mind are powerfully brought together in an exciting show including work by; Joyce W Cairns , Steve Dilworth, Kate Downie, Lotte Glob, Marian Leven, Will Maclean, Allan MacDonald, James Newton Adams, Mary Bourne, Ruth Brownlee, Helen Denerley, , Gail Harvey, Janette Kerr, Sian MacQueen, Lynn McGregor, Illona Morrice and Beth Robertson-Fiddes.

On entering the gallery Lotte Glob’s large ceramic tile seascapes; Seascape, Seascape – Tidal and Seascape Stormy Sea, unleash an incredible intensity of colour in a molten fusion of elemental forces and raw materials. Brilliant ultramarine and turquoise create a feeling of depth that the viewer cannot help but dive into. In Seascape-Stormy Sea, water, earth, air and fire meet, unite and divide; cracking and separating like a microcosm of the earth’s geological record. There’s a sense of mindful physicality in this artist’s work based on being in the landscape in the most expansive sense possible. This is combined with a lifetime’s understanding of Craft, unsurpassed in her chosen discipline. Along the coastline of the UNESCO Northern Highlands Geopark that the artist calls home, the ancient Lewisian Gneiss rock, 3,000 million years old, meets the full force of the Atlantic Ocean. Shore, land and mountain are a rich source of found materials, transformed by fire in Glob’s masterful ceramics. The strength, beauty and delicacy in her work is visibly distilled in Flower of the Sea; a living being of fired clay; anemone-like fingers extended around blooms of glassy blue/ green rock pools, tempered with the hue of a subsiding tide of red kelp. In Rock Flower, an outcrop of white clay blooms emerge from what feels like a monumental cliff face, a fused piece of immovable white stone balanced on top of the sculpted clay in counterpoint with the pale, mortal transience of flowers. The handling of materials and form is supremely sensitive and a celebration of an artist at the top of her profession. Reef is another superb example, a rocky outcrop emerging from a disc of ocean which feels like the entire globe; minerals and pigments ebb and flow to the edges of the ceramic, into the deepest sea of mind, time and space imaginable. Another signature piece is Secret Pool; a sphere resembling a meteorite flung from space, which when opened reveals an interior teaming life forms, shoreline colour and vivid joy. Lotte Glob’s responses to her environment are pure and instinctual; her spirit is as adventurous as the experimentation in her Art and in walking the landscape she has come to understand Nature and human connectivity with the environment in ways that never fail to inspire. She’s an artist who always makes me smile for the wisdom, vitality and sheer energy of her practice, intimately connected to the Northwest land, sky and sea from which she is inseparable.

Lotte Glob ” Flower of the Sea” (Ceramic)

One of the most moving works in the exhibition is Farewell to Footdee (Oil on panel 122cm x 183cm) by Scotland’s most significant figurative artist, Joyce. W. Cairns. In many ways the painting is an act of commemoration and remembrance, a strikingly poignant composition of memories which make a life. In frozen white, blue greyness, articulated by the pure warmth of cadmium /vermillion a masterful sense of composition emerges, in the structural diagonal and vertical uprights of the washing line, refracted light on the icy ground and the emotive placement of the human figure. As with all of Cairns’ work we are pushed psychologically to the edge of the frame and beyond it; by design, the distilled palette, the interior positioning of the figures and by the artist’s innate sensitivity. The acute subtlety of winter light upon the rooftops and gently nuanced expression on the face of the foreground female protagonist portrays a moment of vulnerability and sadness at the end of an era. The painting also acknowledges profound loss; of those who have passed, phases of life and aspects of self. Around the foreground protagonist’s neck is a medal of honour, engraved; “Footdee 1979-2014”, marking the artist’s departure for Tayside and a new chapter in the battle of a creative life. I always try to refrain from purely autobiographical readings of this artist’s paintings, because my sense of her work is that like all Great Artists she always transcends herself. It is true that most of Cairns’ female figures physically resemble the artist and that many of her paintings respond to life in the old fishing village of Footdee and the port of Aberdeen, past memories and familial experiences, but equally her field of reference is more widely European in painterly terms and in subject matter. In her extraordinary body of work; War Tourist, Cairns certainly begins the journey re-tracing her Father’s steps through WWII Europe, but the visual statement that emerged out of this research over the following decade crosses all borders into contemporary conflict, the nature of war and the eternal human condition. There are few artists that share her command of large scale figurative composition, save German Expressionists like Beckmann and Grosz. It’s the emotional gravitas and conscience in her work that is immediately and monumentally striking. Look closer and the balance of elements in her compositions are breath taking; a perfect synthesis of instinct, control, ideas and technique. Cairns’ familial memories are ever clothed in wartime dress, like the younger sister in red beret, gloves and shoes, who looks on in the mid-ground as the foreground Self departs the scene. However Farewell to Footdee is more than an image of individual/ autobiographical commemoration, remembrance or grief. The head and shoulders of the central female protagonist connects powerfully with the viewer’s space and the sense of loss we all feel when we leave part of ourselves behind in the places we have lived and in the people we have loved. Her tilted hat, crowned with a white boarded cottage whose chimney almost transforms it into a house of worship, carries emotional weight; like the posture of the tiny female figure leaned within the doorway, head downcast and hands in pockets. Time collapses into the line of cottages that frame an inner courtyard of the soul; the yellow warmth of light from open doorways in the background illuminating scenes of romance, isolation and loneliness re-enacted in the farewell. It is impossible to see this painting and not be affected by its raw, profound emotional stillness or by the artist’s consummate skill.

Joyce W Cairns “Messerschmitt Over Footdee” (Oil on ply, 152cm x 122cm)

In Messerschmitt Over Footdee (Oil on ply, 152cm x 122cm) Cairns assumes the role of an ARP (Air- raid Precaution) warden. Pushed into the foreground she is flanked by WWII ephemera; Lucky Strike cigarettes, anti-gas ointment and a gas attack leaflet arrangement of museum pieces. The phosphorescent glow of the sea merges with the sky in the heightened perspective of the composition. The illuminating presence and bisecting geometry of searchlights, lighthouses, washing lines and the boundaries of the safe harbour are invaded by an enemy bomber. Again the central protagonist is positioned in the foreground, standing in the viewer’s space as witness, clutching a wreath of poppies to her chest. Out of a first floor window a woman waves a union jack, whilst below a naked female figure emerges from an illuminated doorway. The idea of “keeping the home fires burning” and the anxiety of war on the domestic front can be seen in the pallor of her expression, articulated by the memories , stories and artefacts gathered by the artist, assimilated within her psyche as part of the War Tourist retrospective body of work.

click for full Coburn review

Link to KILMORACK GALLERY SEA EXHIBITION PAGE

FIVE SELECTED WORKS FROM SPRING EXHIBITION

2016-04-23T04:14:00.001-07:00

Here are five works selected from our Spring Exhibition.

1: crescendo by ALLAN MACDONALD

ALLAN MACDONALD
crescendo - oil on canvas - 61cm x 91cm

This wonderful painting by ALLAN MACDONALD and is the smaller original version of the much larger sea painting of the same name in his show (Rock of Ages) here last year. It is a powerful example of MacDonald's use of paint and his feel for the elements.

2 The Grumbling Hive by ROBERT POWELL

ROBERT POWELLThe Grumbling Hive - acrylic with screenprint - 38cm x 28cm

This painting is reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch. Inspired by Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees (1714,) POWELL depicts the follies of civilsation. It is a little grotesque and a lot engrossing. The frame is by Kari de Keonigswarter.

3 Moonlit Walk by CHRISTINE WOODSIDE rsw rgi

CHRISTINE WOODSIDE rsw rgi
Moonlit Walk, Fife - mixed media - 81cm x 71cm

After a long absence, it is a great joy to exhibit work by CHRISTINE WOODSIDE again. This painting, 'Moonlit Walk Fife' is the largest WOODSIDE in the current show. It is a beautiful piece; rich with images, colour and evocations of life around her Fife studio.

4 Still Pool, Skye by BETH ROBERTSON FIDDES

BETH ROBERTSON FIDDES
Still Pool, Skye - mixed media - 92cm x 101cm

Few artists capture the majesty of the Highlands as well as ROBERTSON FIDDES. Here, she uses a blend of her own techniques to paint the Fairy Pools in Skye. Magical and tempting to dive in.

5 Ben Loyal Walk by Lotte Glob

LOTTE GLOB
Ben Loyal Walk - ceramic & rocks - 33cm x 21cm

This is one of LOTTE GLOB's tiles created from stone and sand gathered while walking the hills. They are then fired at temperatures high enough to melt the stone. These tiles (and her books) are physical memories of the day, the hill and the walk... here is Ben Loyal.

There are many other wonderful things in Kilmorack. All works are on the gallery's website: www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk

60 Degrees North: the immersive world of JANETTE KERR

2015-06-23T03:18:00.000-07:00

60 Degrees North: the immersive world of JANETTE KERR

Showing at Kilmorack Gallery from the 20th June until 2nd August 2015.

Rain and Sea Fog over Silwick Stacks
oil on board, 33.5cm x 32.5cm

Sea Fog and Flying Debris over Silwick Stacks
oil and flying debris on board, 23cm x 33cm

JANETTE KERR’s paintings are northern. There is nothing polite about them. They are about an immersive elemental power that is too easily forgotten or has possibly never been seen in the south.

Think of an impressionist painting: warm beaches, warm afternoons, parasols, beautiful people and very slight inclines, and throw this away. Here we have nature at its most powerful: towering waves, foam and vortexes of paint reaching everywhere. There are dark blues and blacks with bits of pink and green amide swirls of action. Put away the parasol and put on a survival suit, we’re in Shetland; alive in the north not melting in the south.

Painting was never meant to be polite and these works certainly aren't.

Faskin An Glansin - Silwick
oil on fabriano paper, 93cm x 100cm

Tony
www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk
janette kerr page

EYE to EYE: new work by JANE MACNEILL

2015-06-22T05:22:00.001-07:00

Flying Lapwing - 45cm x 50cm - oil on board

What is art about? What makes one piece stronger than another? What will last? I have often pondered these questions as all passionate art-dealers must if they are to sort wheat from chaff. A true artist sees things that exist in an invisible but still equally real world. We non-artists catch glimpses of this place, but a true artist’s umbilical cord is professionally connected to it. But what is it? You must look at the art work and ask that question.

At its most simple JANE MACNEILL’s work are beautiful gold-leafed portraits of birds. There are fifteen in this exhibition; from a blue-tinged lapwing in flight across a golden ground, a fat waxwing that fills it frame, a one-eyed grouse that stares at you, to a light quick redpoll. The surprising thing is how much each portrait shouts out as an individual and how much respect is given to the bird.

Each of MACNEILL’s bird paintings is indeed a portrait. She has known every one of her ‘sitters’ (or ‘flyers’) even if it has only been for a second of eye contact. She will not paint an animal unless this eye contact has been made. That is the privilege of any portrait artist; to be allowed to look into the soul’s window. If you have that connected feeling with a Rembrandt or Valazquez portrait, you are seeing a soul livened by paint. This is what MACNEILL does for us. She brings back the memory of her eye-to-eye contact with the bird in its airy elements. It's not any bird she paints, but that precious shared moment.

Waxwing - oil on gesso panel - 30cm x 25cm

The gold-leaf used by MACNEILL is reminiscent of religious icons, Klimt and the Buddhas of Asia. Gold is a way to show veneration and permanence. Gold links birds to the divine. It is symbolic of the airy element they inhabit. ‘We are princes,’ it says, ‘you are not like us, you belong to the world of land and we belong to air.’

MACNEILL has a point here. Even the humble robin is raised by MACNEILL to an ethereal place. Are robins allowed on Olympus where mortals cannot tread? Even without a golden halo a bird can fly, so why not. Gold is illusive, it plays with light; dark one moment and glowing the next, but the truth of the birds’ flight is always there. They are Olympian creatures - that much is obvious. MACNEILL shows us the world of air even if it’s only caught for an instant.

Black Bird - oil and silver leaf on board, 20cm x 26cm

Tony Davidson, Director of Kilmorack Gallery

KILMORACK GALLERY

JANE MACNEILL works

SUMMER WONDERS

2015-06-06T07:20:00.000-07:00

It is rare to find one fantastic artist in a show, but Kilmorack Gallery’s summer exhibition has six! EOGHAN BRIDGE, JANETTE KERR, ALAN MACDONALD, MADELINE MACKAY and JANE MACNEILL show together in this well-established Scottish gallery.

“I’m very excited by our Summer Exhibition”, said the excited gallery owner. “It’s very alive and current; not really a mixed exhibition at all but an opportunity for six very special artists to shine. The chosen six artists are always exciting, but at the moment they are fresher and brighter than ever” he gloated while stroking his intelligent looking beard.

Perspectives - ceramic - EOGHAN BRIDGE

EOGHAN BRIDGE’s sculpture has always been powerful. His vision of horse and rider, his feel of balance and emotional geometry has won his sculpture place in many hearts (and homes.) For this exhibition, however, he is bringing something even fresher. The last two years have been spent in his studio; drawing, thinking and refining his work, and the results are the ten works showing from the 20th June.

awaiting title - oil - JANETTE KERR

JANETTE KERR is also new to Kilmorack Gallery but is well-established both in the far north and the south. Her time is spent between her studios in Somerset and the Shetland Isles. KERR’s inspiration is the energetic (and occasional calm) weather of the far north. Looking into her paintings - with their bold, painterly brushwork – is to be absorbed into the tumultuous world of KERR’s inspiration.

Erratics on the Move 3 - etching - LOTTE GLOB

LOTTE GLOB is as well-known in the north as many of its hills and her work reflects this. GLOB brings to this show a series of eleven etchings that expand her investigations of nature beyond ceramics. There are also a few ‘they followed me backs.’ What are these you ask? They’re friendly creatures that sometime follow the artist off the hills of course.

Starman - oil on linen - ALAN MACDONALD

ALAN MACDONALD (not to be confused with landscape painter Allan MacDonald) has also been busy in his studio. The last two years have been spent on large commissions including two paintings for the prestigious ‘Reality show’ in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Artists. The rest of the time has been spent honing his visions and painting skills further, and work in our summer exhibition is the result of this. They will grab your attention and stick with you. For a good review of Macdonald’s work try Georgina Coburn’s blog.

Redpoll - oil on board - 14cm x 14cm - JANE MACNEILL

JANE MACNEILL has completed a body of iconic paintings of animals for this exhibition. Here birds are raised to their rightful gold-leafed status. MACNEILL’s technique and ambition has reached a new place with these paintings. These small and weak creatures become large and powerful.

Untitled 5 - mixed media - MADELINE MACKAY

MADELINE MACKAY is one of Kilmorack Gallery’s younger artists and work in this exhibition is the result of her residency in the most remote region of Canada, a place of bears, ice and inaccessible coast. Her subject matter here is often the half-eaten fish left behind by bears. It is also the circle of life.

Kilmorack Gallery’s summer show runs from the 20th June – 1st August 2015.

EOGHAN BRIDGE

LOTTE GLOB JANETTE KERR ALAN MACDONALD JANE MACNEILL MADELINE MACKAY

Seven reasons to love KILMORACK GALLERY

2015-05-25T08:34:00.000-07:00

SEVEN Reasons to love Kilmorack Gallery

1 AAA+ artists

An artist dressed in paint. ALLAN MACDONALD in his studio

The heart of any good gallery is the artists it shows. At Kilmorack Gallery we only show work by carefully selected artists who push the boundaries of art.

There are always interesting things to see.

2 Where else can you see sculpture?

EOGHAN BRIDGE, perspectives

Kilmorack Gallery represents more sculptors than any other Scottish gallery. Helen Denerley, Lotte Glob and Gerald Laing have all had solo exhibitions with us. Our spectacular interior (an 18^th rural century church) gives 3d the space and light it deserves.

Over the summer of 2015 we have work by Laurence Broderick, Eoghan Bridge, Lotte Glob, Steve Dilworth and Gerald Laing,

3 Discover our vaults upstairs

Work on screens upstairs can be viewed on request.

Kilmorack Gallery always has an exhibition running. This is normally a two or three person or solo show, but if you are interested in something else; maybe by an artist not part of the current show, there is more to see. We have a vault upstairs that can normally be perused and other works in storage too. Do you want to know more about what is here? Then our website is always up-to-date with that can be viewed.

4 The current show

STEVE DILWORTH 'Beaked Bird' with PATRICIA CAIN 'Arena'

Our exhibitions are always outstanding so if you are interested in Scottish art you will not be disappointed if you just call by. Expect to see work not normally found in private galleries. We have a big space so we often have large and spectacular seminal works.

5 What other gallery has such a comprehensive website?

Kilmorack Gallery’s website has been running since the gallery was founded eighteen years ago, so we have learned how to do it since then. If you want to find information on exhibitions quickly, or to see good photographs of work… it is all very accessible on-line and on the move.

5 The Beauty of the old church

Autumn outside the gallery.

Kilmorack Gallery is housed in the beautiful old Kilmorack Church which was built in 1786 at a time when the Lovat Estates were still forfeited after the battle of Culloden. In 1835 the building was recast in magnificent gothic-revival style, most of which remains as it was, but engrandured by the art.

We have many architectural students and other groups calling-in, looking for the perfect reuse of an old church and they see it. Here old meets new in bold style!

6 What more? Fire, coffee, mind and body

Fireplace, crocodile and chairs. Winter 2014

We believe in comfort at Kilmorack Gallery. We h
ave a jura coffee machine that grinds freshly roasted coffee beans and we have a large fire place with a comfortable chair. The Highlands are obviously world class for the outdoors and we are only half-an-hour from Inverness airport. Accommodation: there is everything from bed in a hostel to castles to rent. We have many clients who fly up just to see a piece and many more who find a visit to Kilmorack Gallery a high point of their highland stay.

For more about Kilmorack Gallery please look at our website: www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk and ask to be put on our mailing list.

Tony Davidson
Gallery Director

review by Georgina Coburn of our May 2015 exhibition

2015-05-22T03:44:00.000-07:00

Sam Cartman, Steve Dilworth and Patricia Cain

Posted on May 10, 2015

Kilmorack Gallery, 8 May – 13 June

http://www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk/exhibitions/6/works/

Steve Dilworth, Moon Sight- Stone (Dunite, 60 x 30 x 20cm)

Kilmorack’s latest exhibition combines visions of Nature, Humanity and Industry with paintings by Sam Cartman, pastels and mixed media works by Patricia Cain and a striking collection of sculptural objects by internationally renowned artist Steve Dilworth.

Stylistically this latest body of work marks a high point for Sam Cartman, whose distinctive landscapes capture the mark of agriculture and industry on the land, coupled with the emotional weight of expansive, brooding Scottish skies. In the context of contemporary landscape painting in Britain, it is refreshing to see Cartman’s industrial palette and architecturally structured compositions, coupled with the immediate response of drawn and incised marks in pencil, charcoal and oils. Although from a distance the formal arrangement of form, colour, and line dominate, immediately drawing the eye into the composition, up close there is subtlety and variety in the artist’s handling of paint that is a real pleasure to behold.

Sam Cartman, Tynron Treelines (Oil, 58 x 61cm)

The bold deliberation and planar treatment of fields or sky are beautifully tempered by the textural qualities of thick impasto, using palette knife and brush, delicate washes and impulsive, spontaneous marks. Cartman’s engagement with the picture plane mirrors places where the imprint of human hands and industrial machinery are integrated into the rolling earth, hills and vegetation. These points of intersection between the structured order of the man-made landscape and natural elements are reflected in the artist’s paint handling.

Sam Cartman, Milnton Byre (Oil, 58 x 81cm)

Tellingly he chooses to paint a quarry on the Isle of Skye as opposed to the customary scene of misty mountains or an endless parade of picturesque coastal cottages. His art of landscape isn’t about the Romanticised or Picturesque but something more real and complex. The inherent design and physicality of paint create a sense of place somewhere between the rural countryside and urbanity. This edginess can be seen in the way that paint is layered, pronounced edges, accents of hot orange or red and in the positioning of human architecture. In Milnton Byre (Oil) an out building is set in an abstracted composition of dense yellow ochre, the stark whiteness containing a depth of ultramarine, drawing the eye to a distant horizon of smeared, circular trees in blue and greens. There is a feeling of focused isolation in this work, laid bare in the more abstract painting Elephant(Oil) in a deeper, cooler and vibrant palette of blues.

Sam Cartman, Skye Quarry (Oil, 91.5 x 122cm)

Cartman’s large scale painting Glenshee (Oil) sees the dynamic elements of his style pushed to their limit in an exciting combination of geometric abstraction and natural line. The sky is a progression of deepening tonality from left to right, intersected by white, rectangular impasto and the composition of blue, green, grey and white fields, with linear accents of orange and arched mountains, lead the eye to dwell convincingly at the centre of the composition. The sense of space and depth in the landscape is powerfully realised in the artist’s design, distinctive marks and distilled palette.

Patricia Cain, Thicket II (Pastel, 170 x 170cm)

Patricia Cain’s mixed media works and pastel drawings provide a visual counterpoint between natural forms and man –made structures. Favouring the diptych, Cain creates spaces for contemplation in bisected images of growth; both in the natural world Thicket II(Pastel) and the built environment Arena (Pastel). The division of the image and detailed marks intervenes in how we might ordinarily read (or momentarily scan) images drawn from everyday life. In Arena Cain creates an incredible sense of depth in a myriad of scaffolding, hard metal drawn in the contradictory medium of soft pastel. Out with the tangled branches of Thicket II, she creates negative white space for the viewer’s mind to wander into. There is a sense of mapped chaos in organically charged intersections of branches and foliage; interestingly resembling an aerial, God-like perspective of humanity in a built up urban setting.

Patricia Cain, Arena (Pastel, 186 x 250cm)

In Living as a Process (Pastel) Cain alludes to a human trajectory in young green leaves amongst a tangle of growth, set against swathes of white space, pregnant with creative possibilities. Whilst the scale of ambition in Cain’s large scale drawings is undeniable, her abstract collaged mixed media works, reminiscent of an aged Matisse, are less convincing. The bold abstraction of Forest (Watercolour and Pastel) displays a more interesting interplay of visual elements; colour, line and form, in a concentrated ground of red hot vermillion. Emotional and spatial depth is created with the utmost economy; with dual vertical lines in white and black receding into the distance, whilst the upright solidity of the tree in the foreground, partially shaded in pastel and with a single curve, brings the suggestion of growth in cool shades of green and blue.

Patricia Cain, Living as a Process (Pastel, 111 x 150cm)

On entering the gallery the gravitational pull of Steve Dilworth’s sculptural objects cuts a swathe through the space. The presentation of this three dimensional work on a series of waist height plinths allows the viewer to get up close from multiple angles and experience the intimately tactile qualities of each work, with directional lighting enhancing the angular precision of their sublime craftsmanship.

Moon Sight-Stone (Dunite) combines Deco-like elegance of line with the grounded integrity of stone, millions of years old. Drawn from the landscape of Harris, the seamless combination of fluid planes and orbital form suggests shifting light and perception, the phases of the moon, the passage of time and of the seasons over millennia. It is the entire cosmos in a single piece of earth; the living, breathing presence of Nature whose beauty lies in being both deadly and Divine. The complex hollows of the orbital cavity shift and change between positive and negative space, darkness and light, waxing and waning before the viewer’s eyes and summoning something deep within. Moon Sight-Stonespeaks to the viewer on a primal level. The hollow orb could be an eye or a grasping claw, the flawlessly smooth and dynamically sharp edges of hewn stone polished to perfection with natural accents glinting like stars. Linked to the legend of Seer Stones it is an object of ancient tradition, Art which has its origins in ritual and the stories we tell to make sense of the world and of ourselves.

Like many of Dilworth’s sculptural forms it is monumentally intimate and naturally ambiguous. Moon Sight-Stone could be an object of communication and sight over vast distances, a shapeshifting bird, or an entire landscape of human consciousness. What is invested in its making translates directly to the imagination of the viewer, connecting us to the impulses and contradictions that make us human. It is intensely physical and deeply cerebral in its acknowledgement of a way of seeing and being on the earth, linked to tribal or indigenous cultures. It is carved intuitively and engineered with perseverance, the weight of stone beautifully poised and balanced, cool to the touch, lithely evasive in movement to awaken the senses. This is not a sculptural object to be passively looked at and admired, to commemorate history or glorify its maker, but to be experienced and held within, an initiation into collective human memory and to aspects of self we may well have forgotten in the blurring attention deficit of everyday life. Dilworth’s objects have extraordinary clarity of form and intention, they’re not trying to be anything; they are real rather than representational and absolutely grounded in life, death and the human condition.

Steve Dilworth, Swift (Dunite and Swift, 23 x 9 x13cm)

Many of Dilworth’s objects contain once living material as transitional points in awakening consciousness. Life and death are eternal dance partners and in an intimate, hand held work like Swift (Dunite and Swift) this centre of spiritual gravity can be sensed and felt in the body. Hollows for the fingers on the underside of the object naturally fit the hands with the thumbs resting in mask-like eye sockets. The apex points towards the body with the weight of stone perfectly balanced , like an object for divining with inward directionality. The robust, masculine form feels like a recently discovered artefact from a long lost tribe, its centre of gravity resting in the collective unconscious. Plumbing the depths of the soul for recognition, this work suggests an innate connection with the timeless human need for Creativity and imagination as a source of renewal.

Steve Dilworth, Throwing Object (Lignum Vitae, Leather and Bird, 13cm diameter)

Another hand held work Throwing Object (Lignum Vitae, Leather and Bird) is crafted to naturally fit into the palms, the smooth wood and smell of bound, interlaced leather brilliantly melded together. Inside is an archetypal mystery, hidden from view and aligned with the spirit. Rattle (Burr Elm, fishing line and stone pebbles) is reminiscent of Neolithic fertility objects and ritual, with slices of elm creating an open rattle, like the deep crevice of a rock or the female body. As if miraculously confronting a wooden object that has survived over thousands of years, Dilworth’s Rattle is playfully and powerfully aligned with the fertile human imagination, the idea of rebirth and the art object as a bridge between the physical and the metaphysical.

http://www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk/exhibitions/6/works/

Steve Dilworth, Water Skull Macquette (Mixed Media for Casting, 40 x 37 x 54cm)

Many of Dilworth’s sculptural forms feel as though they are in the process of transformation or becoming. The artist’s Water Skull Macquette (Mixed Media for Casting) is crafted from the inside out, with two halves fitting beautifully together in endlessly fluid, evolutionary form. Every surface, even those we cannot see are given equal care and consideration. It is a fascinating hybrid of outer carapace in the overlapping shell-like interior and inner skeleton in a hinged, oblong outer skull. Part insect, part crustacean and part marine mammal, it is born of natural elements and could be a fragment from an ancient past or a projection of the future once global warming has transformed the planet, returning it to a primordial, aquatic swamp. The aquiline curves invoke the elemental movement of water, whilst the solidity of the skull creates the impression of an organism built for endurance. As the model for a larger scale work, it would be wonderful to see Water Skull Macquette cast in bronze on a truly monumental scale and exhibited permanently in a public location.

Steve Dilworth Beaked Bird (Bronze Ed 3 of 5, 20 x 50 x 40cm)

Two versions of Beaked Bird (Bronze Ed 3 of 5), the first in a dark bronze patina and the second finished to a golden patina, reminiscent of organic materials such as aged stone, bone or ivory, is also a transformational and highly ambiguous object. Aside from the associations of its title, the elongated beak sits seamlessly in the hollows of a rounded elliptical form; suggesting the germination of a seed, the embryo of an as yet undiscovered species or a hermaphroditic organism. The combination of masculine and feminine forms is also an intriguing feature of Venus Stone (Dunite). Poised on its side like a reclining nude, Dilworth’s tooth form with sharpened roots links to earlier forms by the artist in alabaster and granite; inspired by hawking lures and ancient fertility statues such as theVenus of Willendorf. The supremely smooth dominant curves of this Venus Stone are essentially feminine; a crescent curve feels aligned to the transformational power of lunar phases and ancient mythology. The object is innately sensual to the touch, like a caress from hip to thigh but with a predatory angularity. Run your finger along the pointed root of the tooth and there is a sonic effect, like an invocation of our most basic instincts whether hunting or hunted. The duality of nature and of human nature, both masculine and feminine, is brought to bear in this work. It is powerful and subtle; in its soft sheen, sharpened lines and deceptive simplicity, a supremely honed object of complex human behaviour and psychology; sexual, sensual and invested in survival.

Steve Dilworth, Venus Stone (Dunite, 50 x 25 x 23cm)

There are many works in this exhibition to be savoured, enjoyed and revisited. The exquisite crafting of Dilworth’s sculptural objects, both in thought and execution, together with their presentation in the gallery space, naturally invite the viewer to make their own tactile and imaginative connections. The way that the thematic content of Cartman’s paintings and Cain’s pastels inform each other and the rich layers of association in the materials and crafting of Dilworth’s three dimensional objects make this an exceptional exhibition not to be missed.

All images by kind permission of Kilmorack Gallery.

www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk
work by Patricia Cain
work by Sam Cartman
work by Steve Dilworth

kilmorack gallery blog

BETH ROBERTSON FIDDES | Recollection - Northern Dreams

Colin Brown - Love Letter to Europe

PAUL BLOOMER | three works for a better world

Unlocking Memory and Awakening Conscience | New Works by Joyce W Cairns

Some pictures I haven’t done yet | ROBERT POWELL

work still to be created by Robert Powell

The Triumph of Silence

The Great Wall

Cartophagy

Architecture of Solitude

Only Connect

three questions to JAMES NEWTON ADAMS

It seems that you have an urge to create. Not just painting but also sculpture and music. Do these other interests feed back into your painting?

You studied and worked in London for many years before moving to Skye in 2004. Was the move a lifestyle or an artistic choice?

I love the fun and freedom of your paintings. How do you respond to the labels (faux) naive and primitive? And who are your artistic heroes.

Swirling Mental Mists - ALAN MACDONALD

The work of Alan Macdonald captures us like few other artists. Here he tells of a mysterious and inspirational place.

World Tree | KAPKA KASSABOVA on trees and Ian Westacott

Kapka Kassabova on the hidden power of trees and the work of Ian Westacott

Kapka Kassabova is a poet and writer. Her latest book ‘Border - a Journey to the Edge of Europe’ won the Saltire Society Book of the Year, the Edward Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year and the Highland Book Prize.

Worlds of Possibility- The Art of Colin Brown

Colin Brown in his Stonehaven studio. Photograph: G.Coburn 2018

Worlds of Possibility - The Art of Colin Brown

NORTH | Janette Kerr

JANETTE KERR is known for her elemental paintings. Here she writes about the sea and why it is an inspiration.

The Power of the Periphery

Art-dealer and gallery Director Tony Davidson on why not being in the centre can be just what is needed.

three questions to LOTTE GLOB

Danish-born ceramic artist Lotte Glob in an inspiration to many. But what were her inspirations. Three questions to this interesting artist.

Growing up you were surrounded by the avant-guarde CoBrA artists. You must have been aware of many mediums - why ceramics?

Your knowledge of glazes, clay and the firing point of rocks is impressive; and so is your creative imagination. What comes first: the skill of ceramics or your muse, one of which I assume is nature?

There appear to be influences which lie beyond Scotland, Denmark and ceramics. What artists are your greatest inspiration?

Strange Wood - a poem on creativity by artist PATRICIA CAIN

Patricia Cain is known for ambitious paintings which explore artistic perception through drawing. Her process is bold and intuitive; and to express it she has written a poem. Sometimes that is just what is needed.

Strange Woodby Patricia Cain

Three Questions to Alan McGowan

Few artists have as great a command of anatomy as Alan McGowan and there are just as few with his incredible painterly touch. Here are three questions to this Edinburgh-based and nationally significant artist.

Art without Time | Georgia Coburn on Harris-based Steve Dilworth

Art writer Georgina Coburn on Harrisbased artist STEVE DILWORTH

Stillness and Flow | PETER DAVIS on his own work.

Shetland-based PETER DAVIS illuminates fresh truths about the landscape with the most simple elements pushed to news highs.

Despatches from Remote Places | Artist Allan MacDonald on why remoteness is an artistic draw

Dispatches from remote places

Winter Woods - the enigmatic world of artist MARK EDWARDS

MARK EDWARDS work is compelling, more subreal than surreal - buried deep inside us. Tony Davidson, Kilmorack Gallery, explores his paintings

GEORGINA COBURN REVIEW

FIVE SELECTED WORKS FROM SPRING EXHIBITION

Here are five works selected from our Spring Exhibition.

1: crescendo by ALLAN MACDONALD

2 The Grumbling Hive by ROBERT POWELL

3 Moonlit Walk by CHRISTINE WOODSIDE rsw rgi

4 Still Pool, Skye by BETH ROBERTSON FIDDES

5 Ben Loyal Walk by Lotte Glob

60 Degrees North: the immersive world of JANETTE KERR

60 Degrees North: the immersive world of JANETTE KERR

EYE to EYE: new work by JANE MACNEILL

SUMMER WONDERS

It is rare to find one fantastic artist in a show, but Kilmorack Gallery’s summer exhibition has six! EOGHAN BRIDGE, JANETTE KERR, ALAN MACDONALD, MADELINE MACKAY and JANE MACNEILL show together in this well-established Scottish gallery.

Kilmorack Gallery’s summer show runs from the 20th June – 1st August 2015.

EOGHAN BRIDGE

LOTTE GLOBJANETTE KERRALAN MACDONALDJANE MACNEILLMADELINE MACKAY

Seven reasons to love KILMORACK GALLERY

SEVEN Reasons to love Kilmorack Gallery

2 Where else can you see sculpture?

3 Discover our vaults upstairs

4 The current show

5 What other gallery has such a comprehensive website?

5 The Beauty of the old church

6 What more? Fire, coffee, mind and body

review by Georgina Coburn of our May 2015 exhibition

Strange Wood
by Patricia Cain

Art writer Georgina Coburn on Harris
based artist STEVE DILWORTH

LOTTE GLOB JANETTE KERR ALAN MACDONALD JANE MACNEILL MADELINE MACKAY