Orkney Museum, Kirkwall, Orkney, until April 23 2011

ANYONE who knows Orkney knows there is a constant unfolding drama of weather played over huge seas and skies uninterrupted by wind breaks or buildings.

Sylvia Hays admits she sets herself constant challenges in attempting to depict this environment, and battles with self-inflicted problems. She walks a tightrope between representation and abstraction, struggles to simplify without reducing the surface to pretty colours and horizontal stripes, and loves the dilemma.

Sylvia Hays - Towards Eday

An American who has lived in Orkney since 2002, she has chosen this place for the freedom of expression it gives. She explains: “The paintings are landscape studies where the sea and the sky are as important as the land itself.

“I am a collector of oxymorons and dilemmas. To paint without an ambition to solve self-inflicted problems and contradictions would be to paint with no point. For me, painting begins in Orkney. Just as here the North Sea meets the Atlantic, my American youth, influenced by space and scale, by a sense of awe before a Rothko as well as work of the Hudson River school with its sense of “an unappropriated world”, meets what I hope has become a European sensibility.

“I can only speak of my hopes and ambitions; what visions are in my head remain tantalizingly unrealized and are what keeps me painting.”

The visions we have in this show are of sometimes huge skies, sometimes huge seas – in fact so huge that the largest piece, Warebeth, measures 148cm by 213cm. Rich golden ruts gouged in paint could be land scourged by plough or sea strafed by storm.

In Deer Sound, the sound is a thin strip of blue dominated by the earth. Sky rules in Passing Cloud, while the isle of Gairsay rises spectrally like Avalon or the mystical isle of the Finnfolk. In Cloud Morning Gairsay, the sky is more Turner-esque, while in Walking in Papay, the style is more representational.

Sky and sea are abandoned in Corrugated (Ness), an intimate study in which iron peels through time from the wooden wartime huts. Seawind Autumn brings moodiness with lonely huts on the edge of an eerie moor, backed by dark skies with a glint of low-lying sun hitting a roof.

Emotional riches and feeling are here among the brushstrokes.

© Catherine Turnbull, 2011