Visible Energies

1 May 2009 in Orkney, Visual Arts & Crafts

A Better Way of Seeing

ALISTAIR PEEBLES wrestles with reflections inspired by Mel Gooding’s recent lecture at the Pier Arts Centre

WHEN THE celebrated art critic Mel Gooding began his lecture at the Pier Arts Centre last month to introduce the current exhibition of drawings, A Discipline of the Mind, by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) – and well aware that he was sacrificing etymological precision for rhetorical emphasis – he began by saying how pleased he was to be speaking “in not only probably the best space for art in the Orkney Isles, but possibly the best space for art in the British Isles.”

This is only one of many well-informed comments one might expect to hear about this inspiring gallery – from a visitor or from someone closer to home – but for anyone interested in the idea of art and in the appreciation of visual experience, his remark helps explain why what has been created over the past thirty years at 28-30 Victoria Street in Stromness is so significant and so deserving of support.

Lava Forms Lanzarote 2 by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

After the lecture, delivered to a full house on 18 April, I mentioned to the speaker some of the other comments that I’d heard or read about the space recently, and he admitted that he wasn’t sure whether it might be very widely known here with what enormous respect the Pier is held in the country as a whole. Nor indeed why that should be the case.

Thinking about his talk overall – a little lengthy for some, but like some others I was spellbound and would gladly have sat through the same again – I feel certain that not only did it help us towards a better understanding of the superb work on show, by this famous daughter of St Andrews and St Ives, but it also helped build a better sense of the importance of the Pier’s permanent collection.

This not least because the gallery contains the work of many of the artists of the 40s and 50s who formed Barns-Graham into the particular kind of prolific, creative spirit that she became. (And through its presence in Orkney – which she visited several times and which fascinated her greatly – has also helped form the outlook of many artists from here.)

But his talk also clarified the reasons why such excellence in a facility dedicated to the nourishment and celebration of visual experience is so important, and so widely regarded.

Anyone who missed Gooding’s talk, but has visited the Pier in the past few weeks, will perhaps understand the force of the few quotes, notes and conclusions below, taken from scribblings made in the course of his presentation. He had been invited by the Barns-Graham Trust to curate the exhibition, which is now set to travel throughout Britain, having been launched at the Pier.

This selection of works was chosen from the extensive resource which was left by the artist in care of the specially-created Barns-Graham Trust at Balmungo in St Andrews.

The Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney

However anyone looking for more detail about the talk need search no further than the excellent catalogue, inexpensive and very well illustrated with her drawings (including one or two from Orkney, as well as Lanzarote and elsewhere). This gives the gist of the lecture in an essay, that conveys no less passionate enthusiasm and clarity than the spoken version.

With illustrations of work by Hepworth, Nicolson and Gabo as well as Barns-Graham herself, he told us that the St Ives “project” was not directed at producing an “art of physical description, but of felt and thought equivalencies: what it feels like to be standing in space, experiencing time.”

He further explained that the Russian émigré Naum Gabo, a key artistic figure in St Ives, whose work explored the interchange between external and internal in our experience of the world, had a profound influence on the young Scottish artist.

“Our thinking and perception are creative acts,” as he wrote in 1957. His example led her to understand that “the proper purposes of art were not individual or social purposes, but to reveal the real nature of things.”

If this sounds like science, Gabo was indeed a scientist as well as an artist, and through him Barns-Graham came to understand art as a form of research. Her own very Scottish cast of mind was one that responded readily to this purposeful interdisciplinariness.

Gooding drew parallels with others of the era whose work crossed the usual boundaries: among them Neil Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd, D’Arcy Thomson (Professor of Biology at St Andrews), the Hungarian Georgy Kepes and George Elder Davie, author of The Democratic Intellect.

But what in simple terms does this notion of art as research mean? Surely a picture’s a picture, and no more to be said. Gooding observed that for all of us, scientists and artists alike, the experience of the world can convey feelings of simple wonder, but if we’re being serious about it, serious about being here, that’s not where the thinking should stop.

Stromness, Orkney 1 by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Thus the simple wondering reaction, isn’t this a marvellous view?, important and necessary as it is in itself, can lead on to an understanding of what gives the view such energy, and thus of what it means to be experiencing it, phenomenologically.

In a similar way the more scientific reflection, isn’t this a marvellous rock?, can lead on to a geological understanding of the world and how we come to be in it: the discovery of fossils, ores, oil, evolution. Not surprisingly, as an artist drawn to landscape, geology was as interesting to Barns-Graham as are bones and musculature to a painter of the human figure.

Thus making the drawing is like conducting an experiment: to discover something about the circumstance of being in the world, and to convey that understanding visually, rather than in charts and words. (Interestingly, some of the drawings seem to borrow that more mathematical graphical vocabulary, and are intensely successful in conveying an experience of space and sound.)

There is still time to visit the exhibition and see all this for yourselves, and as far as the talk is concerned (and the catalogue essay), it was very useful to be reminded that visual art is not now, nor has it ever been, simply something to fill a space on the wall or shelf, nor an activity justified by visitor numbers and the interests – important as they are – of the tourism or investment industries, but that it is an essential and very ancient means of coming to terms with the nature of experience.

Given the fact that we live in a world that we can see, that is to say, this is a vital means to help us see it better and understand it and ourselves more completely. While still coming to it all through the experience of wonder. (See also R W Hepburn, Wonder and other Essays, EUP, 1984.)

To come back to the point made by Mel Gooding at the outset, the importance of that intelligent probing beyond the surface of things is one of the main reasons why not only the artists they show but the building and indeed the whole institution of the Pier Arts Centre, and its location, engender such awed appreciation near and far. Visible energy indeed!