Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, until 20 June 2007

Frances Walker RSA 'Machair Walk'.

IN THE history of art of the Scottish Highlands (if such a neatly defined entity can ever be said to exist) it’s interesting to ponder on the various treatments of landscape; the land is an abiding trope for artists wishing to explore what ‘Highland’ means to them.

Depending on your point of view, Sir Edwin Landseer’s ‘Monarch of the Glen’, painted in 1851, was either a crass, over-romanticised and patronising take on a whole host of Highland issues (at the height of the Clearances where is his concern for the plight of the people?), or a deft handling and composition, and a foregrounding (quite literally) of nature as an important aspect of Highland life.

There’s a satirical take on Landseer’s ‘Balmorality’ and all the clichés such a term conjures by the self-styled invited artist, The Lonely Piper, who has adapted Landseer’s earth-bound vision and catapulted it into a universal context in his ‘The Cosmic Monarch’.

Landseer’s work isn’t in the Royal Scottish Academy’s 181st exhibition this year, although its conceptual presence was probably never far from the minds of the RSA organisers who have chosen to devote a proportion of their exhibiting space to ‘HIGHLAND: Visual Responses to Highland Scotland’. It’s a welcome move because clearly the art historiography of the Highlands requires and demands greater attention than has hitherto been the case.

A proportion of most of the ten galleries (and the RSA library) have been given over to invited artists’ responses to Highland themes and issues, and they include familiar names such as Frances Walker, Calum Colvin, Richard Demarco, Alan Davie and Marian Leven.

During a recent residency in Skye’s Gaelic medium university college (Sabhal Mor Ostaig), Leven produced a series of eighteen mixed media studies, exhibited here under the collective title ‘North Notes’.

Leven, who is married to another highly talented RSA exhibitor, Will Maclean, explores landscape in quite a different way 150 years on from Landseer. For Leven, the external landscape informs her inner vision. These delicate, moody, atmospheric works in all their shades of grey and white with their frail washes and obscured palimpsests are really mood and emotion rendered as tangible image.

Frances Walker’s work, although occupying more space and including a large paneled screen set on the gallery floor, is a more prosaic artist, really only interested in viewing the world as seen; there’s little metaphor and only a steady crafting hand.

Calum Colvin’s ‘Ossian’ somehow conjures lines from Browning :

“While the patching houseleek’s head of blossom winks
Through the chinks–
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime,”

But Calvin’s ruins are those of a reputation – that of James Macpherson, whose ‘Poems of Ossian’, published in the 1760s, provoked a debate on authenticity and authorship which continued for the next few decades. Colvin’s treatment is to build a ‘set’ and photograph it under different lighting conditions. He can therefore control mood and highlight or obscure different parts of his composition.

For those with even a passing knowledge of the visual arts in Scotland, the reputation of Richard Demarco needs little preamble. He’s done just about everything and met just about everyone, not just in the UK but in places as far flung as Poland and Romania.

In the 1970s Demarco undertook a number of voyages on the barque ‘The Marques’ and stopped off in various places around Scotland to meet artists and writers. Demarco took with him luminaries and visionaries from the European intellectual avant-garde – friends, colleagues and fellow voyagers.

These journeys were never about tourism but, rather, explorations of history, prehistory and the connections between past and present. They were about place and the spirit of place. Thus he sailed through the sound of Raasay with Sorley Maclean, who read his own poetry to a wrapt and windswept audience.

Only Demarco, unique in his genius for introduction and human connection, could have pulled off such a move. Looking at the line drawing (copied from a photograph) makes one long to have been there – just for that moment and the intense collision of ideas and resonances such an event must have provoked.

Demarco’s ‘Road to Meikle Seggie,’ a huge wall drawing, illustrates a number of such meetings – it’s more intellectual topography than geographical sketch. The Road to Meikle Seggie – Demarco’s shorthand title for life’s journey of ideas, connections and meetings – is a precious notion illustrating with clarity his belief that life and work are non-separable; for Demarco (like his great inspiration Joseph Beuys) his own life is one continuous artwork.

© Giles Sutherland, 2007

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