An Lanntair, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, until 28 June 2009

Work by Donald Urqhuart in An Lanntair (photo - Ian Stephen)

THE FIRST TIME I painted a boat blue and grey was a bit of an opportunist accident.

The grey might well have fallen of the back of a warship. But it was stunning as a contrast to the peely wally Baltic blue on the topsides. Donald Urquhart is a man who likes these hues. But he also likes the idea of balance and counterpoint.

This is his first show in the new gallery but an Lanntair devotees will remember an excellent exhibition in the old town hall setting. Both of Urquhart’s Stornoway shows have been built for the occasion, not merely a re-run of a previous exhibition. I can remember a series of small scale works based on the slightly variegated patterns within peat banks.

The technique of painting over photographs was used in the earlier show and is continued in this one. The artist steered me to the Gerard Richter exhibition in the Fruitmarket Gallery some years ago – and this is certainly an influence. But so is the pure minimalism of Sol Le Witt, the austere line drawings of David Connearn and the shapes of Donald Judd’s sculpture.

But the gap of years has meant that the emerging artist is now pretty much a mainstream contemporary Scottish figure, recently elected to the RSA and working within Edinburgh College of Art.

I would say that the concerns of the work have not changed but the confidence required to bring forward its expression has increased. In the interim, the artist has carried out many large scale public works particularly in the landscape. I was intrigued by the an Turras project on Tiree. A former shelter for the queue for the ferry became a building in which purpose was a long way down the list of priorities. The pure shape and unobtrusive materials make a tunnel to drive your vision with some velocity down to the end panels which expose the sea view.

And in a way this exhibition just installed in an Lanntair is really architecture. The individual works are built with symbiotic panels of near monochrome colour balanced with the textured greys which suggest fronds of the organic world. So the built and the grown are together.

Now to the individual parts.

Lined Sky is a series of 5 works. The cliché of clouds is revitalized as vertical bands of blue cut divisions to dissect the greys. It’s like music and it’s like the accurate cuts of refraction – sometimes on the North Minch the light through the sky is very like the rays cast from a protractor. It’s all done in gouache on silver gelatin. I think it’s about ways of looking at, but not necessarily dividing, the shifting skies.

The long wall is occupied by the Gaelic alphabet where each abstract letter corresponds to a species of tree. The line of works turns a corner. The series demonstrates the variations within the pattern. As with language, the individual sound implied by the letter says one thing but the ordered combinations amount to something more complex.

Donald Urquhart has now travelled widely to devise make and install work. Two planes, Lofoten uses the triptych form to offset graphite drawings of what could be details from the natural world with what again seems to be monochrome blocks of colour but of course there must be variations within variations.

The minimalism is taken further in the work made in Kyoto, Japan, where 5 pale lines break the block. This installation places the work right on a divide in the gallery back wall so again the architecture of the building is part of the composition. This use of the space as it stands, is used to best effect in a new study of the glen burn at Valtos, where the line of colour and greys is carried round the corner. The gallery wall is a part of the work which is painted directly onto it.

You could argue that the minimal tendency risks being taken too far at times, as in Harris Drawing, in graphite, where you have to look closely to see any movement in the work at all, rather than a solid block of colour.

But Two Drawings About Distance makes the intention explicit. It’s difficult to define scale in the work – there could be a close-up of the veins in leaves or it could be a distant shot of trees. It’s about perspective and that dizzy sense of scale which brings you back to the landscape – back from from the most refined expression of it.

I was reminded of a phrase by the American poet George Oppen where he talks about the need to sound out poetry to test if the language is doing what it should. He describes the sense of it as being like rails in the night, reaching out, going the distance.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

Links

• An Lanntair
• Ian Stephen