Pier Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 14 August 2011

I OFTEN think that the art world – despite all its protestations and its open days and its community workshops – is a very closed shop indeed.

It reminds me of the Magic Circle – you only get in if you know the secret of the trick and swear never to tell; but you reserve the right to exchange a knowing wink with another Circle member.

Folk who have read my reviews know I love the Pier; but, though they did a brill job inside, the architects fell into the Magic Circle trap when they designed the door to the outside world. It’s scary smoked glass, so you kind of look into an aquarium, in which Sandra and Isla swim diligently.

Stands bearing expensive books and toys send warning signs; this is a Gallery. There won’t be cheeseburgers. It’s a wee bit forbidding; you’re entering a different zone.

Alfred Wallis- Headland with two three-masters (1934-8)

This was very evident during the Tall Ships weekend, and the Stromness gala week which followed. Streets full of cheeseburgers. The Pier’s pavements a riot of chalk drawing, as ever, and events inside for energetic school-free kids; but you are in a rarified element, beyond the doors.

Jim Lambie’s amazing op-art floor, which he had such fun installing, hits you the minute you walk in; it must be fun, being Sandra and Isla, and watching the punters’ reactions to such a cheeky, dizzymaking, challenging statement under their feet.

The point to all this rumination is the exhibition upstairs, past all the rock stars and pop references. This, planned to coincide with the Tall Ships,  is a must see for all sorts of reasons.

It showcases two artists who are described by those who know as ‘naïve’ painters.

It seems to me there’s always a note of condescension in that term. Experts, critics and curators on these TV art programmes wax lyrical – “never had any training!”, “semi-literate little old man!”, “used sheets of wrapping paper and laundry markers!”, “untrammeled by the pernicious effects of training in perspective!”, and so on.

I venture to suggest that Beryl Cook wasn’t a bit naïve – neither business-wise nor with regard to her artistic oeuvre. It’s sometimes just inverse snobbery, all this lauding of a kind of art that’s really closer to crafts, a kind of art which has always existed in its own domestic, working class/rural world.

A very few of these Grandma Moses’ have been ‘taken up’ – by dealers, or by – as in Alfred Wallis’ case – artists who were looking for a new direction in their own work. Wallis, of course, is part of the St Ives group, a big influence on Kit Woods and Ben Nicholson. He had been a seaman from the age of nine till thirty five, and began painting ‘for company’ on the death of his wife.

He was lionised, exhibited with the group – but spent his last days in the poorhouse. They made a beautiful gravestone for him, the St Ives painters; but seemed unable to solve the poorhouse problem; perhaps there was nowhere else to put an old man with Alzheimers. It seems a sad end, though, for such an inspirational figure.

He used old cardboard boxes as canvases, tearing them or cutting the tops and bottoms out; the colour and shape of the board informed the way the painting turned out. Bits were left bare to ‘be’ sand or rock. He used pencil, ships’ enamels, oil, charcoal. He painted on both sides of his paper, and arranged the village houses to his own personal perspective – his brother’s house was small, because they didn’t speak; the church was omnipresent.

The works in the Pier are rough, energetic, and sensual. He loves the geometry of boat hulls and rigging; the skies scud along, and the orangey-brown base colour imparts a richness to the seascapes. Combined with a vigorous, liberal use of chalky white and a sketchy shaggy black, this produces a lovely energy.

He seems impatient – his sailors are stick men, with no beards or caps; there’s nothing painstaking here. It’s a record, he said, of how things used to be; he didn’t need to refer to the ‘real’ landscape – it was all imprinted in his head. Perhaps that’s why these paintings seem so free – they’re only tethered to his imagination, and the emotion in them comes direct, without stopping by any reality checks on the way.

‘Naïve’ then, yes, in the sense that a child is naïve, innocent of restraint.

Thomson - Three-master passing Dennis Head Lighthouse and the Old Beacon, North Ronaldsay (1973)

An inspired combination then, to show William G Thomson’s North Ronaldsay work alongside Wallis. Crofter Wullie o’ Neven, a historian and folklorist, did most of his painting in later life, using photos and magazine illustrations for reference. He painted herring drifters, mail boats, and tall ships, using Humbrol model paint, a ruler, and black biro.

The titles, inscribed under the pictures in an ancient, elegant hand which brings to mind inkwells, blotters and nibs in a tiny local schoolroom, are long and detailed: ‘North Ronaldsay Mailboat making for Black Rock, Sanday’, for example. The detail is crucial – he knew every stick and stone of that coast. Geography, naming, precision, mattered.

This work is perhaps more familiar ‘naïve’ territory; the waves are like seagulls, the seagulls like seals, the clouds like candy floss; tractor, sheep and cows sit placidly on enamel grass, background to a painstaking boat with a red sail. The herring fleet sails into the deep in wobbly perspective, a forest of sails, all carefully numbered – LK110, K101. They veer off a flat plane, and the innocence of true perspective creates a surreal sense of dislocation.

A curiosity itself now, a glass float, is adorned with a fine rigger – the fanciful title, ‘In the Trade Winds’, made me think of the Onedin Line romance the tourists wanted to buy into during the Tall Ships weekend; some were put out to discover that rough weather makes folk sick on boats, its wet up aloft, there’s no tour guide telling you which grey lump is Copinsay, and the Captain’s word is law; he says you don’t sail, you don’t, no matter how many champagne dinners you’ve booked.

But there’s nothing fanciful about Thomson’s ships; he has done his homework; they are named, and their rigging is rulered in to perfection. You could make a model, using these pictures as a guide. He enjoys the patterns sun and shadow make on sails; his pencil can be subtle. A visitor said ‘these are just a record of the boats, what they looked like.’ Perhaps. But they’re a loving, careful record; like scrimshaw in the hands of a seaman, they’ve been worked on by someone who knew the world of ships in bottles, lighthouses manned by men, not machines.

Perhaps, I thought, as I looked at the inscription ‘To Beatrice from Daddy’, that’s the essence of ‘naïve’. It’s not really for sale; it’s for giving to folk; it doesn’t pretend to be what it’s not. The most troubled member of the St Ives group, Kit Woods, friend of Picasso, Diaghelev, Stravinsky, declared that he determined to be ‘the greatest painter in the world’.

Wallis and Thomson would no more have said that than they would have graced a wine and nibbles opening, read a review like this, or put a price on the back of their painting. It was just a thing they did ‘for company’.

© Morag MacInnes, 2011

Links

• Pier Arts Centre