Balancing Art and Life

ALISTAIR PEEBLES considers the artistic achievement of North Ronaldsay painter and sculptor IAN SCOTT in the light of his latest exhibition in Stromness.

THIS PAST SUMMER in Orkney, a sculptural storm blew up suddenly, and quietly faded away – at least I think it’s gone for the moment. The question it grew out of: how best to memorialize George Mackay Brown, and how best to give a public face to his lasting achievement as a writer, as he put it himself, “for the islands”.

The exhibition UNCAST, continuing in the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, till 8 October, brings us up to date with the achievements of one of the islands’ most notable visual artists, the sculptor and painter Ian Scott. The business of a memorial sculpture for GMB has no immediate connection with the exhibition, and I began with a reference to it not just because it raised a stooshie, but because tangled up in all the feelings, memories and reasons it provoked was a recognition that public art in Orkney isn’t. Doesn’t. Hasn’t yet. Not much anyway.

And also because I find it very encouraging that, to put it cautiously, there is some serious public interest here in buying a piece of Ian Scott’s work in bronze from the exhibition – funding sources are being looked into – and because I haven’t met anyone yet who thinks it wouldn’t be a moment too soon if such a thing were to happen.

It’s almost automatic, in speaking about this artist, this man indeed, to couple his name with his native North Ronaldsay. Apart from his years training at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, and secondary education in Kirkwall, he has lived his entire life in that most northerly Orkney island, helping to work the family farm (now having inherited the responsibility for its care) and devoting a great deal of time to the interests of the community. It has been a busy and fulfilling way of life, but not one that has allowed for unbroken dedication to painting and sculpture.

Nevertheless, North Ronaldsay, as well as sustaining him in the practical and social aspects of life, has quite clearly fed his imagination and provided rich subject matter for his work. Equally, the rigour of the art education he received during the 60s formed his talents for working with line and surface in such a way that with little difficulty he has been able to pursue his art over the years when circumstances allowed, and the opportunity this exhibition has provided (or compelled) for a sustained period of work has paid off handsomely.

“In selecting work for the current exhibition, Scott has consciously placed before us material from all stages of his creative life”

UNCAST is part new work, part retrospective, and it shows a remarkable consistency in Scott’s output from his earliest days as a practising artist to the present. In an authoritative introductory essay to his previous exhibition at the Pier Arts Centre – all of 21 years ago – Edward Gage wrote of Scott’s “continuously creative life dedicated to expounding certain concepts…” and that therefore “…dramatic changes have no place in the development of his imagery and one must look instead for slight changes of emphasis, for increasing refinement in the business of formal realisation.”
 
In selecting work for the current exhibition, Scott has consciously placed before us material from all stages of his creative life, and while it is true that the years have fostered the process of refinement that Gage drew attention to, one must hope that more opportunities will arise in years to come for that process to give rise to further examples of the kind of work that Scott has been able to achieve here.

Thus the exhibition includes examples from art school – the work of a skilful young artist, dealing confidently with his material – as well as painting and drawing in a variety of media from the 1980s to the present; and sculpture, mostly recent, but including reference to early works such as the portrait in bronze of his grandmother, The Orcadian. That powerful study is achieved in a much more stylised aesthetic than other figurative pieces that accompany it in the retrospective area of the show. Those include Clay Study for a Lifeboatman (a design used for the memorial in Longhope, Hoy, for the men lost at sea in 1969), and bronzes of Stanley Cursiter and George Mackay Brown.

“The sculptures distil the visual fields into objects that carry all the associations one sees in the painted interpretations, and the juxtaposition confirms that.”

The two rooms of the Pier Gallery are given over to Scott’s work from this year: eleven oil paintings and four sculptures in plaster. The paintings are all coastal studies with titles that locate them precisely, mostly in North Ronaldsay: The Black Rock at Hangie, Ebb tide rocks below the Lurn, and so on – earth colours and vivid blues, often, curiously, with the relative stillness of a rock pool in the foreground. (I keep wondering if I feel a sense of enclosure on those shores, as you look out and beyond the island: an Edwin Muir feeling, perhaps.) In one sense those pieces and the sculptures that stand nearby are at odds, for the sculptures are abstract forms – Bone Study: Standing Stone, Forms of the Sea, and so on – fluid shapes, effortlessly combining waves, clouds, rocks and the lines and movements of the animals that inhabit the sea and the sky.

But actually to stand in the gallery and look at those sculptural forms with the seascapes behind them on the walls is to find no discontinuity really, but excitement, and a powerful energy passing back and forth. This effect is strengthened by the way in which the foreground rock formations in the paintings achieve something of the same rapid fluidity and abstraction that one sees in the moulded forms. The sculptures distil the visual fields into objects that carry all the associations one sees in the painted interpretations, and the juxtaposition confirms that. While the paintings are quickly executed, characteristically in one day, the sculptures have taken much longer to materialise in their present form – of which more below. Their sources are evident in the titles, but Scott has travelled widely in Britain, to Shetland, Faroe and Iceland, where the natural shapes and inspiration could be found.

The teacher at Gray’s who most affected Scott’s outlook was Leo Clegg, Head of the Sculpture Department at that time, and the influence has lasted throughout. I asked Ian about the artists whose work he most admired: “Artists I like (I imagine you mean sculptors)?  Well, Hepworth and Moore of course.  There are others, Epstein, and the two French sculptors Rodin and Despiau. There are more but above all, I think Egyptian sculpture. There to see is the wonderful simplification of form – everything reduced to a minimum of interpretation – yet saying everything – simple and pure (maybe not so simple as one thinks) by sculptors living over – is it four or five thousand years ago – something like that. Anyhow, that’s my line – simple, powerful and pure form. They were masters. Of course one see this ‘simplification’ in the art of other civilisations and in so-called primitive sculpture, but Egyptian for me. Leo Clegg always encouraged his students to study the sculpture of the ancient Egyptians.”

“It is clear to anyone who knows Ian Scott and his work why he has chosen to live in North Ronaldsay, and why he has chosen to balance art and life in his own energetic and purposeful way.”

In one of the window spaces in the Pier Gallery is a group of small bronze maquettes from the mid-70s. While this connection confirms the observation made by Edward Gage, quoted above, it comes as a surprise to realise that the plaster forms in the gallery, made this year, are in some cases large-scale versions of those much earlier pieces. The surprise is in part that it has taken all this time for the work to move on to a larger scale, but there is a surprise also that the large works seem so new-found and, but for the fact that they have yet to be cast, so complete in themselves.

Perhaps the obvious explanation is that the origins and sources of inspiration for these works, unlike the busy faraway world that finds its sculptural voice in Calder and Serra and the Chapmans, for example, don’t themselves alter much in their essentials. There is also the fact that his work sits so well with the work of Barbara Hepworth in the Pier’s own collection. Seeing her bronze sculpture on the courtyard as you leave the Gallery gives no sense of having broken with the experience of the work you’ve been looking at indoors. The sound of the sea in the harbour, and the shape and movement of the waves there, are also sympathetic to the atmosphere created inside.

It is clear to anyone who knows Ian Scott and his work why he has chosen to live in North Ronaldsay, and why he has chosen to balance art and life in his own energetic and purposeful way. (I mean the full breadth of his work: as he says himself, “…it seems to me that the work of the lobster fisherman, the dyke builder, farmer and wool knitter, writer, poet, musician and artist are all related. There is artistry in every kind of work we do.”)

But the artistry of the artist is finally in art, and I cherish the hope that the possibility of the kind of recognition I referred to earlier – together with the evident popularity and success of this exhibition – will encourage Ian to make the byre at Antabreck home more often to the kind of sleek, dynamic creatures that featured this summer on his exhibition poster. We’ll see: we’ll hope so.

© Alistair Peebles, 2004