Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 9 June 2012

IF FOR any reason the spring forecast – economic, political, or temperature-wise, whichever you will – has been getting you down, this exhibition will put the creative heart back into you.

THIRTY years of printmaking on Orkney are celebrated – not to mention thirty years of survival – and what a learning curve they’ve been part of – from lino cut to digital image and back.

arah Maclean - Untitled (relief print)

I can’t help but think of printmakers as quiet folk, and their craft the gentlest and most delicate – but I’m all wrong, of course. Printers were radicals, getting their message across to the illiterate early on – in demand to illustrate pamphlets and proclamations, religious manifestos and political calls to arms.

Radicals, too, in terms of innovation and experiment; they were forever tinkering and trying new techniques. Beneath it all lay a simple, powerful thing – love of the line, and a desire to share its various and powerful manifestations.

There are two parts to the show – the work of the printers themselves, and a special nod to George Mackay Brown’s relationship with artists and illustrators. Brown was in awe of artists, he said; but privately he acknowledged that they were working ‘from the same sort of source, with the same kind of joy and pain.’

Both emotions are on show here. Jeremy Baster’s jolly Orkney Medley, a jumble of cows and tractors, sheaves and wind turbines – is refreshingly free from po-faced spirituality. It’s a busy, working, greeney orangey Orkney he depicts, optimistic and brisk. Speed’s his thing. His prints are full of sweeps and undulations; they have a retro feel to them, as if you’re turning the pages of a 50s motor cycle mag.

Alistair Peebles is mischevious too; his We come to Orkney and Me Orkney – just the letters, some highlighted – seem wilfully enigmatic till you know the back story. There’s been a derelict shed at the pier for a few years now, on which somebody’s painted ‘Wecome to Orkney Dave’ (spot the mistake…) in vivid blue paint.

It’s endured long after Dave, whoever he was, arrived, and saw the message, one hopes, as he drove past off the ferry – but of course everyone who comes off the ferry sees the sign. If you’re local, you look out for it. A neat take on the power of words, these prints; another sort of celebrity for the greeting. Nick Gordon’s Technicians Only, plays with letters and language, in the same sort of territory.

Anne Marie Nicol - Goldenlight (woodblock)

There’s a really good little guide to printmaking terms and techniques, which makes you aware how versatile these artists are. You have to linger over Carol Dunbar’s stunning flower images – archival digital print on tonasawa paper, creamy and thin. The biological diagram of the flower – elegant, precise, like a template for a piece of embroidery – is juxtaposed with the rich subtle tints and variations of the flower itself. You can see the way it has grown. It’s like seeing the live and dead versions, and it’s utterly fascinating.

Birds feature for Sarah MacLean, birds and stars in black and white lino cut. The landscape is Liz Lea’s preoccupation (she has worked with melted plastics – environmental concerns are close to her heart); her line is frank and clean, her colours rich.

Anne Marie Nicol bridges the gap between the natural and the metaphysical, with her woodblock Goldenlight. It is indeed warm red gold and blue. It conjures up astrolabes and maps, turning worlds and man’s attempt to understand them. Again, it’s a warm, engaging piece. The medieval features in the hall, where there’s a Mappa Mundi, Island Phantasy, an early commission for Alan Davie inspired by trips to Orkney. This bird’s eye view of a simpler world, with cathedrals and rivers and nota benes, has a merry childlike wonder about it.

Sue Daniel’s titles suggest a different set of preoccupations – The Mouth of Truth (after Cranach)…Know Thyself (after Domenchino)…The Illusion of Self. Her etchings with drypoint aquatint and colour are on a low table; one’s looking down, rather as Davie looks down on the world – but here we’re looking into a psyche. The prints have depth, solidity, and an interesting grainy texture to them. Cerebral, and slightly scary, these; about the artist, not her environment, but no less interesting for that.

Sue Daniel - Know Thyself (after Domenichino)

Diana Leslie bridges the metaphysical with a firm leap, and splashes about in narrative,with gurgles of joy, re inventing Hogarth for the 21^st century (with a nod to German Expressionism on the way). Her series takes the hero from his Inheritance through Orgy, Marriage and points north – to his Madhouse incarceration in 8 rumbustious pictures. Full of imagination and energy, these prints bristle with vigour, wit, and sinew. Linger over them; all human life is there.

The Mackay Brown Fellowship commemorates the anniversary of the poet’s death – three days short of St Magnus Day, 16^th April – with a lecture (this year by Dr Linden Bickett from Glasgow University) and a series of special events. The Pier has come up with a little show dovetailing perfectly with the printmakers’ celebration.

In 1985 Brown received a request from the 22-year-old history student Charles Booth-Clibborn, to provide text for a Scottish Bestiary, an equivalent of those produced in England and Wales in the Middle Ages. Within a month of his writing, he was amazed to receive 19 poems about mythical and real animals including the Orkney Stoorieworm and Nukeelavee.

He persuaded what would become a roll call of Scottish artistic talent – John Bellany, Peter Howson, Jack Knox, Bruce MacLean, June Redfern and Adrian Wiszniewski – to illustrate them. It became one of the biggest post-war private-printing projects undertaken in Scotland.

Maggie Fergusson tells us in her biography of GMB that Booth-Clibborn says ‘it was extraordinary – an almost unbelievable act of faith in a complete stranger.’ She adds that, ‘on George’s part, it had been entirely typical…he had this sense that time was running short.’ He wrote ‘ I think of the marvels, beauties and joys in the world that have passed me by and that now I can never celebrate, and the pen shrivels in my hand.’

You will find your own favourites here. What grabbed me was how each artist, in responding to the poems, reveals as much about his/her own personality as s/he does about the animal under consideration. Howson is medieval, earthy, bright; his stag’s head bursts through a Scottish pub. John Bellany’s grouse (‘I am a very shy bird/I really don’t want to appear on a million whisky labels…’) has an edgy elegance, and his dove is tranquil; Redfern’s wolf, meeting man for the first time, recoils in a blaze of blue, full of emotion and sensuality.

Knox’s grey and white Whale, beached, pierced by harpoon heads, on a pier with a three-master dim in the background, perfectly catches Brown’s elegiac mood – ‘the iron enters him slowly, cell by cell.’ There’s much to delight here.

He never met his faithful correspondent Sister Margaret Tournour, a Sacred Heart nun, but she was part of the last twenty years of his life. Correspondence was important to him; but a writer who was also a nun, who marked every important day in his catholic calendar with a little engraving celebrating the beauty – and sometimes cruelty – of nature was a special blessing.

Her tiny prints are here, with magnifying glasses provided, on a big table. The big guns of Scottish 80s art thunder away on the walls, it’s a fine contrast to turn in to these.

Clearly she was a disciple of Bewick, and a traditionalist. There’s real beauty in her precision – she comments sometimes (‘not a good print!’) rather as GMB does himself by the side of a poem. He would have understood and applauded her critical approach to her craft, not seen it as false modesty. She liked the slow growing hard box wood, and burnished the back of the paper with a spoon. They do have an air of tranquillity, these little things; of patient toil. There’s an elephant; a hawk; a lop eared bunny; many flowers; a slightly soppy English cottage; a hawk moth which is a miracle of detail. You return again, to marvel at the intricacies of the world.

All this – and upstairs you can still see the special International Womens’ Day collection – the Hepworths, in the clear Orkney light, will bring you back to the generosity of the great big curve.

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Pier Arts Centre