Nairn Book and Arts Festival, Nairn Community & Arts Centre, 4 -9 September 2012

FEATURING work by established local artists including Kirsty Cohen, Michael Stuart Green, Nicola MacDonnell, Christine O’Keefe, Fiona Matheson, Cyril Reed, Jessie White, Evelyn Pottie and Francis Boag, the Compare and Contrast exhibition at the Nairn Book & Arts Festival explored a range of different media within a relatively narrow spectrum of art practice.

COMPLIMENTARY to investigation of line drawing, oils, acrylics, watercolour and digital art in this year’s workshops, the exhibition succeeds in presenting some wonderful examples of work by familiar and established local artists, but without the element of discovery and burgeoning context present in previous festival years.

Landscape by Francis Boag

Cyril Reed’s Life Study ‘Lorna’ (Watercolour) utilises bare line to great effect, coupled with small blocks of watercolour wash. The range of colour from blues, earthy yellows, browns and pinks is almost a deconstructed palette of flesh tones, anchoring the drawn line resoundingly to the physical body. Although probably cropped as part of a sequence of life drawings the composite of two figures; one reclining in the top right of the composition and the other seated female figure beneath set up an interesting dynamic of contemplation between two selves.

Landscape is a central preoccupation of this show and Evelyn Pottie’s ‘Upper Findhorn and Strathdearn’ (Screenprints) display her skill and subtlety as a printmaker in a medium usually associated with boldness of Pop Art. Here it is the multi-layered hues and light of the Scottish landscape that the artist captures in painstaking tonal layers; her visual signature strikingly painterly and equally composed.

Utilising a vibrant, incandescent palette and found elements of collaged music and printed text, Francis Boag’s ‘Bergen Fjord’ (Acrylic) presents an interesting play of man-made and natural forms and an almost unreal depth of hue. Contrasting colour and texture bring this semi-abstract composition to life.

Nicola MacDonnell - Blue Windows

Nicola MacDonnell’s ‘Blue Windows’ (Watercolour & Ink) submerges the viewer completely in dreamy washes of turquoise blue, creating an immersive mood and atmosphere that like the semi-open windows with their pitch black interior, invites contemplation. In a similar way use of negative space as an engaging part of the interior design of the image is explored in ‘Ghost Trees’, where the absence of detail, the blank ground of the drawing, assumes its own meaning. Treatment of the rest of the image is almost decorative in its use of pattern and line and this tension between drawn mark and ground on both a technical and psychological level begs further development.

Michael Stuart Green - Kitchen Reflections

Michael Stuart Green’s work provided perhaps the most stimulating food for thought in the exhibition, particularly ‘Kitchen Reflections’ (Original Digital Print 1/5) which characteristically displays his accomplished cross-disciplinary technique. This fusion of drawn, painterly and digital approaches creates multi-layered possibilities of interpretation in relation to the subject. The composition is bisected by the bold acidic lemon yellow of the domestic interior, together with the text “kitchen reflections on everything we ate and when it was that we could eat together”, prompting interrogation of a seemingly passive still life. The text, written in a font akin to newsprint or advertising, together with the table in the foreground spilling into the viewer’s space as if we are also complicit, causes the viewer to re-evaluate a familiar scene. The reflections in the oven door draw our eye into the image and also beyond it; to a window reflected back within our own imaginative space. The artist has created a multi-layered print reflecting a multi-dimensional world of visual interpretation, as much about the act of seeing as it is about the subject.

While funding cuts have no doubt had an effect on the scale and ambition of Visual Arts content of the festival, from a curatorial standpoint bringing together diverse practice from artists at all stages of their careers is arguably more dependent on vision than budget. With the Open Competition element from previous years and links with emerging artists from Scotland’s Art Colleges absent, even with Scotland’s fifth Art College in Elgin on the doorstep, professional context and creative trajectory have been subsumed by a selection of conservatively pleasing work.

It was great to see in an adjacent room to the main exhibition, a display by pupils of Nairn Academy Art & Design Department. However this also caused me to wonder if looking around them locally these students would be able to see a career trajectory visibly in evidence, with the work of established local artists of different disciplines across the spectrum represented and celebrated publicly in a way that wasn’t necessarily married to market perception. Unfortunately, the answer even at festival time would still appear to be no.

The voluntary sector does an enormous amount of work in support of Visual Arts throughout the Highlands and Islands and this is of huge importance and value in communities right throughout the region. The Nairn Book and Arts Festival is a great example of this vital activity; however with a distinct lack of representation and public development of Visual Arts locally there is also an opportunity to link this community grounded activity with a wider professional and educational context. Contact with established artists leading workshops during the festival is certainly one way of doing this and no doubt of great benefit to participants, but there is also a wider question of making Visual Art visible that has yet to be fully addressed in our region. What role festival committees have to play in this bigger picture is an issue for further consideration and debate.

© Georgina Coburn, 2012

Links

• Nairn Book aad Arts Festival

www.nairnfestival.co.uk