IT IS regrettable that after two years the Nairn Book and Art Festival’s Open Art Competition is no longer part of the local art scene, at least while a lack of funding in the current climate prevails.

WHILE selection is always a contentious issue in an area where professional, semi-professional and amateur interests compete for what little public wall space exists, there has always been a need for selected shows to compliment the work of private galleries and more open arenas such as local art society shows.

Shaped by the competition and selection process, the last two exhibitions in the Nairn Courthouse were much tighter in terms of quality and more representational of diversity within the limitations of the space.

Ruth Nicol - Leith in Winter, Albert Docks Tug

The competition, which offered prize money and a solo exhibiting opportunity to the winner in the following year, was designed to attract emerging talent from all over Scotland, providing a wider frame of reference for local artists.

With this competitive element gone invited submissions, presumably from an organising committee, have replaced the open call selection process. In consequence the student element is conspicuous by its absence this year, and there are less discoveries in store for the audience.

Painting and landscape are ever dominant, with a lack of the sculpture, printmaking, photography or mixed media work seen in previous years. While there are many pleasing scenes on display this is largely a pedestrian show rather than an aspirational one.

Named artists meet expectation but aren’t encouraged to exceed it in such an arena, and the sense of delight in seeing the evolution in 2009 Nairn Open Art Competition winner Ruth Nicol’s work this year is somewhat quashed by the thought that emerging artists – unless known to the organisers – will not be given the opportunity to submit their work.

Perhaps a lack of prize money could have been replaced by sponsorship from a major art supplier for equipment, development of a local residency/studio opportunity and exhibition opportunities, retaining selection and keeping the momentum of the competition alive, rather than taking a collectively retrograde step.

Among the thirty eight exhibiting artists including Eugenia Vronskaya, Kirstie Cohen, Sam Cartman, Cyril Reed, Linda Smith, Evelyn Pottie, Jannis Mennie, Nicola MacDonell and Fiona Jappy there are, however, a number of works which encourage contemplation.

A small watercolour by James Kail entitled Blue Print invites closer inspection with its fluid and accomplished use of the medium. The chair with half a coat visibly hanging upon it is quietly poignant, the faded sepia and aged fabric suggest residual memory of a human presence, absent from the image.

The delicacy of the paint handling is sensitively wrought and the arrangement of still life objects is imaginative rather than descriptive in the mind of the viewer, adding potential layers of interpretation to the scene.

Sam Cartman - Lamppost, Stirling

Sam Cartman’s paintings in oils present a dynamic combination of semi-industrial architecture and abstraction. Cartman retains the drawn line whilst exploring variation of mark and paint handling, giving the two dimensional surface unexpected texture and subtlety.

Lamppost, Stirling, with its carefully drafted ornamental lamppost juxtaposed with bold accents of colour and simplified form succeeds in creating a balanced formal design in naples yellow, ochre, cerulean blue, moss green and vibrant orange. The combination of detail and abstraction, urban context and rural landforms sets up an interesting dialogue in the work.

Similarly in Mains of Usan the artist delivers variation of texture and density of pigment, ranging from the minimal block of sky to pastel-like softness in the foreground and an almost incised feel to the pitched pattern of the rooftop. Colour is carefully deliberated so that out of a palette that feels derived from everyday industrial functionality accents and variations when they occur are rendered more noticeable for their restraint.

Ruth Nicol’s work has continued to develop, and her two works in acrylic and pencil, Leith in Winter, The Docks and Leith In Winter, Albert Dock Tug, are stylistically assured, with a combination of fluid paint handling in the sky and water coupled with graphic draughtsmanship in the rendering of buildings and colourful linear dynamics in the fore- and mid- ground.

Ruth Nicol - Leith in Winter, The Docks

The natural and man-made converge in the choice of palette and manipulation of the painterly surface, particularly in the elemental separation of pigment in contrast with sharply defined areas of graphic colour.

Bette McArdle’s socially engaged figurative works are a refreshing highlight of an exhibition largely preoccupied with land-based mythologies. The inversion of beauty and classical subject matter in The Three Disgraces as a contemporary comment on the feminine begs further stylistic exploration and development.

The artist’s treatment of the figure as flesh reveals its morality and in this way is reminiscent of the satire of Albert Tucker during the blackout period in 1940’s Australia. Whilst this work doesn’t exhibit the same brand of savagery unleashed by the New Objectivity in Weimar Germany in response to social and economic conditions, the central concern here, like the work of Dix or Grosz, is truth rather than beauty.

In our age as in any other this is a function of art practice which is absolutely necessary. There is always a place for art concerned with wider issues than itself, and McArdle’s adjacent work, He’s Not Worth It Babe(Oil), is a good example.

In this image before an illuminated shop front a group of figures surround a fallen human figure on the ground. Details are indistinct – what we see is largely in silhouette with broken outlines of alizarin and ultramarine animating the movements of two men and two women. There is ambiguity in their actions; some have raised sticks, others from their stance appear to be shouting, in encouragement or protest we cannot be sure, with a woman seemingly trying to hold a man back from stomping on the fallen figure.

Like the mute suggestion of mannequins in the window we witness a moment of violence unfolding, unsure of what will happen next. This uncertainty coupled with the framed reference of the shop window and the actual canvas feels both extremely timely and nationally relevant.

On display upstairs in the Nairn Community & Arts Centre the winner of last year’s Open Art Prize, student Karen Howitt has since graduated with an Honours Degree in Painting from Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen.

Karen Howitt - Hatching A Plan

This Solo show features charcoal and conte drawings by the artist including the intriguing large scale figurative work What Remains. Set within a woodland glade at night, the play of light on a moonlit pond in the distance, illuminating the faces of two female figures together with the firelight in the foreground, draw the viewer’s eye into the shadowy scene.

Tonal layers of charcoal are overlaid with linear marks creating a compelling density in the depiction of night as a physical and psychological space. The evasion of one figure by another and the implied blindness of the main seated protagonist creates an imaginatively open narrative for the viewer.

Drawings such as Hatching A Plan or Don’t Just Sit There are more illustrative and cartoon-like in their linear definition, whilst works such as Fly or Fry and Now I am King recall the work of Joe Davie in their use of pattern, design and the masculine figure.

Hopefully ways can be found in light of reduced funding to still facilitate the showing of emerging and student work on an ongoing basis, together with a range of work from professional, semi professional and amateur artists as part of Nairn’s annual community art festival.

© Georgina Coburn, 2011

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'Arbiter of Elegance - a Biography of Robert Adam' by Roderick Graham

First, some statistics. The Festival succeeded in reducing the overall number of works entered, by reducing the limit per applicant to two works, rather than three, so they got a total of some 350 entries, as opposed to the mammoth 550 we had to go through last year. Yet the exhibition is almost twice the size, and uses not only the original venue of the Court House, but the Seamen’s Mission as well. And I have to admit that, even after close inspection, there were only a handful of works that I felt wouldn’t have got our seal of approval last year.

So, fewer entries, yet many more selected artists and works, while maintaining the overall standard. Quite an achievement for just the second year of the Open. And the standard of hanging and presentation is high, with clear printed labels for every work (something many other opens shy away from, producing instead irritating printed lists and numbered works). Yes, it’s true that using screens in the Seamen’s Mission was far from ideal, but at least the screens themselves were as good as I’ve seen, and the hanging went for clever and sympathetic juxtapositions. And all the prizewinners seemed very worthy choices.

Equally gratifying, on that point, was the solo show by last year’s overall winner, Ruth Nicol. Ruth was still a mature student last year, and I presume that these new works formed her degree show. They show a real growth in confidence even from last year’s high standard, and fully justify the policy of offering such a solo show to the overall winner.

I had to miss the second half of the Festival, as I’ll be at a conference in Wales (which may lead to a future blog) so I was only free to chair two of the Festival’s literary events, but both proved to be a great pleasure. I’ve been reading Andrew O’Hagan’s articles in the London Review of Books since his first, back in 1994, but until now I’d read none of his novels. The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe is certainly one of the strangest books I’ve read in a long time, and I wasn’t sure how a conversation about it would go, in front of an audience. I needn’t have worried. Andrew is in both senses a ‘natural’ performer—in that he talks easily and readily, and that he comes over very directly and without pomposity. Not surprisingly, just about every copy of the novel on display had gone by the end.

My other chairing duty was a very different matter, Roderick Graham talking about the life and work of Robert Adam, subject of his latest biography Arbiter of Elegance. I had a personal interest here too. As ‘Rod’ Graham the author had had a previous life as Head of Drama for BBC Scotland, and as a humble ‘extra’ (Ricky Gervais style) I had been, quite literally, a spear carrier in Rod’s production of his own play about the last days of the Earl of Bothwell. I’ve dined out ever since on how I got to beat up a young Brian Cox with an eight foot halberd…

As with Andrew O’Hagan, my chairing duties could not have been easier. Roderick Graham spoke fluently and with only the briefest of notes, for a very entertaining forty minutes, and each question, from me or the audience, encouraged a new flow of urbane anecdotes and unlikely facts, such as: what we think of as ‘Adam’ fireplaces were really made by a Dutchman called Rysbrack. Once again copies of the book—hardback this time—were flying off the selling table.

Like so many festivals across the Highlands and Islands, the success of the Nairn Book and Arts festival is a tremendous tribute to the huge voluntary effort involved, as well as to the herculean efforts of their part-time administrator! And what a good venue the Nairn Community Centre is—flexible and welcoming. Long may the festival flourish.

© Robert Livingston, 2010

Nairn Book and Arts Festival 2009

THE SUN always shines in Nairn. Or at least, it always seems to when the town is en fête. And this year the organisers of the Nairn Book and Arts Festival certainly seem to have got the weather gods on their side again, so far at least. Last year’s festival was the first that had been able to make use of Nairn’s fine new Community Centre, and there were inevitably still a few teething problems. This year the Festival seems to have settled comfortably into the venue and is using it to its full potential.

The programme is a judicious mix of big names, old favourites, local stars, and new talent. Definitely falling into the first two categories were Liz Lochhead and William Dalrymple, in the Sunday afternoon slots. Both have the enviable ability to be both relaxed and professional, and to communicate to a large audience as if they were speaking to each member individually. Both also successfully mixed the old and the new.

Liz Lochhead’s reading came on the back of two performances by the National Theatre of Scotland of her play Mary Queen of Scots got her head chopped off, and so it was understandable that she should open with the prologue from that very play. I haven’t seen this new production, but if the actor playing Corbie delivers a better prologue than the author herself, then it truly is remarkable!

She then alternated selections from her two volumes of Collected Poems with new and unpublished poems, explaining that she’d only recently come back to poetry after concentrating on theatre work for several years. Liz is one of those poets-Betjeman is another-where it’s almost impossible to separate the texts of the poems from the sound of the author reading them, so distinctive is her language, and so characterful her delivery.

She ended her all too short hour with what she admitted was something of a departure for her, a short story. In effect, it was a monologue not unlike Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, and a very effective one: creating a wholly believable persona in a situation that was at once achingly funny and very humane.

Last year, William Dalrymple gave a dazzling illustrated lecture, updating his classic travel book From the Holy Mountain. This year, like Liz Lochhead, he offered us a reading of unpublished new work, together with, as he termed them, some ‘lollipops’ from his earlier books. The core of the session was a long extract from his new book, out in October, which examines different aspects of spirituality in India through the personal stories of nine very different individuals.

Dalrymple chose to introduce us to the extraordinary, and rather harrowing, life of a young Jain nun-an unforgettable, profound, and unsettling story. Like Liz Lochhead, Dalrymple reads as he writes, with a keen sense of drama and pace and, in the shorter pieces, excellent comic timing.

The question and answer session at the end opened up deep issues that could easily have kept us all debating for the rest of the evening! Due to the need for set-up time in the Community Centre, William Dalrymple’s reading was in the Newton Hotel which also makes a fine venue for such an event. Seated on a podium, in a wing armchair, potted plant to one side, and pint of beer in hand, Dalrymple gave the impression of being the host welcoming us into his grand nabob-funded home!

Back to Nairn on Monday afternoon, and the sun was still shining, which didn’t dissuade a large audience from coming indoors to listen to Professor Ted Cowan on the cultural impact of the Scots abroad. This was lecturing on a bravura scale. With the briefest of notes and a sheaf of internet print-outs, Professor Cowan kept us enthralled for an hour or more.

Big, bearded, bear-like and with a wicked sense of humour, he resembles a Scottish Bill Bryson, and he has Bryson’s ability to encompass a huge range of information in a compact and wholly palatable form. In a festival which has foregrounded the Homecoming Year, he was scathing about the underlying idea that the descendants of emigrant Scots are filled with longing and nostalgia for the ‘homeland’.

Instead, his thesis is that the colonial Scots were often the most active in building a new nation. Lachlan MacQuarrie, Governor of New South Wales, was the man who firmly established the name ‘Australia’. James Busby drafted the Treaty of Waitangi which has become the worldwide basis for negotiations on the land rights of native peoples. Donald Smith from Forres started as a fur-trader and rose to become Lord Strathcona and one of the builders of the Dominion of Canada.

This was bracing, stereotype-challenging stuff-I can’t have been the only member of the audience to be amazed to learn that the counties of Scotland with the highest rates of emigration in the 19th century were nowhere near the Highlands-they were Kirkcudbright- and Dumfries-shire!

Time for a quick refreshment in the late afternoon sun, and then back in for a very different event, under the ‘new talent’ category. Karen Campbell and Sophie Hannah are two of the rising generation of crime writers. Their approaches are very different: Karen, a former police officer, bases her novels in police procedure-and ‘on the beat’ officers, not CID-with a strong emphasis on character.

Sophie, on the other hand, admitted that she’s addicted to mystery, and all her novels, though termed ‘psychological thrillers’, begin with the kind of conundrum that ensures the reader keeps turning the pages. In fact, she confessed (the mot juste) that the mystery in her latest novel was so baffling that for a long time she couldn’t think how to resolve it!

This was a perfect example of a well constructed reading event. Both writers spoke fluently and entertainingly about how they approached their work, and then read tantalising extracts from their latest novels. The Q&A session which followed was lively and illuminating. It’s just a pity that, with so many delights on offer in the festival programme, lesser-known writers such as these can’t yet draw an audience as large as the bigger names do. But a gratifying number of books were being signed at the end of the session!

The Nairn Book & Arts Festival runs until 13 June 2009

© Robert Livingston, 2009

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Ruth A. Nicol - Freuchie Services, On the Way to Kilmany (1st Prize)

WITH THE profusion of open shows presenting the opportunity for artists of all abilities to participate, it is refreshing and indeed welcome to see a selected show emerge in the North as part of the annual Nairn Book and Arts Festival. Whilst inclusion is a dominant ideology in arts policy and cultural planning, what it does not represent with any consistency is professional context for working artists.

This is an important show in terms of making the work of professional artists visible within a community arts festival and setting a high bar in terms of the quality of work. Selected shows are always a contentious issue; however, they are a necessary part of a balanced spectrum of artistic activity and have been absent in the area’s cultural calendar for far too long.

What this show presents is an excellent selection of varied, well executed and accomplished work within the constraints of the exhibition space, a space which has perhaps contributed to the somewhat conservative nature of the show overall. Artist Shaun MacDonald (Blue Door Studios, Nairn) and Scott Burn (Moray Arts Centre) are to be congratulated on their hanging of the show in a challenging series of spaces.

It would be extremely difficult in this building to exhibit installation, film or very large scale work. Whilst some may find this disappointing, the exhibition is a solid beginning and a significant benchmark which I hope will continue to be built upon in subsequent years with an ever expanding frame of reference and vision.

The inaugural event attracted 550 entries with collection points locally and in Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh with a third of submissions coming from over 100 miles away. The judging panel, including Inchmore Gallery owner Gwen Black, sculptor and artist Gerald Laing, Robert Livingston, director of HI-Arts, and Robin Kennedy, lecturer in Arts at UHI, selected 80 works for the Nairn Courthouse space with the emphasis on drawing, composition, paint handling, sculpture and conception of work.

These parameters are clearly in evidence throughout the exhibition. Winner of first prize (£1500 plus gallery space in 2010) was Ruth A. Nicol, a student of Edinburgh College of Art with her large scale acrylic work Freuchie Services, On The Way To Kilmany. Second prize of £500 was awarded to Sam Cartman for Hut (Oil), the Chairman’s Choice and an award of £500 went to Stormy Seas Orkney (Oil) by Hugh Kirkwood and Sue MacPherson’s Zephyrs (Oil) received the Homecoming Award of £500.

Gerald Laing described in his prize-giving speech the need for art to “feed your speculation”, to give an audience “something to hum”. Very much in that spirit Michael Agnew’s A Canvas, On A Canvas, On A Canvas, On A Canvas is a clever and engaging visual conceit in mixed media. Michael Cairncross’s sculpture in bronze and portsoy marble, Embracing The Illusion, is an equally intriguing piece of work, creating a series of refracted dialogues between its highly polished angular surfaces.

Alisdair McKay’s abstract sculpture The Pragmatists is also a satisfying combination of ideas and materials – the human figures in the work in warped timber anchored to their the cement-like arrow bases facing pointedly away from each other.

There are many highlights in the show to be enjoyed, including Patricia Cain’s dynamic mixed media drawing Fergusons No9 on a ground of antique gold/ ochre. Cain presents an unexpectedly beautiful image of an industrial structure with pastel and charcoal adding to the tonality and definition of the work.

Meg Telfer’s Stone Fence Yesnaby, Orkney (Collagraph Print) creates a wonderful interplay of textures which reflect the low relief of the actual plate. The eye is drawn beautifully into this strong composition by the arrangement of form and the fence line itself, the wire like arteries of a living landscape. Layers of sky are pressed down to the horizon creating a wonderfully evocative psychological space from an extraordinarily narrow tonal range. Here understanding of texture and composition engage our emotional response to the work in an imaginative reinterpretation of the landscape.

Another superb piece of interpretive composition is Sam Cartman’s Seascape 3 (Oil), which spills out to the outer edges of the frame, a cold grey sky contrasted with landforms of pink and brown in a beautiful arrangement of composed stillness and vigorous brushwork. The balance of colour and paint handling in this work are excellent, the broken line of the horizon maintaining all the freshness and energy of an initial response or drawn mark.

Fiona Jappy’s mixed media work Salt in My Blood combines the haunting presence of photographic memory with layers of finely drenched blue pigment, the smiling child emerging from behind the skirt of an ancestor whose form we can only just make out. A group of ghostly familial figures emerge from the ground while arrangements of drifting birds and butterflies contribute to the ethereal quality of the image in association with the fleeting quality of human memory. The red barcode-like sequence at the base of the painting anchors the work, encoding the subject with personal identity and the universal need for belonging.

Brigid Collins’s Come, See Real Flowers (Wire, tissue, gauze, gold leaf, beeswax) presents the delicate interior world of the poem house where gold embossed fragmentary text provides a gateway to interiors of the imagination. The choice of materials and construction; veins of leaves, delicate papers, precious metal and frayed edges are on an intimate scale, encouraging closer examination and contemplation of the work.

The exhibition provides an important opportunity for professional work to be shown locally within a Scotland-wide cultural context, expanding the field of reference for visual artists and raising the profile of the area in hosting the event.

The show is complimentary to a range of visual arts activities during the ten day festival, including workshops, talks and exhibitions; 4Square (Contemporary Highland Art), ThreeSixFive (Photographic portraits) and Primary Schools Tapestry at the Nairn Community Centre, Off The Peg (Art hung in High St shops), The Power Of Ten (Photography) at the Nairn Railway Station, Nairn Academy Art at the Nairn Museum and the Nairn Photographic Competition at the Nairn Library.

© Georgina Coburn, 2009

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Jeremy Hardy

FOR ME, Jeremy Hardy is one of the giants of radio comedy. His mordant humour, driven by a splenetic, passionate anger, and a ‘what the hell?’ attitude to offending his (largely middle class) audience, has illumined programmes from ‘The News Quiz’ to ‘Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation’. Judging by the anticipatory buzz of the capacity audience in the Nairn Community Centre, I was not alone in that view.

And the first half proved us all triumphantly right. This was stand up as it should be-sharp, shooting from the hip, insulting everyone by turns (and didn’t we love it!), and puncturing authority and the establishment with well-aimed venomous darts. Some lines were so funny that they came with their own aftershock, as the full implications sank in of what you’d just heard.

And although this was just one gig on a UK tour, Hardy had plenty of fresh and well-informed material specially designed to offend Scots in general and Nairnites in particular. Wonderful stuff.

But then came the interval.

I don’t know what happened in those twenty minutes, but for the second half, we might as well have been watching a different act. Unfocused, clumsy, rambling, repetitive, and worst of all, unfunny-this was nothing like good stand-up.

Towards the end Hardy was even reduced to repeating, word for word, a rant from last week’s News Quiz. Does he think we Scots don’t get the show, or did he just not care? And a series of gratuitous insults about the oh-too-easy target of the Findhorn community were really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

By the time the evening dragged wearily to its close, Hardy had been on stage for over two hours, not counting the interval, and for the second hour I felt as if I’d been trapped by the pub bore.

This fine Nairn Festival has provided some interesting lessons. The two professional writers I saw-Brookmyre and Dalrymple-proved to be brilliant performers, superbly well-prepared and not losing their grip on the audience for an instant; and thereby heightened my already considerable admiration for them.

The two professional performers, on the other hand-Hamilton and Hardy-were under-prepared, sloppy, and ultimately self-indulgent, and so I was sorry to find that two of my comedy idols had feet of clay. And the other lesson is that no stand-up should be allowed to perform, for more than 70 minutes-and never, never take an interval.

© Robert Livingston, 2008

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