Northings

MORAG MACINNES overcames her maths block to enter the imaginative world of Steven MacIver.

PAY ATTENTION at the back there! My abiding memory of the maths class is of the teacher – a clever, good, nice teacher – running his hands through his hair in despair and saying ‘for goodness’ sakes girl, it’s obvious!!! ’

Not to me. The beauty, symmetry and delight of all things mathematical passed me by, though I was very fond of the gadgets, the set square and that thingummy you drew the circles with. I loved making patterned paper doilies, cutting shapes out of folded paper and then opening out a lovely symmetrical design, different every time yet the same in its differences. I spent ages with my kaleidoscope. I liked looking at crystals under the magnifying glass. I just didn’t like the maths bit.

Game Space (oil on canvas, 150cm x 120cm) - Steven MacIver

Imagine my alarm, then, when I hear that MacIver, a young Orcadian artist out of Grays, the Slade and the Sainsbury Scholarship at the British School in Rome, is interested in ‘game space’. The picture in the paper looks like an awful lot of architectural, ruler-ed lines and squares. The drawn line is ‘an end in itself…re – evaluating the environments I encounter,’ he’s quoted as saying.

Aberdeen University and Arts Trust Scotland funded the year he took travelling an imaginary line – N 41 – drawn round the globe, hence the exhibition’s title. He visited, for example, the brilliantly named Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing, and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. He began by being interested in ‘the role of the home ground within the community’ and ended with, well, something completely different.

As soon as I’m in the Corridor looking at two pencil and paper works, ‘Ladders’ and ‘Domes’ (the more I visit the Pier, the more I realise how vital and interestingly diverse each exhibition space is, and so will you, as you move around –the tight little Corridor invites you in, and gets you up close to the art quickly) I think two things.

One – this man uses a pencil the way we did on the edges of homework notebooks and rough drafts, building up shapes, using soft shading and hard edges. (OK, some of those kids’ doodles might have been of cowboys, lions or unclothed ladies – but I mean the spirals and squares and triangles and flowers that grew round the edges of the history notes).

Two – it’s like M C Escher, the Dutchman whose work you may know from infuriating jigsaws made from his late meditations on the Mobius strip – a two dimensional strip with only one side which plays about with our ideas of what’s possible (told you to pay attention…).

Some of the titles echo Escher as well – Recreation 1, 11, 111. Game Space 1, 11 ( Metamorphosis 1 and 11 are important milestones for Escher).

‘Ladder’ is decorative, almost feminine in its careful, controlled expert gradation of shading and texture – an inhabited space, with curtains, chenille, fishing net, buoys, wood, steel, busy yet beautifully contained. ‘Domes’ alerts us to the artist’s love affair with geometry.

Opposite these, we’re plunged into ‘Game Space 11’ It’s like diving into a net ( or the Matrix – I’m half expecting Keanu Reeves…). The colour’s warm and persuasive – wine, red and violet with sudden sparks of bright green.

I have a daughter who is obsessed by the Japanese strategy game Go. She and her partner travel the world to spend weekends doing incomprehensible things with small stones on a board which looks very like this large oil painting. It’s a metaphor for life, the Go game, I suppose – all about strategy and capture – and very three dimensional, on a two dimensional plane.

The precision of the brushwork is remarkable. To the Long Gallery – another two Game Spaces, opposite each other on the two end walls – one blue and grey, all lines and squares, so the odd curve comes as a real pleasure – the other like, for want of any other description, a fakir’s rusty red bed of nails, except that there are little rectangles of pure colour here and there, like lights in a skyscraper at night.

Escher used sketches as a geometric grid, from which to design his own characters, filling that plane. He is close to my heart because he never understood the maths he was doing, except through his art – his notebook, Regular Division of the Plane with Asymetric Congruent Polygons, developed purely from his own desire to make graphic design – he never graduated, never was a success at school.

In the same way that phycisists use simple words – like string, or big bang, or butterfly effect – to investigate complex ideas, Escher used art. I think MacIver does too.

Recreation 1 and 111, and Gold Rush. Big canvases, sitting well in the space. They’re elegant, a bit like public art at first glance – you could imagine them in a bank or a shopping centre. But look closer – there’s real subtlety in the texture under the celebration of line that’s going on. Recreation 111 is cool – it’s a bit like what I’d imagine looking out of a new York hotel window twenty floors up in rain might be like. I’m betting scaffolding really rocks MacIver’s boat…

Gold Rush is dynamic, with the same underlying sneaky texture, a very natural one this time, brown shadowy natural hints like tree branches, overlaid again by jaggy blues and golds.

The Room off the Long Gallery is another tight little room, fairly dark and intimate. There are more small pencil works here – rather like notes from the artist to himself about the possibilities of texture. Crumpled paper; flawed cubes, graph paper, but empty of people, in a de Chirico kind of way, as if everything in the space is waiting for somebody to come along and sort it all out.

I expect the artist is that person.

Just as I’m getting a bit mathed-out (Escher, as a child, ‘with care, selected the shape, quantity and size of his slices of cheese, so that, fitted one against the other, they would cover as exactly as possible the entire slice of bread’, and I’m starting to want to throw a lot of Smarties around crazily ) – we reach the Seaward Gable End, my favourite room.

Beyond two young herring gulls on the pier outside, at the school’s Maritime Studies Department, the wooden fire escape and the gang planks round the boat slip echo the severe verticals inside this space – heating ducts, for example.

And bang! The wonderful Form1 – an older work from 2004 – seems to birl away in ever decreasing circles (a circle, at last!) like the Star Ship Enterprise. It’s a football stadium seen from above, a millennium dome in black white and grey, a gas ring. Go closer and it’s full of cogs and wheels and a spider-webby network of spaces enclosed by lines.

The background, again, is subtly smudged and distressed. The techniques here are remarkable – such precision, yet a kind of freedom inside the confines of the geometry. Refreshed, I head for the Double Height Gallery – which is exactly what it says it is.

There’s a series of wonderful surprises here and I hope when you visit you leave it until last. The titles are a clue – East is East. Blossom. Akasaka. Candlestick. Worship. There’s an expansion happening. The palette suddenly changes – to a stunning, subtle grey and mauve and pink, muted, not jazzy like all those Games and Recreations, not twitchy, but gentle and thoughtful.

Gloss paint contrasts with matt, isolating shapes and glinting in the lights. Extraordinarily, the room is an emotional experience – still shape-based, investigating what Escher called the division of the plane, still a meditation on inner space and containment – but charged with feeling.

Like MacIver, Escher travelled a great deal, and also like MacIver, became interested in decorative tiling, particularly in the Alhambra Palace in Grenada.

I don’t go to artist’s talks on their work on purpose, because I prefer just to see – and the Pier staff are great and always helpful, but I tend not to ask them much either, unless it’s about something very practical, for the same reason.

But Carol Dunbar tells me that Worship – a stunning architectural observation of a church, Byzantine-like, representational, precise, tenderly coloured, began the series. From there MacIver moved to work which is, I think, growing in confidence, daring, even playful. Akasaka is like a city, laid out yet isolated.

Candlestick is gentle, all curves, as pale as if it’s seen through a layer of volcanic ash – the football stadium shape again, but seen in a new, much kinder way. Blossom invests geometry with depth – maybe a flower the way a bee sees it? Little ticks of light seem to disturb the grey and black petals, and there’s a Mobius strip infinity feel about it – we want to invest it with movement.

It’s fascinating to see an artist build in strength. He has engaged patiently and carefully with the cold hard shape that I thought was maths and is making it move and change in ever more complex ways.

Escher said ‘in mathematical quarters, the regular division of the plane has been considered theoretically… mathematicians have opened the gate leading to an extensive domain, but they have not entered the domain themselves. By their very nature, they are more interested in the way in which the gate is opened than in the garden lying behind it.’

Steven MacIver is learning to have real fun in the garden.

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

Links

• Steven MacIver

• Pier Arts Centre

MORAG MACINNES enjoys a trip down memory lane

Janette Park, Social History Curator, Orkney Museum and Stromness Museum, with Bryce Wilson at the opening of the exhibition.

WELL, THIS is a nostalgia trip for me. I was that fifties bairn with me socks and sandals, me navy blue knickers and me Saturday sixpence, off down the street to enhance the coffers of the local entrepreneurs.

The Stromness Museum is a jewel for lots of reasons – principally because it believes in quietness, no daft crowd pleasing Yorvik nonsense, and quirkiness. It seems to me that we have lost the reason why museums exist – they were places where boys (usually) sent things from places they’d visited, so their mums could go on a Sunday and see shrunken heads and alarming gourds, appended by a hand written notice saying: gifted by James Flett from Sri Lanka.

Stromness Museum honours that tradition – stuff that got kept by, or sent on, is important. We’re a trading place, and have lots and lots of Inuit things, South African things, Russian things. But this exhibition celebrates wur locals. The business people – local boys who done good, profiting by the kelp trade, or the fishing, or the tourism. Canny men and women who knew how to turn a coin or two.

The writers and adventurers who visited Orkney from the 16th century onwards display an endearing sense of surprise: the food is fresh! The tailor makes a good fist of a suit! The beds are warm and the breakfast sumptuous! Perhaps they had been led to believe we were all savages (and Walter Scott had a hand in that) – and were gratified to discover it wasn’t true… or perhaps they just thought anybody living so far from Edinburgh must be compromised culturally.

Here are showcased the people on the Stromness Street, their products, their adverts, their crazy optimism. Would an ice cream parlour make a profit in 50s Orkney? With a mosaic floor? Well – you can only try. Guilio Fugaccia did, and here’s his ice cream scoop to prove it.

I remember many of these shops, these traders. It seems odd to see their pictures, caught in Kodak. I remember them over a counter, being polite. I went with my mum to the draper’s shop, P L Johnston (tailors and general outfitters, Aquatir and Wayfarer Rainbows, LYBRO & Sweet Orr Overalls…) and watched the girl hurl the change from one end of the shop to the other.

There was a roll of fabric that you knew would be twenty dresses come summer. My father worked for J A Shearer, delivering rolls on his bike, hot from the bakeries. There were several – Porteous specialised in soda scones, but my nana never shopped there, though it was just across the road – she went to the other end of town. The other end of town had two more bakeries and several butchers. Ah well.

Peter Drever – there he is, peeping out of his shop door; I was a bit afraid of him, though he was always friendly – but he was so voluble, so talky. He gave you apples, shined on his shoulder.

Here’s the advert for Wrights Shoes – Boots, Shoes and Bends. His shop was like a cave with an elf in it – he really did tap away on a last. You could smell the leather.

The hotels – their adverts take you back to a John Buchan world, where chaps are meeting up for the fishing season. At Mackay’s a cold lunch costs 2/-. A boat and two boatmen for sea fishing, shooting or excursions costs ten shillings – and you are directed to enjoy the view of the Pierhead pump, at which the horses ‘drink largely.’

At Flett’s Commercial Hotel, a Dog Cart is kept for the convenience of parties staying. Here’s John Rae’s, with the postcards kept outside on a rack. Nobody nicked them. And here’s J D Spedding the chemist, offering Embrocation (specially strong) and Invigorating Hair Tonic for one and threepence – and Oatmeal Soap, Specially prepared for Stromness Water, 6d per tablet.

It’s an innocent world, and a hard working one. There’s a suit made by Dodo Marwick, on his own customised hanger – he always wore a skull cap, and, according to Johnny Pottinger, whose reminiscences enliven the exhibits, in his shop ‘always a lady or a gent would be industriously hand sewing.’ His advert promises ‘many fresh and novel ideas for the coming season.’

The distilleries, of course, are represented, as is the passionate poem by the Sons of the Knight Templars, exhorting the populace to:

‘work together with your might
to save your native land
from alcohol the nation’s curse
for ever set it free
No more let Stromness streets resound
to drunken revelry.’

With limited success, it has to be said… in 1825 there were twelve pubs. For old Stromnessians, this exhibition is a walk down memory lane. For newcomers, it’s an education – look at the story of the boat builders, and admire their glue pot. Look at Mowatt’s limeade – a ‘crystal clear product’ ‘ deposit refundable on return’ – (oh, to be back in the world where deposit was refundable) and be aware that what you miss out on, being new folk, is the memory of Mowatt’s lemonade and Argo’s cream buns, brought on the baker’s head still warm, when the School Sports was just coming to its climax and nobody knew whether Magnus or Rognvald was winning.

Enough, or I’m going to drown in nostalgia. This wee show is testimony to the resilience of local traders, and subtly, the text reminds us of that boom times came and went, but the street survived. Maybe it still can. Go and see it, it’ll make you fond of people who tried. 

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

FESTIVAL season is upon us again, and while there is plenty to look forward to, the proposed two-day Rock4Life event featuring Status Quo, REM, Sugababes and others planned for Arderseir has now been cancelled entirely due to poor ticket sales, following an initial announcement that the second day would be sacrificed.

It is another reminder that such large-scale promotions are a very risky business, and follows in the wake of the demise of both The Outsider and Hydro Connect last year. A more traditional community-related event like the Shetland Folk Festival, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, is perhaps a little more insulated from economic vagaries, but it is a major compliment to all concerned that it has thrived so well.

The Traditional Music and Song Association is another recent victim of the financial squeeze, although not yet to the point of demise. The organisation recently announced the necessity of making its paid staff redundant, but still hopes that a renewed bid for Scottish Arts Council funding will be successful.

Meanwhile, the Highland Council’s budget consultation remains open until the end of June 2010, and I would urge anyone involved in or simply interested in the well-being of arts and culture in the Highlands to make their views known.

Comments and responses can be made to the Council through the weblink above, or at Ward Forums in your local Ward. We have also added a comments box – delayed by a technical hitch – to Georgina Coburn’s Speakout article. While this does not feed directly into the Council’s consultation, we’d like to see some debate on the issue.

Many of the proposed cuts could be deeply damaging to the infrastructure and hard-won developments in arts activity in the region. Proposals include the closure of Inverness Museum and Gallery and the ending of funding to Eden Court’s Out of Eden outreach project.

I have said before in this column that the arts cannot expect to escape in budget cuts of the severity that the Council needs to make, but the arts community is certainly entitled – and indeed obliged – to fight its corner at this crucial point in the decision-making process. No use looking on in silence and complaining afterwards.

On a happier note, Right Lines have finally succeeded in the long haul to bring Whisky Kisses to the stage in the version they envisaged, and hit the road with the show this month. The aforementioned Shetland Folk Festival and Fèis Rois’s Adult Fèis in Ullapool see out April and usher in May, while both Scottish Opera and Scottish Ballet visit Eden Court.

The Ullapool Book Festival (7-9 May 2010) includes a session with Iain Banks, always good value on these occasions, and Pitlochry Festival Theatre have announced their summer repertory season, which opens on 14 May 2010.

Kenny Mathieson
Commissioning Editor, Northings

National Theatre of Scotland's reworking of the JM Barrie classic, Peter Pan.

IN INTERVIEWS to promote this National Theatre of Scotland reworking of the JM Barrie classic, director John Tiffany has talked about the ambitious scale of the production. With its 17-strong cast, live music, extensive flying and pyrotechnic magic, it is bigger, he reckons, even than his staging of ‘Black Watch’.

This may well be the case but, for all the considerable achievements of Tiffany’s various collaborators, their combined efforts seem to squash the story’s playfulness. It is a production too much about shade, too little about light.

In David Greig’s new version of the play, the setting has moved north from prim Kensington to steely Edinburgh, where boys toss red-hot rivets to the men constructing the Forth Rail Bridge and swing dangerously from the scaffolding for a dare. The design by Laura Hopkins evokes the three great diamond structures of the crossing which, when we move to Neverland, cleverly turn to reveal their more organic side. Now the landscape is one of cairns and crags, a place instilled with the song and folklore of the Highlands.

This transition from the industrial city to the elemental countryside makes a good deal of sense. Barrie, whose 150th anniversary is in May, grew up in Kirriemuir in Angus, but achieved fame in London. It is reasonable to assume he would have associated his world of childhood fantasy with the sprites and fairies of Scottish folklore, while his understanding of grown-up order would have been largely metropolitan. Thus in a play that is all about the struggle between the adult head and the childhood heart, the journey north feels psychologically right.

There is a clear logic, too, in Greig’s gentle narrative revisions as Peter Pan and the Lost Boys do battle with Captain Hook and his pirates. Yet somehow it all seems a bit of an effort. Yes, there is some entertaining aerial work, such as when Peter Pan walks down the side of the proscenium arch. Yes, the illusions, courtesy of Jamie Harrison, are dazzling, especially the free-floating fiery ball that is Tinkerbell. And yes, Davey Anderson’s score is wide-ranging and atmospheric.

But the production lacks definition. It’s partly that there are often so many people on stage you can’t work out who is talking, partly that there is a lot of shouty acting and partly that the hazy light never lifts. But on a deeper level, it is that there is not enough joy in Peter’s world for it to seem irresistibly enticing and, conversely, not enough sense of a failed romance to compel Wendy back towards adulthood.

As a result, the central clash of opposing wills is muted and we don’t feel the full tragic weight of the loss of childhood and the inevitability of growing up.

Peter Pan is at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, from 1-5 June, and His Majesty’s Tehatre, Aberdeen, from 15-19 June 2010.

© Mark Fisher, 2010

Links

• National Theatre of Scotland
• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog

National Theatre of Scotland's reworking of the JM Barrie classic, Peter Pan.

GEORGINA COBURN hails an extraordinary gift to the region in this collection of nameless greatness.

One Female and Two Male Heads - Anonymous Venetian Black Chalk Drawing (British Museum)

Nameless – Anonymous Drawings of 15th & 16th Century Italy from The British Museum, The Courtauld Gallery and National Gallery of Scotland

is a significant and provocative exhibition which explores the essential value of art and creativity in an age of celebrity. The exhibition of anonymous drawings forms the centrepiece of a larger interdisciplinary programme of events, performances, talks, workshops and classes exploring concepts of Beauty, Renaissance and Authorship.

Opening concurrently with The British Museum, London, and The Uffizi in Florence’s Fra Angelico to Leonardo and the Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition Michaelangelo’s Dream, the exhibition is imaginative and expansive both in its context and premise, enabling hidden anonymous treasures to be viewed by the public for the first time.

The question of what constitutes “nameless greatness” in an era where branding, fame and celebrity define Western cultural values and aspirations is extremely pertinent and timely. The exhibition team, including Moray Art Centre Founder and Director Randy Klinger, Dr. Alison Wright, Head of Renaissance Art History, University College London, and Freda Matassa, ex-Head of Collections Management, Tate Galleries & Royal Academy, London, have created a wonderful stimulus for artistic engagement, appreciation and debate.

What resonates throughout the exhibition is the value of drawing as an intimate and immediate means of human expression unfettered by the prejudice of attribution.

The concept of authorship and its meaning in the contemporary world is highlighted by the selection of anonymous Renaissance drawings, actively challenging our collective need to value work in accordance with the art market and accepted canons of art history. The validation of a named master is wholly absent, heightening the viewer’s primary experience of the exhibition: that of connection with the timeless universality of human experience and emotion.

Even a contemporary largely secular audience could not fail to read the emotional gravitas contained within each delicate line of The Virgin Mary and Two Holy Women (Metalpoint with white highlighting on lilac prepared paper, British Museum). This arrangement of figures traditionally displayed at the base of the crucifixion becomes all the more powerful in isolation, depicted in a way which articulates human fragility.

Accentuated by the technique of metalpoint which creates an amazing delicacy of line, this inherent vulnerability can be seen in the weeping drapery and compassionate arrangement of the three female figures drawn to each other in grief, their hands converging at the centre of the composition. This human mark is a gesture transcendent of religion and time which finds pure expression here in the immediacy of drawing.

Similarly when viewing Portrait Drawing of A Man (Black chalk on pale brown paper, British Museum) the soft sensuousness of the medium is immediately tactile, linking the crafting of the image with our essential reading of it. Although we do not know the identity of the artist or the subject, their direct gaze meets our own in a way that is immediately arresting and compelling.

Reminiscent of Durer, the fine rendering of detail and facial modelling in chiaroscuro displays enviable draughtsmanship; however, the resounding tone of the exhibition is not intimidation through artistic pedigree or technique but an irresistible invitation to see not just the world of the artist, but ourselves.

Throughout the exhibition the viewer is in awe not of names but of the struggle, curiosity, insight and craft demonstrated by an individual human hand and mind, qualities which the supporting programme of workshops and classes will no doubt enable people to explore for themselves in greater depth.

The tiny red chalk drawing of Virgin and Child and St Anne (Courtauld Gallery, London) is one of the highlights of the exhibition, conveying all the vigour and energy of the artist’s first response to the subject. The drafted sketch lines still visible in this and other works in the exhibition, such as St. John the Evangelist, after Jacopo Sansovino (Red chalk and red wash over traces of black chalk on buff paper, squared in black chalk, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), convey the discipline of the medium.

Created at a time when workshop education within a recognised school was the norm, these drawings can be seen simultaneously as visual workings within a larger framework of artistic production and tangible evidence of the singular vision of the artist as maker.

One of the most potent and exciting works in the show, Anamorphic drawing of a rider on a monstrous horse (Pen and ink over traces of black chalk on three pieces of paper stuck together, Courtauld Gallery, London), displays its dynamism not just in the arrangement of the image within an angular trajectory but in the animation and fluidity of pen and ink.

Seen at an extreme angle of vision to the left or right, the fantastical image merges in an ambiguous morphing of man and beast. The claw-like hands and muscular body of the rider coupled with the unbridled energy of the horse engulfed in cloud or flame is furiously elemental in its movement, an image violently pulled in opposing directions.

The imaginative appeal of this work lies in the strange combination of an almost scientific optically-driven approach to the construction of the image and the magical, otherworldly experience of seeing it emerge like a phantom from that dark space in the corner of your eye.

Although we will never know the identity of its creator, this drawing, like many others in the exhibition, affirms the value of creative process and the possibility of re-birth through human enquiry, thought and creative action. The exhibition as a whole causes us to re-examine our criteria for judging beauty and the cultural meaning of Renaissance.

The supporting programme of events offers an astonishing array of possibilities for wider engagement with the exhibition’s central themes of Beauty, Renaissance and Authorship.

A series of talks including The Interpretation of Form in the Renaissance by Dr Antonio Locarfaro, University of Siena, Renaissance Discoveries in Anatomy by artist Alan McGowan, Renaissance Poetry and Culture by Patrick Hart, University of Strathclyde and Orpheus Revived: The Re-birth of Platonism at the Heart of the Renaissance Movement by Anthony Rooley, Director, Consort of Musicke & Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Basel will compliment the exhibition.

In addition, performances of Renaissance poetry, music and Commedia del’arte, together with classes in Life Drawing, Printmaking, Figure Drawing in Silverpoint, Modern Fresco Painting, Renaissance Portraiture. Renaissance Anatomy, Renaissance Painting Technique; Imprimatura and Glazing, a series of young people’s classes, family day art classes; Work in a Renaissance Studio and Drawing: Renaissance Perspective and a Scottish/ Italian Food, Drink and Trades Festival will enable people of all ages to participate in the event.

Nameless is an event which expands beyond the boundaries of a traditional gallery space, bringing the viewer into contact with the “nameless greatness” and humility of the human mark. It is an extraordinary gift to the entire region defined by the vision and energy which has defined Moray Art Centre from its conception. 

© Georgina Coburn, 2010

Links

• Moray Art Centre

GEORGINA COBURN examines new direction in the work of this Inverness-shire-based figurative artist.

Triptych by Denise Davis

TORE GALLERY’S latest exhibition, aCross the Carpathians, features a striking selection of new figurative works by Highland based artist Denise Davis. Inspired by the artist’s journey to Romania in autumn 2009, this collection of oils on canvas and board explore religious iconography and the power of the human figure as a means of artistic expression.

Davis’s characteristic abstraction of the figure and strong palette is exemplified in Triptych (Oil on canvas). Loose gestural brushwork invested with the energy and immediacy of drawn marks, together with a dominant palette of rich cadmium red, umber and ochre, is accented with deep ultramarine and white, every mark delivered with equal vibrancy.

The sequence of three figures spatially divided by the physical frame are compellingly laid bare, the artist shows us the inner nature of the figure as flesh right down to the bone of the spine. Choice of colour, paint handling and effective use of the triptych as a compositional/symbolic device are strongly reminiscent of the work of Francis Bacon.

Davis’s observation of neglected and decaying houses of worship on her Romanian journey has given new impetus to her ongoing exploration of the human figure. The remnants of religious imagery hidden in hundreds of Orthodox churches and suppressed under a communist dictatorship are a visual testimony of collective suffering and survival.

The introduction of religious iconography into Davis’s work is present not just in terms of visual association but treatment of the picture surface. Many of these new works work directly onto wood panel, often with the grain visible – a hard and ungiving surface. This physicality coupled with a layered treatment of paintwork, sometimes scratched away, or distressed to allow underpainting to emerge, conveys a feeling of struggle and endurance in relation to the human subject.

Mary Magdalen, a work which interestingly utilises collaged newsprint in the formation of the cross, frames the figure in a border of gold paint emerging from the dark umber ground of the painting. The use of gold and its function in icon painting in connection with the viewer is both optical and spiritual. We feel acutely in the inclined posture of the Magdalen figure and in the reflective gold that frames her, a vision of humanity with the full weight of history and experience upon it. Davis’s layering of materials also adds to this sense of searching through rubble and layers of grime for some remnant of truth – be it spiritual or simply human.

Done Deed, an image of the crucifixion, is potent in its abstraction of human form, the angular shoulders pushed to the high right-hand corner of the composition. This uncomfortable positioning of the figure, together with the violent binding marks scratched into the paint surface defines the human form in a visual language of pure expressionism. The head is subtly defined in a halo of cerulean blue together with golden highlights of Naples yellow upon the body which allow the figure to emerge resiliently out of what is symbolically humanity’s darkest hour.

Completion (Oil on canvas) displayed rather appropriately in the converted gallery’s pulpit expands this idea. The stark combination of the cross and figure in a desolate mindscape of steely grey/blue sky and black earth is illuminated by pure articulate use of cadmium red which is spilled from the base of the cross and from the adjacent figure onto the earth below. The effect of this vibrant red is quite extraordinary, like that of the gold in an icon. The connection is immediately with our own blood.

In Figure With Skull, the human form takes on an almost mythological or allegorical status. The rich alizarin crimson which dominates the scene, populated only by a ghostly hovering skull and a female figure, her back indifferently towards us, presents an imaginatively heightened narrative of life and mortality. Figure With Red Skull (Oil on canvas), with its softer paint handling, presents an interesting image of the female form linked by red accents to both death and the creation of life.

The creation of an imaginative and psychological space through abstraction can perhaps be seen most acutely in Dog Fight, infused with raw energy and the rapid violent movement of two forms barely discernable locked together in deathly struggle. Animal instinct and impulse are depicted here effectively by purely abstract marks.

There is throughout this body of work an interesting dialogue between the secular and the sacred, with the human form as mediator. It is a brave step for a gallery strongly connected with traditions of landscape painting to exhibit such a show, and although this work might best be presented in a more enclosed space where lighting can be directed with more precision, this is a fascinating and affecting body of work which deserves to be seen more widely. 

© Georgina Coburn, 2010

Link

• Tore Gallery

ALEXANDER SMITH checks out a band on a rising curve.

Woodenbox With a Fistful of Fivers

HOOTANANNY’S hosted one of April’s most eagerly anticipated gigs with the visit of much-hyped Glasgow band Woodenbox With a Fistful of Fivers. Support came from Inverness’s own James Mackenzie and the Aquascene.

The local act delivered a fine set of languid, string laden folk-rock, which at times was very impressive indeed. Their set boasted some genuinely lovely meditative wanderings; among them was ‘The Boat Song’, which demonstrated a range of musical and lyrical strengths which promises much for the future.

With a string of rave reviews for their debut, Home and the Wildhunt on the influential Electric Honey, a label which has expedited the careers of Belle & Sebastian and Snow Patrol amongst others, WBWAFOF are red hot at the moment, and the Highland capital had lofty expectations for their visit.

Fortunately they instantly found their Ennio Morricone-influenced groove with ease. Thrilling brass-whipped single ‘Hang the Noose’ really signalled the band’s intent; it was fiesta time on stage and the crowd quickly responded accordingly. From there they settled into a steady stomping chug and Hootananny’s went with them. What was impressive from the off was their ability to seamlessly blend disparate elements then deliver them with utter conviction and dynamism, while never becoming desultory or obfuscatory.

They incorporate country, blues, ska, rock’n'rolll and just about everything else, all suffused with an unavoidable doff to Morricone’s s spaghetti western soundtracks. Throughout the brass erupted in controlled explosions creating a real drive, while frontman Ali Downer stomped with a charged bark.

The highlight came, paradoxically, from the gorgeous, slower paced ‘Draw a Line’, which carried its own measured energy and really allowed Downer’s earthy Scottish diction to penetrate; it also gave the crowd just enough time to recover before a welcome return to stomping with gusto. ‘Twisted Mile’ was another shining example of their versatility, merging country, folk and rock’ n’ roll with a cool ramshackle energy.

Lyrically they explore some pretty moody territory, but it’s laced with interesting ambiguities and humour and often set against an upbeat country soundtrack resulting in a genuinely interesting musical conflict, which is 100 percent free from clichè.

WBWAFOF offered a vibrant, refreshing and at times riveting performance peppered with just the right amount of quirky chaos, and their effort was rewarded with an awesome response from the packed house.

With acts such as Mumford & Sons breaching the pop charts recently, more acts embracing a similar aesthetic may soon come in from the periphery, and given that WBWAFOF are near the very top of an ever increasing pile, opportunities to catch them in such intimate surroundings may be very limited indeed. Awesome.

© Alexander Smith, 2010

Links

• Woodenbox 

• James Mackenzie

MARK FISHER relishes Wee Stories ability to retell classic stories in a fresh way

Iain Johnstone and Andy Cannon in Treasure Island (photo - Kevin Low)

IAIN JOHNSTONE is adrift on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Talking directly to the audience, he sets the scene. “No ships, no land, no aeroplanes,” he says. This being the day UK airports have finally reopened after the Icelandic volcano, it is an adlib that gets a laugh of recognition.

And it is far from being the only laugh in this two-man adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s high-seas page-turner. That might come as a surprise to those who love the novel for its sense of adventure, pace and danger, rather than for its knockabout laughs, but the ever reliable Wee Stories theatre company is brilliant at injecting the best kind of fun and enthusiasm into the most serious of tales.

As it has done with Arthurian legend, Shakespearean tragedy and Greek myth, the company introduces young audiences to a powerful, dramatic story in a way that is both deeply respectful of the original and unafraid to have a giggle.

Thus, it presents Stevenson’s 1883 story in terms of two musicians who are lost at sea with only bananas and champagne to keep them going. The company gives us not only a retelling of the tale of teenager Jim Hawkins and his voyage with an unsavoury crew in search of buried treasure, but also a framing narrative about two men who are becoming increasingly fed up of each other’s company.

Joined by Andy Cannon, Johnstone passes the time by acting out Treasure Island, a book both men adore. They score laughs in their bickering relationship and their arguments about how to stage the story, but never in a way that diminishes their passion for the piratical adventure itself.

The approach also comes with a built-in theatricality. Stranded on their raft, Johnstone and Cannon can tell the story only with the material immediately to hand. They use bananas for guns, empty bottles for additional characters and a double bass for a galleon. They make scratch costumes with whatever is to hand and make quick changes as they run though Stevenson’s colourful cast of seamen and landlubbers.

The result is a highly entertaining show that trusts the power of the imagination and captures the excitement of Stevenson’s swashbuckling story, doing so in an unpretentious and lively way.

Treasure Island is at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, from 28 April to 1 May 2010.

© Mark Fisher, 2010

Links

• Wee Stories
• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog

IAN STEPHEN checks out the results of an imaginative project uniting schools in Skye and Edinburgh

YOU WOULDN’T think an artist best known for a hermit tendency would be a natural lead artist for education projects. But I saw Julie Brook enthuse Primary schoolkids when they visited her Mingulay show in Collins Gallery, Glasgow. I also saw large-scale drawings at Kelvingrove, some years ago. These were made with Glasgow pupils and individual elements contributed to impressive cityscapes. So it seems, for Julie Brooks, life is a balance between sojourns in depopulated places and vibrant family and community life.

Air Iomlaid exhibition opening

The Fruitmarket Gallery is balancing its eclectic exhibitions programe with an accessible show derived from an ambitious Gaelic language conversation between Tolcross Primary School, Edinburgh, and Bun-sgoil-Shlèite, in Skye. It’s not a document of the juxtaposition of urban and island imagery but an exhibition in its own right.

Brooks was the lead artist in a team which began with the aim of bringing the pupils to engage with an unfamiliar landscape through drawing and painting. Another stated aim was to avoid fostering one style above another, but rather looking for the individual young artists to develop their own ways.

But strangely, the high quality drawing and painting on display downstairs in the Fruitmarket could indeed be the work of one school or one class or even one artist. There is a great variety, but it reminds me of collected bodies of Scottish landscape work shown elsewhere in Edinburgh.

I’m thinking of certain periods represented in the permanent collection of the City Arts Centre, across the road. And then there’s the studies of Iona and other West of Scotland paintings in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s current showing of themed groups of work relating to the use of colour.

Maybe the similarities in the children’s paintings are inevitable when you have a tight project theme. But it must be huge motivation for the participants when they see their contributions building up to an exhibition on this scale.

When you take the walk upstairs, the impact of the collective work hits you with force. Tables of used but bonny blue sketch pads have a huge presence. The charcoal drawings and free studies spill out, revealing confidence and fluency as well as enthusiasm. These are clearly at the heart of the project. And, beside them, city and island imagery is mixed into huge scale landscapes in monochrome. The individual efforts are orchestrated.

On the evidence of this we are looking at a very fine learning process. Later exchanges of the Gaelic medium group brought in poets, animators and film-makers. The ambition of the project is reflected in a handsome catalogue and the exhibition will move on to the Isle of Skye in June.

© Ian Stephen, 2010

Links

• Air Iomlaid
• Fruitmarket Gallery
• Sabhal Mòr Ostaig
• Air Iomlaid blog (English)
• Air Iomlaid blog (Gaelic)
• Air Iomlaid image gallery

MORAG MACINNES heard Dr Donna Heddle trace connections with the Sagas in the poet’s work

George Mackay Brown

THE GEORGE Mackay Brown Fellowship instituted a Memorial Lecture on the poet in 2007, to be held on or as near St Magnus Day (16 April), as possible. Aficionados will know how important to the author the saint was – the subject of many of his poems, and a full length novel.

With uncanny synchronicity, he died in the month he loved best, when the daffodils were out, and his funeral was held at St Magnus Cathedral on the saint’s day. As Maggie Fergusson remarks in her excellent biography of the poet, “before, in the language of the sagas, he ‘passed out of the story’… he said ‘I see hundreds and hundreds of ships sailing out of the harbour.’”

These last words – and the mention of sagas – set the scene neatly for this year’s lecture, by Dr Donna Heddle, programme leader in Cultural Studies at Orkney College, UHI, and Director of the Centre of Nordic Studies. She is a saga specialist, and took as her theme the myriad voices the poet exhibits and the rhetoric of the sagas, which inspired his work.

Other Orcadian writers, such as Eric Linklater, have experimented with ’saga language’. But Linklater experimented with many voices. For GMB the economy of the old stories – and the communities and personalities and events they were about – underpinned his creative life.

Dr Heddle pointed out that the preconceived idea of GMB the hermit was too simple – he is not parochial, but looked for a room with a view. His language is concrete, spare and direct. Like the saga writers, he was not an explorer for himself, and his poems are saturated with life. Like them too, he’s a mood setter, not a commentator.

He rarely uses direct speech, and it is formulaic when he does – again a saga trait. His emphasis is also character-led. His women, like those in the sagas, are strong but often thwarted. His perception of time, too, is ‘an ocean of narratives’, rather like the orality of saga tales, which often define action through character.

If you want to see a Nordic treatment of the way a man acts, she suggested, look at the story ‘The Wireless Set’ ¬ a deceptively simple tale about stoicism and simplicity in the face of family tragedy.

There is also, however, a Celtic strain running through his work. He called himself Mackay Brown, recognising his mother’s roots, and his deep rooted belief that what has once happened always exists, his timeless evocation of landscape, the circularity of it, the paradox that the end is always in the beginning – that is reminiscent perhaps of the Book of Kells.

Then there’s the spiritual voice, as a reflection of the creative power of God, his fondness for liturgy and its language. For him human lives are always rooted in ceremony – he is the poet as spiritual significator.

Dr Heddle described the importance of Thomas Mann’s influence, and speculated about the similarities between G M B and Icelandic writer Haldor Laxness (Iceland being much in the mind, as some of the participants were unable to make the weekend because of flight disruption).

She summed up by suggesting that the most Nordic part of Mackay Brown was a residue of the sense of value, oldness and permanency of community. In the course of the lecture she discussed in passing the relationship between Muir and Mackay Brown, and said she would love to do that lecture. The audience will look forward to it. This was a fine beginning to a weekend celebrating literary endeavour.

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

Links

• George Mackay Brown