GEORGINA COBURN recommends grabbing the chance to see work by two important Scottish artists.

THIS EXHIBITION at an talla solais presents a superb opportunity to view a substantial selection of over 60 works by acclaimed Scottish artists Will Maclean, RSA RGA RSW, and Marian Leven, RSA RSW. This is a perfectly balanced show with a room devoted to each artist and a third bringing their work together on loan from private collections.

Marian Leven - Interaction

Maclean and Leven’s work compliment each other beautifully, and it is wonderful to be able to view this exhibition in the context of the local West Coast landscape. Both artists’ level of engagement with this environment, together with their exploration of visual language creates an inspiring and thought provoking exhibition. A powerful expression of the mindscape of land and sea, Coastal Connections reinterprets this landscape in human terms, each artist’s methodology revealing a wider cultural process of reevaluation and recognition.

Maclean’s Signs and Symbols/ BadenTarbet (Mixed media and found objects 1999) with its whitewashed low relief and emergent imagery feels like the unearthing of an ancient tablet. Reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphics and the stone carving of the West Highland School of Sculpture, Maclean’s signs and symbols read as an enduring reminder of a sea-going culture. There is something quietly introspective and monumental about the piece itself as a signifier, raising important questions about personal and collective identity. For me the whitewash is very much about the visual culture of the Highlands and Islands, with Signs and Symbols/ Baden Tarbet powerful evidence of its continuing existence.

Displayed on three elevated plinths, Maclean’s Fish With Boat Roove, Big Fish Eat Little Fish and Fish With Double Hook (Bronze 2006) are superbly angular and elegant in their articulation. Like a series of visual lures, line and form, together with the high finish of gilt-edged bronze and green patina, immediately draw the eye.

Exquisitely crafted, they allude to the meaning and value of traditional craftsmanship found in boatbuilding or weaving, of art inseparable from life. Like much of Maclean’s sculptural work they feel like acts of aesthetic engineering, the artist’s long association with the sea consistent throughout his working life in the fisheries and in the studio.

Sulidae Torpedo (Mixed media and found objects 2005) demonstrates methods of construction integral to the artist’s creative process, acts of assemblage shared by artist and audience in the reception of the work. What is so compelling in Maclean’s work is the complexity of its layers, meaning like the technique of collage is creatively fluid and open to interpretation.

In Sulidae Torpedo the box construction presents the viewer with a series of delicately overlaid surfaces. The glider-like model made partially of bone combines stark sculptural lines hovering poetically above its hand-drawn outline. A series of beautifully mysterious surfaces and collaged elements emerge out of the ground of the image.

Crowlin Head (Mixed media on board 2000) is another example, presenting intriguing layers of internal mapping. Striated contours of navigational charts combine with a physical mapping of the muscular structure of the human head. This yellow and aged engraving anchored to a fish and a cross section of vertebrae pull the image out of the frame and into the viewer’s consciousness.

Hand written text and fragments of typeface – “to Canada” – provide points of reference. Maclean’s box constructions are vessels of assembled meaning, found objects gathered and composed in a personal and collective process of recognition. At the heart of this process is a sense cultural loss and endurance.

It is a great pleasure to see works from private collections included in the exhibition, among them Maclean’s “Portrait of Morag Mackenzie, Polbain” (Pen and Ink on Paper, 2007) which has not been previously shown. This unexpected portrait interior, for it is not representative of its genre in an orthodox sense, is an absolute gem. The depth of the interior space draws us in psychologically, a sepia-tinged elusive world of light and shadow fragmentary as memory or a dream, but equally as potent.

The portrait figure itself, features drawn distinctly upon a pale body, hovers in the incandescent light from a rear window. Present throughout the image is a profound sense of reminiscence and human presence, a distillation of portraiture itself. Shadowy dogs like sentinels and the outline of stag’s antler’s frame the image with objects of a childhood past brought vividly to life.

Maclean’s The Drowning – Isle Martin (Acrylic on Paper, 1999) is another fine example of work on private loan. This poignant image of human absence is made visible in the opaque ghost-like silhouette in the boat and sensitivity of paint handling, layered and waterlogged in a drowning haze of blue. The solemn veiled landmass of burnt umber in the background, white line of the horizon and outline of a seagull’s head to the right of the image like a spectre of death add to the ethereal quality of the work.

To the very edges of the distressed frame the painting is infused with strength and feeling. Maclean’s Rudder Shaman (Mixed Media Construction, 2000) is another dominant work in this room, its blackened totemic presence like a talisman for journeying.

Marian Leven’s Summer Isles (Acrylic On Paper, 1996) is beautifully rendered and composed, flecks of sand and striated brushwork give the image vigor and intensity, drawing us into a silent vortex of circular movement in the foreground. Light seems to come from within the landscape and beneath the high horizon line, creating a liberating feeling of space and depth.

A similar dynamic is created in Pool of Light (Acrylic On Paper, 1996) where dark edges give way to luminous expanse and energized brushwork. In Summer Isles the dominant steely blue and grey of the composition is accented with white light and a flash of ochre; whilst Leven’s palette is characteristically subdued it is no less rich, conveying an understanding of pictorial elements explored more radically in the rest of the exhibition.

Leven’s reduction of visual language to bare tone, form, line and colour takes its cues from nature and the coastal environment. There is a strong sense of the momentary definitive mark in her work, a response to shifting patterns of weather and light revealed to the viewer in fragments and traces.

Trace Line (Watercolour On Gesso) is a good example, a sequential statement made in washes of pigment and drawn line. Light From the West (Watercolour on Gesso) is a tremendously subtle piece of work, the smoke-like tonality created in finely speckled marks of paint overlaid both vertically and horizontally. The formal geometric elements of the work are tempered by a gentle layering of textured watercolor on paper giving the whole sequence a minimal, calligraphic quality.

Each work feels very much like a meditation, deceptively simple yet multilayered in its construction. The sense of harmony and balance achieved in these abstract works is compelling. Enclosed Space (Watercolour on Gesso) is a fine example with washes of grey delicate splatter, enclosed in a thinly drawn line, a shard of light in the central form. The whole piece is framed so it hovers adding another layer of enclosed perception to the work.

It is ironic that in a year of Homecoming the most potent exploration of this theme can again be found outside the official programme and that a public exhibition of this stature has been facilitated by a local arts organisation of charitable status. an talla solais are to be congratulated on their vision and commitment to visual arts access, an exhibition of this kind places the work of Highland artists in a national context, bringing that context resoundingly home.

© Georgina Coburn, 2009

Links

• an talla solais

Associated Page

• Creative Connections Gallery