Review by Mandy Haggith
Katy Spong: 37 Red Leaves
2 Aug 2012 in Highland, Showcase, Visual Arts & Crafts
RhueArt, Rhue, near Ullapool, until 15 September 2012
KATY Spong has spent a year taking in the views from her Argyll home, overlooking Cuil Bay, and creating from them a visual diary.
IN IT she has recorded the passing seasons, sunshine, breezes and snow, and some of the wildlife she has encountered – deer, gulls, crows and, above all, geese.
Katy Spong - Snow Landing
Perhaps because she herself is a migrant to Scotland, having started life in Uganda, she seems to have a particular affinity with the great migrating skeins that mark the changing seasons so profoundly. Her depiction of individual birds, and especially of their sky-writing formations, capture the powerful motion of geese so well you can almost hear them honking.
In her introduction to this exhibition, she quotes Richard Mabey’s description of geese as ‘an immense living calligraphy… as near a sacred message as you will get from the natural world.’ She has captured their flight in various media – acrylics, polymer photogravure print and monoprint – experimenting with different materials as she tries to, in her own words, ‘capture the small and big things that help us keep count, to mark the passage of time.’
There are many other lovely images to be found in her diary, each ‘entry’ of which is in the form of a monoprint. These are modest, mostly square-form images, with delicate and subtle use of colour. They are made by working with oil inked onto a copper plate, then subtracted with various marks, and transferred onto paper via an etching press. The results have something of the antique about them, with their soft edges and blotted, simple tones. With their use of washed colour, sharp blade marks and thumby smudges, they contrast with the brush-marked surfaces of the acrylic paintings.
Their peaceful colours draw the viewer in to look more closely at deftly drawn lives, caught in a moment of pause: a buck stands attentive on a hill in front of a tree, a line of cormorants rest on a rock before a green rippling pool, two tups face each other out.
Katy Spong - Bill Spooks Gulls
The artist has an uncanny skill in capturing motion, particularly of birds. In one print, a raptor soars over deep blue water. In another, a tumult of gull fury is generated by a confident swish of crow. A pony sets another group of gulls scattering. Three geese stall to a landing in snow.
Between all this movement there are still pictures too. Nets hung out to dry become marvellous colour-pattern compositions, and a birch wood becomes a complex of light that is almost abstract. An orchid flower, entitled ‘protected’, was somehow disembodied and less successful as an image than the others, but most of them are lovely.
The title pictures of the exhibition, 37 Red Leaves, show leaves on an autumn maple. Against a yellowish light, grey-blue stems and snow, the last few hanging leaves are bright notes of red, evoking longing for what little remains to remain just a little longer.
In the new, airy gallery at Rhue, with its stunning setting overlooking Loch Broom, this is a beautiful set of paintings to linger over and an appropriate exhibition to mark the passing of the season.
© Mandy Haggith, 2012
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