Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 5 November 2011

SYLVIA WISHART (1936-2008) began life in a house on Clouston’s Pier, in the centre of Stromness, a couple of doors away from where, fifteen years earlier, George Mackay Brown was born.

Their lives were intertwined a bit: but Sylvia was her own woman, and cut her own solitary track through Orkney’s history and landscape. This exhibition brings together for the first time work garnished  from a 50 year long life in painting; canvas after canvas fills the Pier. There are really useful information boards, and the place is buzzing with locals – many of whom provided the works on show.

Sylvia Wishart - Cottage Interior c. 1968-72, oil on board, private collection © The Estate of Sylvia Wishart

You feel her presence particularly if you are an older Orcadian, and remember when the warehouse which became part of the Pier was once her own studio; upstairs you can see her 1973 ‘Harbour View’, thoughtfully hung exactly where she would have stood when painting from her tiny window.

Margaret Gardiner was her friend; they schemed together about a perfect site to house Gardiner’s St Ives Collection. Margaret bought Sylvia’s place, Sylvia became an adviser and then a Trustee; the rest is Pier history.

So she’s coming home, in a sense, though in a way she never left. She did teach elsewhere; but Rackwick and the West Short were her painting places. Like Mackay Brown, she didn’t feel the need to move far to get inspiration.

I declare a family interest here; early in my father Ian MacInnes’ career as a marine artist, post war, he took his light easel around the Stromness streets in all weathers. Clouston’s pier was a favourite – it commands a fine view both ways, is made of good ochre stone, well dressed, and there were boats, buoys, washing lines and dappled shadows a-plenty.

The young Sylvia used to dog his footsteps, saying, ‘what are you doing noo? What bit are you puttan in?’ To stop her asking questions he would get her to hold down his easel for him until she got fed up. (There was a gentle etiquette preserved, when he painted the street; folk knew him, came up and said, ‘Aye Ian, no bad day’, and then went on with their walk; but Sylvia was a bit young to know the rules.)

She first exhibited a picture at twelve, in amongst some MacInneses , Farmiloes and Scotts, and was considered gifted; but it’s a sign of her character that, though she studied under dad at school and he tried hard to get her to apply to Art College, she was adamant that she didn’t want to ‘stay on’  – she went to the Post Office instead. A living had to be made. However, he persevered, and they got together a portfolio, and off she went to Grays in Aberdeen.

Sylvia Wishart - Watchful 1964, oil on wood, on loan from Ingrid M Morrison

It’s a treat to see her development. I looked, of course in the early work, for traces of my father’s influence – a fluid splashy line, a rich ultramarine, raw sienna, burnt ochre palette. Not a trace of it.  Her early 1964 study of the local boat the Watchful is already informed by her continuing interest in geometrical shapes – funnels, masts, gangplanks, netting – and the sage green and cream chalkiness has a pastel, conti crayon feel to it which never really leaves her work for long, even in old age.

Her portraits from this period show great empathy. She catches the subtlety of personality and domestic atmosphere in a way which is very attractive. I wonder why figures don’t feature much in the later work – it’s a shame. Perhaps – though she could be gregarious and welcoming and warm, of course – the creative act which engaged her was to do with the elements themselves, the essence of things – not people.

Her mature work begins in Rackwick. She visited, with friends Mackay Brown and Susie Gilbertson. There she fell in love with a broken down croft which sits in the bowl of a hill commanding a view of the crescent sweep of shoreline, a ruckle of abandoned houses, and the astonishing red sandstone  Hoy cliffs. The trio walked, talked and drank by peat fires and the light of Tilley lamps and cruisies; they flirted with Catholicism.  (Sylvia changed her mind).

She did the croft up.  George wrote, and Sylvia painted. They fought sometimes – real fisticuffs. They shared the urge to make something, inspired by the scenery around them.

He produced An Orkney Tapestry (a seminal work, outlining many of the themes which would recur in his later work). She did the illustrations – beautiful precise pieces of draughtsmanship. Around the same time she produced a series of Orkney views for a local business calendar, and these are in the long corridor at the Pier.

Sylvia Wishart Hoy Sound 1987,oil and mixed media on paper, Pier Arts Centre Collection (c) The Estate of Sylvia Wishart

Tranquil visions, they are – no high winds, no undue Romanticism, they’re utterly Classical and immensely satisfying. It is as if she is looking through a glass, and the distance that gives  empties her, and the view, of feeling and allows her simply to record. I’m reminded of Orwell saying that good prose should be like a window pane – and perhaps this image isn’t a bad one at all, specially for the later work, which I’ll get to in a minute.

She returns to favourite views again and again, in the 60s and 70s, and we begin to see the inclusion of important, totemic objects – a capped fence post; a ship in a bottle; a bird; a lamp; a Biblical text. The oil is thick and crusty, and she uses the paintbrush flat and square, then turns it and scrapes and scratches with the sharp end, so that corn stalks, wood grain, furrowed fields, roof flags or dyke tops stand proud. Winter suits her tonal sense – greys, a fugitive wispy turquoise, browns, and then tiny streaks of something unexpected – an orange streak in the sky, or on a stray clump of monbretia; a red streak of rust.

It’s impossible to look at this period in her development without connecting it to Brown’s images of Rackwick, the deserted valley:

At Burnmouth the door hangs from a broken hinge

And the fire is out.

The windows of Shore empty sockets

And the hearth coldness

Stars shine through the roofbeams of Scar

No flame is needed

To warm ghosts and nettles and rats

(Orkney Tapestry)

A triptych, in the sea-room of the Pier is perhaps the only really derivative thing in the exhibition – it’s pure GMB, down to the Madonna in the blackened hearth; and it sits uneasily, the imagery mawkish, the heavy symbolism dragging the thing down.

There is a great loneliness, I think, in these  Rackwick pictures – the frames (beautifully chosen and painted to compliment what’s in them, a study on their own) frame an empty window or the hasps of a door. We are in the darkness of the croft, often, looking out at light – and what a variety of light – hot harvest, yellow spring rain, snow.

Nature has taken over, and is implacable – beautiful sometimes, but untouchable, a little scary. An element, not to be domesticated. Influences? Well, there’s a touch of the Joan Eardley, perhaps; more than a nod to the Glasgow Boys and Peploe; a drop  of Max Ernst – those moons, discs hanging over fields  – as we move on to the next period, when she moves to Heatherybraes.

Sylvia Wishart - Hoy Sound with reflection c. 1996, oil and mixed media on paper, on loan from Tom Muir

It’s a long low Orkney croft house with a panoramic view of the Pentland Firth, where the tides run in a ‘roost’. She could see Hoy, and, on a clear day, the coast of Scotland; and fields tumble down towards the water under her house, worked by local farmers, changing colour and texture as the year turns. It provides her with another window; ( ‘it’s ‘smashing!’)  – and a new discovery. A friend visits, and she’s out. She leaves a drawing of a bird on the window. She looks at it.

‘This made me look…at the window as well as through it.’

It’s a pivotal moment. Subsequently there’s hardly a painting which doesn’t play with reflection, what’s inside and what’s not, what’s natural and what’s made. The barrier between the inner and the outer breaks down; the view from the window becomes a view in a window, in the glass. The objects and ornaments dance about amongst doves, owls, hanging plants and sometimes, the reflection of the artist herself. Outside things – jaunty Alfred Wallis boats, the ferry, the moon – nestle in beside the pattern of curtains. Rusty balers bowl along beside texts: Thou God seest me is there.

The canvases are bigger, and swimmier, loose and dreamlike – Chagall’s in there somewhere now, and the insistence on returning again and again to the same theme is worthy of Cezanne and Monet. A couple of really delightful lithographs have a crisp elegance, revisiting the same objects, adding a woman’s lined face – is it her? Or a relation? I do wish she had done more people. And illustrated childrens’ books – the little recurring details will delight young visitors.

There are other themes. She engages, for a while in the 70s with boxes and creels, piled outside her Stromness Pier ; she’s caught by a locally famous Norskie wreck on the West Shore, which has been slowly decaying since 1966 – you can still see the remains, though new artists have been taking chunks away to add to their own installations, not maybe knowing the old history of old things in their places on old shores.

In the end though, it’s the observer at the window, who confronts us. She gazes for so long that space and shape blur and melt. What’s more real – that ship out there? This window pole? The net curtain? The pot plant? The seaswell? The reflection of the reflection? She’s a philosopher-painter, investigating, in John Berger’s phrase, ‘ways of seeing.’

It takes me right back to her beginnings, tugging on an easel, asking and asking ‘what bit are you puttan in noo?’ She describes her own process like this – ‘I let the picture grow in all directions until a decision is made where to stop the image … I choose to start with much more than I think I will need … it gives a freer form of expression.’

There’s a book coming; an important addition to this very important and impressive show. Put your order in now.

© Morag MacInnes, 2011

Links

• Pier Arts Centre