Orkney Gallery, Kirkwall, March 2004

A VISIT TO the degree shows at Scotland’s leading art schools is an exciting experience. The work often reflects recent trends in the contemporary art world, and it is always refreshing to see so many ideas from artists who are beginning to make their mark, in all the various media at their disposal.

© Laura Drever

Sometimes, of course, formal novelties replace genuine innovation, and amongst the often inexplicable trickiness, it is reassuring to see the work of someone who uses paint on canvas in a sophisticated and engaging way. When I saw her work last summer at Edinburgh College of Art, I was not surprised to learn that Laura Drever had received a total of seven awards for her work in final year, recognition of her outstanding abilities as a painter and draughtswoman.

Since graduation, Laura has returned to her native Orkney, set up her studio in Stromness and  continued to paint, producing a new body of work that has recently been on show in the Orkney Gallery in Kirkwall. The development and growth in confidence of her painting over such a short period is quite remarkable, especially considering that the impetus to continue to work can be hard to find once an artist has left behind the routine of an educational establishment. It is clear from these twenty-or-so new pieces that her early promise will be sending out vigorous new growth for some time to come.

Her work is primarily about how she experiences the landscape. In fact the landscape of Orkney is a theme that has been with her from early in her student days, when she would return to Edinburgh with photographic records of her home environment and rework those images in paint. Eventually, however, this rather secondhand method of representing the place she knew, and that she felt directly, became unsatisfactory.

The photographs were set aside and she began to explore what is now still at the heart of her work: her own relationship with Orkney. These days, rather than make sketches or take photographs, she goes out into the landscape and walks, taking note of how the weather and  seasonal changes affect what she sees and how she feels. The paintings attempt to capture these personal, fleeting shifts of  mood, pattern and light.

West focuses on her responses to walks taken in and around Stromness and the West Mainland of Orkney. The paintings feature recognisable elements of the landscape: the iconic bulges of north Hoy and the lower, rounded Harray hills – as well as less definite, though no less familiar, references to other landscape features, such as rocks, lochs and fields.

These are not arranged in a direct transcription of ‘the view’ but tend to be scattered in a broad and minimalist way across the paintings, which themselves work both as flat compositions and in terms of pictorial depth. Her painting style is a balance between gestural, spontaneous brushstrokes and areas of very detailed and delicate pencil drawing. Although she makes no claim to be following the example of any other artist, she did say that she liked the work of Cy Twombly, and something of his range of marks is realised here.

Her colour palette is subtle and quite muted. In these paintings she has introduced the limited colours of the winter landscape – the  deep reds of the grasses that glow from  hillsides and the damp dark tones of waterlogged fields, brown and green.

The paintings are worked on well-prepared surfaces of several kinds: heavily-primed canvases, paper that has been pulled tight across canvas stretchers, and quite large pieces of thin chamois-like leather. These leather fragments are randomly shaped, warped and punctured, providing textural qualities that give an interesting, dynamic context for the marks made there. The sizes of her paintings range from very large to small and intimate, but the works in this exhibition are mostly domestic in scale. She enjoys working on the very large pieces, which offer great scope for a range of mark-making and show how effectively she can handle space. The smaller works have an immediacy which is not so strongly evident in the bigger works.

Indeed, in general, the works on show at the Orkney Gallery are much freer and more fluid than the big showpiece paintings that I saw in her Degree show. While they seem less ‘finished’ than the Edinburgh works, they have a vitality and energy that expresses something more than the Orkney landscape itself: they reflect the freedom that she has found now that she is back here, inhabiting this place. By comparison, the Edinburgh paintings now seem rather aloof and disconnected.

Laura Drever is a gifted painter, committed to her work, and with the drive and inner confidence to continue to take bold new steps in finding where her talent may lead her. It is very refreshing to have someone of her artistic calibre returning to live and work in Orkney (and she’s lucky to have a place like this to call home). George Mackay Brown found it unnecessary to stray from his own landscape to say something universal, and while it is interesting to speculate whether Laura has a desire to explore other landscapes, and to wonder what she might make of them, it is inspiring to see such an assured development in such a short period of time, and very welcome to have her back here making art.

© Carol Dunbar, 2004