Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, until 29 July 2007

Calum Colvin RSA 'Self Portrait' (photo - RSA Edinburgh)

IT WAS Robert Burns who, in his poem ‘To A Louse’, published in 1786 wrote:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

The poem has been cited often enough (perhaps too often) as a plea against human vanity; but in the context of this exhibition it is used as a way of describing the process of portraiture and, more complexly, self-portraiture.

The curator of this show by twelve artists, Gordon Brown, who runs the eponymous Brown’s Gallery in Tain, has come up with a rather neat, compact and intelligent idea: pair a dozen artists and ask each to produce a self-portrait and a portrait of their ‘other half’.

So, John Byrne was asked to work with Steven Campbell, Calum Colvin with John Bellany, Gordon Robin Brown with Jennifer Houliston, Allan Macdonald with Eugenie Vronskaya, Craig Mackay with Pat Semple and Alex Main with David Eustace. The results are by turns fascinating, insightful, painful and, occasionally, banal.

Portraiture and its close cousin, self-portraiture, have a long and distinguished lineage in the history of art. The artistic territory is also populated by dense psychological intrigues and complexities. A specialist in the linked genres, Professor Shearer West, pointed out: “While a portrait can be concerned with likeness as contained in a person’s physical features, it can also represent the subject’s social position or ‘inner life’, such as their character or virtues”.

Certainly, this observation is useful when looking at some of the images here. John Byrne’s portrait of Steven Campbell and its reciprocal image are cases in point. Byrne shows Campbell (whom he had never met prior to the ‘sitting’) in a pose of slumped and abject misery, clad in sombre grey and black.

In his left hand Campbell wields a palette and brushes and his right hand, he also holds a brushes. The face is pale, ill looking, and his black bikers’ boots are clumsy and oversized. What does this tell us about Campbell and about Byrne’s perception of him? It’s as if Byrne was intimidated, frightened almost. Byrne describes Campbell as having ‘the gaze of a man who has lived a life’.

By stark contrast Campbell’s image of Byrne is lyrical and full of symbolism; two of Byrne’s winged ‘muses’ are shown, angelic and classically beautiful, while various birds (including a hummingbird and a swallow) fly and flutter in the foreground. Bryne, too, is shown carrying an implement in his left hand (it might be a pen or a brush) thus signalling his status as ‘polymath’.

The pair’s self-portraits also make an interesting comparison. While Byrne shows himself ‘in combat’ dressed in a camouflage vest and surrounded by thorns, he also carries the symbolically loaded palette and brush. The artist as a fighter for truth or under attack?

Campbell’s self-image is more troubled. Painted in a style not dissimilar to Egon Shiele, the artist depicts himself in a long elaborately coloured overcoat; Paisley-esque floral patterns swirl and merge in the background. But the eye is soon drawn to the lower part of this six-foot-high painting where skulls, eyes and ghosts accrete and fester in a ghoulish broth. It seems that Campbell’s demons are never far away.

In the early part of his career, John Bellany’s visions were equally outlandish and disturbing; they carried a raw energy and real pain. Here, his self-portrait carries little if any of this early force; his work is now, by and large, pat and formulaic (even if, like here, it carries a £30,000 price tag).

There is the predictable panoply of imagery and symbolism (boats, fish, the sea) but it seems to be saying very little. Bellany’s portraits and, by extension, his self-portraits are merely repetitive. And although he sits (one presumes) with his subjects ‘in the flesh’, the end results are by and large, very similar.

Thus, Calum Colvin is shown with Bellany’s stock-in-trade huge red nose (he doesn’t have one) and over-large oval eyes (all of the Bellany’s eyes are virtually the same). Colvin’s approach is different although it, too, is beginning to feel repetitive and formulaic.

Colvin constructs elaborates sets, partly painted and partly three-dimensional, and photographs; the resultant image forms his completed work. Here an image of Bellany, with cigarette butt clenched in his teeth, is shown against standing stones, a chair and the kind of detritus you might expect to find in any harbour – ropes, metal fittings etc.

It’s the same kind of technique the artist employed in 2003 in his exhibition Ossian: Fragments of Ancient Poetry. Although these images are by two of Scotland’s most distinguished artists it is difficult to escape the feeling that neither engaged with the other on anything but a polite and superficial level, with little evidence of an attempt to portray an ‘inner life’.

By sharp contrast the four works which have emerged from the pairing of Craig Mackay and Pat Semple demonstrate a great deal of mutual empathy; and, clearly, both artists were able to accommodate and portray the other’s spiritual and artistic milieu.

Mackay is portrayed indoors (perhaps in his home) – in the background a small window leads the eye outside to the fields and sea beyond. A dark cloud on the horizon hints at a sombre and contemplative face. Inside, fish swirl around the room (very much like the birds in Campbell’s portrait of Byrne) while a lute and dog positioned near the window complete the scene. It’s a work loaded with symbolism and barely hinted at perceptions.

Mackay’s take on Semple is no less complex and consists of two groups of photographs in what might be described as a composite portrait where the different elements form more than the sum of their parts.

The first grouping shows the artist in her studio while the second shifts its focus out of doors, in nature, perhaps in the artist’s garden. In the first grouping the subject’s face is partially obscured by her easel and this paint-spattered wooden object takes on the form of a cross; the other section shows the clutter of the artist’s working space, paints, brushes, smears of colour.

Out of doors, the artist, sallow-faced, delicate, feminine leans against a silver birch; two detailed shots alight on the artist’s hand. Mackay’s take is deeply tender. This composite portrayal (facilitated by his chosen medium) showing interior and exterior views can be read in multiple ways.

The garden and thus the outside might be read as a metaphor for the artist’s public self, while the inner space of the studio could be seen as the internal self – place which few artists find comfortable or accommodating. Mackay is a photographer of great talent and technical proficiency and has found an equally talented painter with whom to collaborate.

As Others See Us – Portraits from the Highlands can also be seen at The Swanson Gallery, Thurso, 4–25 August, 2007, and Inverness Museum & Art Gallery, 1–29 September, 2007.

© Giles Sutherland, 2007

Links

• Click here to see David Eustace ‘Self Portrait’ , John Byrne RSA ‘Portrait of Steven Campbell’  and John Bellany HRSA ‘Portrait of Calum Colvin RSA’.