Review by Mandy Haggith
Four Views
11 Oct 2011 in Highland, Showcase, Visual Arts & Crafts
An Talla Solais, Ullapool, until 16 October 2011
FOUR VIEWS is an exhibition of work by four artists with connections to Ullapool.
The veteran of the four is Dick Lindsay, who presents pieces from throughout his long life. Although Dick’s early pictures show that he had talent as a young man, he did not take his art seriously until he ‘got down to business’ after retiring aged 69, and over the subsequent more than two decades his work has become increasingly vivid.
Work by Dick Lindsay
Most of his pieces are in pen and ink, conjuring light and shade with tiny marks. In breath-taking detail, he captures patterns and forms that seem photographic in quality. A picture of Ullapool harbour has three-dimensional cloud formations, which on closer examination are just an implausible mixture of ink marks and blank paper, yet standing back, the clouds fluff back to seeming reality.
He captures a gleam of light on the curving hull of a boat in its shed. An outstanding coloured ink drawing of Isabella Rossellini reveals her as sad, but radiant, with eyes that follow you around the room. The best of his drawings give such realistic renderings of weather, animals and people that they seem caught in motion.
Rhona Joan Macleod - The Church Where I Was Christened
Rhona Joan Macleod’s landscapes seem innocent and almost childlike by comparison. In a range of watercolours and acrylics, they include slightly wonky renditions of Inverness streets and buildings, and dreamy rural views in gentle colours. There are several linocuts, which are particularly pleasing, with wild weather skies captured in a few strokes and a wash of watery colour. A picture of the standing stones at Callanish has a brooding sense of presence in the stones. The Church Where I Was Christened, sepia toned, evokes earlier, simpler times.
There’s no sepia at all in Simon Mackenzie’s palate, but he uses every other colour imaginable in his explosive paintings. Most are abstracts, yet evoke a range of natural subjects: flames, trees, water, sky. There is lava in wax and paint, and blossom in joyful blue and white.
Work by Simon Mackenzie
Blown Into Colour is a warm celebration in positive tones. Big Bang renders the creation of the universe in spots and splatters of furiously colourful paint, with stars emerging from streaks of nothing. Petroleum is a rainbow sheen in a cave of darkness. Bursting the Banks is a river in spate, full of wild energy splashing out of its frame. This is a room full of drama, the whole spectrum harvested with passion and force.
Equally colourful but much more delicate are the textiles and books of Pam McDonald, who paints with fabrics and stitches together fragments of life into beautiful wholes. There is work here of exquisite complexity, like Sylvia’s Box, a big collage made from the contents of a sewing box, with lace, buttons, paper cuttings, patchwork templates and image fragments combined into a conceptual portrait, like a map of a psyche. A fold-out book of Jedburgh Abbey contains pages of glimpses and glances, as if looking back through time.
Work by Pam Macdonald
Some of the most fascinating of Pam’s pieces are artist books, compendia of ideas and experimentation with stitches and edges, fabric layering effects and explorations of geometry, which give a sense of endless curiosity with colour, texture and pattern. She starts somewhere in the world of embroidery but ends up taking us into an artistic heartland where she seems to be asking intriguing and difficult questions about how to look and feel and make something beautiful. These are tactile pieces begging to be stroked and touched, deliciously rich in colour and dense with thoughtful and skilful handiwork.
The work of these four artists shows such huge variation of practices and materials it is hard to believe it all has the same landscape as its common inspiration.
© Mandy Haggith, 2011
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