An Talla Solais, Ullapool, until 29 August 2011

I ENTER the exhibition of James Lumsden’s paintings, knowing that the walls will be filled with nothing more than blocks of colour, fully expecting to be baffled. I leave, to coin a cliché, enlightened.

I had assumed that for an artist to shun depiction and work in purely abstract forms involved some kind of arrogance and I did not expect to like the result. Now I think that actually it requires something more like humility to present such non-figurative pieces, giving an audience the opportunity to experience the raw emotional response to pure colour.

Work from the exhibition in An Talla Solais

Although the paintings don’t set out to represent anything in particular, James says that he is happy if we find objects or landscapes in the work, and he seems unworried, if somewhat bemused, as people walk around, interpreting marks and blobs as animals (‘a conger eel chasing a fish’) or even people. Indeed I could not help but see some pieces consisting of two bands of colour as landscapes – a horizontal line seems to divide water and air, suggesting a lochan reflecting sky or sunset over the ocean. The paintings are dense with light and atmosphere and somehow don’t seem truly abstract at all.

Yet, the works I enjoyed the most are impossible to view as naturalistic in any way. A big red ‘Contained Painting’ is in fact barely contained by its two narrow side-stripes of black and white. The red is so vibrant, so warm, and it glows so powerfully that it seems to flow out from its containment to fill the whole room, reflecting its red blaze out into the space.

The intensely shiny quality of all these works means they act as pools of colour-filled light, bathing us as we walk around the exhibition. Thus a room full of predominantly blue pictures ends up with a cooler, airier feeling than the room dominated by that hot red. The corridors present pictures, made while James was artist in residence at An Talla Solais in 2010, of monochrome graphite and acrylic, full of interesting textures, offering a pause between the colour-filled rooms.
The smallest room is the most highly charged. Windowless, and thus perhaps concentrating its light, it has about a dozen pieces called ‘Fugue’, specially created for this exhibition. The idea of a fugue, in which a melodic phrase is used over and over in different ways, is a metaphor for the process of creating these works. Each is made of up to 40 layers of acrylic paint, gradually building up a counterpoint of colour over a period of months.

James says that his colour choices are unplanned and intuitive. Many of the panels are divided into two horizontally, and his choice of where to make the break occurs spontaneously. After a few layers of paint are done a natural place to divide the piece into two emerges as a flaw, suggesting a line, which he then makes ruler-straight, setting up progressive contrast between the colour above and that below.

As each layer of paint is worked, marks and blots happen, and these inconsistencies in tone are crucial. What appears at first glance to be a monochrome slab with fixed lines – harsh, shiny, cerebral – reveals itself to be much more subtle, almost fluid, with tones that seem to ripple as the surface catches changes in the light or movement in the room.

I suspect that in a different light, at a different time of day, all kinds of other tones than those I saw would be observable from the depths of the images. Even though the acrylic they are made of is hard and immutable, it seems as if underlying layers of colour could well up from within them.

Many of the pieces are called ‘Liquid Light’, and they evoke rippling water and stranger effects, like aurora, with a fleeting quality. Some dark dualities, neon green over dark grey for example, are positively creepy, while others are warming, even joyful.

There is space to find anything we like in James Lumsden’s minimalist artworks and I wonder why they are so satisfying to look at. Is it precisely because they allow our egos and imaginations so much room to play?

As a result of this exhibition I have realised a tendency in myself to expect an artist to be someone who is trying to thrust their big personality into the world. I go to a gallery seeking entertainment, or insight, to be told a story or shown the world in a new way. But here, instead, are rectangles of coloured acrylic with nothing more than a shiny surface and some suggestions of texture. The content that I expect to be shown is missing.

Yet in these busy, information-drenched times, it is actually a great relief to be freed from content. What remains is a kind of meditative space. Having no ‘things’ to look at is an invitation to stop thinking: there’s nothing to work out, no narrative to follow, no message to decipher. There is nothing except pure colour to respond to. And, to my amazement and delight, I find that my ability to respond to pure colour is alive and well and, what’s more, the response feels good.

An intriguingly atmospheric and thought-provoking exhibition.

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

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