Kilmorack Gallery, by Beauly, Inverness, until 4 August 2012

KILMORACK Gallery’s 15th Summer exhibition presents a strong showing of work by new and regular exhibiting artists.

THEY include Joyce W Cairns, Alan McGowan, Henry Fraser, Lizzie Rose, Lotte Glob, Sam Cartman, Colin Brown, Pat Semple RSW, Kirstie Cohen, Helen Denerley, Allan MacDonald, Eugenia Vronskaya, Mary Bourne, Charles MacQueen RSW, Peter White, James Newton Adams and Robert McAulay.

Alan McGowan - Back

Following the release of Alan McGowan’s superb visual essay, The Language of the Body, Figure Drawings in Four Chapters, Northern audiences have the opportunity to view some of the exceptional drawings and paintings featured in the artist’s publication first hand. Resoundingly the human body is the text and McGowan’s command and understanding of his subject, chosen medium and context are richly in evidence throughout. Immediately visceral and innately cerebral, this body of work sits within the canon of Western Art and the figurative tradition as a history of ideas lived visually.

The distillation of McGowan’s own visual language within this suite of drawings and paintings is a joy to behold. In Back i (Mixed media) the aura of the body as well as its physical mass are defined by a singular washed mark on paper demonstrating absolute precision, economy and totality. Elegantly linear contours and defining marks at the hip convincingly allow the viewer to read the axis of weight, not just in physical terms but the emotional gravitas of the figure.

This dynamic between abstraction and tactile physicality is one of the most compelling characteristics of the artist’s evolving work. Torso i (Oil on Board) is another magnificent example, a work as invested in the art of painting as it is in the body as a visual text. The heightened tonality of the painting references the work of artists such as Rembrandt, while the richly textural paint handling in thick impasto creates form and presence akin to Bacon. Like Rembrandt’s hanging carcasses, McGowan’s Torso i illuminates humanity in light and darkness; as monumental architects of ideas and vulnerable, mortal slabs of meat. The artist’s technical skills in relation to anatomy and paint handling are equally matched by his ability to transcend the personal and illuminate the universal experience of what it is to be human.

Alan McGowan - Recline

Recline (Mixed Media) is another beautiful example; the ribcage and hip defined in a series of master strokes coupled with charcoal lines of breath taking delicacy, reminiscent of Rodin’s drawings. The figure in its entirety is reimagined in the mind of the viewer; the head, for example, depicted in just a series of rapid and intense marks as visual triggers. We are given all the information we need not just to look but to see. The human body as a physical presence and as a set of ideas or associations is also exemplified by Two Skeletons (Mixed media), where the energy and vibrancy of drawn and washed marks from the internal structure of the bones radiates outwards; a timeless dance between the subject and the artist’s hand. McGowan’s works are life studies in the most expansive sense; creation and destruction, beginning and end contained in every vibrant, essential mark.

Sam Cartman - The Rock, Dumbarton

Sam Cartman’s The Rock, Dumbarton (Oil on board) combines formal design with the freshness of drawn marks in its depiction of a dominant outcrop of rock and human architecture. A starkly effective reduced palette and the artist’s paint-handling, from a planar, almost industrial treatment of some painterly surfaces, contrasted with residual charcoal or pencil marks and accents of bold gestural colour, create compositions of sophistication and balance. The way that man made and organic elements inform our reading of the work is a constant source of fascination and a defining stylistic element within Cartman’s abstracted industrial and rural landscapes. Catterline Coast 3 (Oil on board) is another wonderful example; the human dwelling on the cliff top dwarfed by the surrounding environment, perched on a landmass between sea and sky.

Joyce W. Cairns - Footdee Gospel Hall Studio Garden

Footdee Gospel Hall Studio Garden (Oil on board) by Joyce W Cairns is one of the highlights of the exhibition by one of the nation’s greatest living artists. The oriental, almost decorative treatment of the ground with its arrangement of birds, feeders and ornaments creates a heightened psychological space for the central female protagonist. Rooted in the Expressionist tradition and steeped in the artist’s personal iconography, this is a sharply articulate composition of cool blues, incandescent red, orange and bone white, revealing a subtle stylistic shift in the artist’s paint-handling.

The treatment of the figure is more gently defined, less linear and immediately confrontational in its arrangement within the composition. The mood is contemplative and reflective, though no less potent than the artist’s monumental figurative compositions.

The vibrant red ground of the painting is fertile with associations, a fluidly interior surface upon which the human figure, collected objects, birds and the signature motif of a cat open up a world of interpretation. Cairns skilfully renders a scene that is both dream-like and grounded in its own Surreality; a packet of mealworms spills over into the viewer’s space, everyday packaging pulling the observer back to the ground on which they stand. The presence of chosen found and personal objects often anchor a painting within a distinct time and place of vintage remembrance in the artist‘s work. Here the juxtaposition of objects – celebratory Christmas bauble, spotted cloud like forms, ghostly ribbons and twigs ambiguously growing out of (or penetrating) the ground surface – intensify the sense of unconscious and personal association rather than offering historic visual anchors. Species of bird; mythic, predatory and innocent song, reflect this intriguingly fluid dynamic of association in the composition.

It is, however, the female protagonist, recurrent motif of a domesticated hen nesting on her head, finger to the nipple, clutching an enormous ginger cat like offspring that is the central focus of the painting. As the cat stretches beyond maternal grasp trying to attack a nearby bird the idea of nurture and nature are brought into visual conflict.

The viewer is drawn in by internal architecture of the painting, having been attracted initially by the resonant, luminous colour and seemingly decorative arrangement of figure, fauna and objects. As we scatter feed on the paintings pictorial elements a deeper truth or unease emerges, typical of the way that Cairns’ paintings transcend the personal and powerfully articulate the human condition. The artist’s distilled visual language moves from darkness to illumination in the act of seeing, bringing all of her knowledge and experience to bear in a single image and leading the viewer’s eye and mind compellingly into the work.

Pat Semple - The Guardians of The Night

Pat Semple’s large scale landscape Summer Orkney (Oil on Canvas) presents an almost mythic expanse of sky and cloud in a harmonic, uplifting complimentary palette of yellow, pinks, blues and purples. The roughly stippled brushwork and delicate layering of hue accented with deep purple give the whole work strength and intricacy. A smaller work, Guardians of the Night, depicting a female head flanked by two attendant spirits is like a hymn to colour with all the luminosity of stained glass.

The fluid brushwork gives the painting a dream-like quality tempered with the vibrant purity of the artist’s chosen palette. It is a beautiful, intriguing and sonorous work reminiscent of 19th century Symbolists in its treatment of the human figure combined with mythic elements of the mind. It is, however, the artist’s signature paint handling and use of colour that makes this intimate, interior work truly sing off the gallery wall and into the viewer’s consciousness.

Lizzie Rose - Sea Island Line

Argyll-based artist Lizzie Rose has contributed a beautifully distilled series of mixed media works to the exhibition. In Flower Lines bewitchingly articulate drawn marks and delicate washes create a feeling of energy and presence within an incredibly subtle and skilfully rendered composition. Rose illustrates why sometimes a whisper in visual terms is infinitely more powerful than a shout and this idea expands magnificently in her poetic treatment of the landscape. Sea Island Line is a fine example, a singular line of distant horizon and mountainous peak between a mass of steely blue sky and ocean.

Rose captures the unique quality of light in the Scottish landscape in her translucent, opaque washes of acrylic together with the energy and dynamism of nature in the artist’s direct linear response in pencil, charcoal or pastel, clearly seen and felt in Pale Island Cloud. Although of a modest scale the intensity of line in the image expands resoundingly beyond the frame. Like the Canadian artist Emily Carr, Rose is absolutely at one with her chosen environment and this sense of connection is exemplified in every drawn and painted mark. Grey Tree, with its transparent washes and directional lines of force, definition in reverse through white drawn marks rather than dark, give the image an ethereal quality akin to Carr’s painterly reverence for the natural world of her beloved British Columbia.

Lizzie Rose - Grey Tree

A larger scale mixed media work, Cloud Moon Mountain (Acrylic, pencil and oil pastel), is brimming with promise in terms of the potential scale of Rose’s work.Barest washes of blue and umber together with the power and deliberation of drawn marks create an incredibly vibrant and expansive image, a place of the mind inhabited by the artist and viewer alike. This combination of contemplation, reverence and visceral, immediate response to the environment is magnificently balanced in Rose’s best work and bodes well for future development.

It is exciting to see the quality of work in Kilmorack’s 15th summer show both from its regularly exhibiting artists and new artists to the gallery such as Pat Semple and Lizzie Rose. There is much to be enjoyed and savoured in this exhibition by artists at the forefront of Scottish Contemporary Art.

© Georgina Coburn, 2012

Links

• Kilmorack Gallery