PAINTERLY responses to the West Coast and the Hebrides are the focus of Tore Gallery’s latest exhibition.

THE show includes works by Clare Blois, Gwen Black, Linda Smith, Isabell Dickson, Michael Stuart Green, Margaret Cowie, Fiona Matheson, Edward MacMillan, Helen Robertson, Gillian Pattison, Elaine Davis, Jane MacRae, Janis Mennie, Elizabeth Joss and John Nicholson.

Land and seascapes of the Highlands and Islands are undoubtedly popular subject matter for both recreational artists and professionals, and Tore Art Gallery has a high concentration of both on every available surface! What separates the wheat from the chaff in this genre is arguably the artist’s ability to reveal more than just a pleasing view. The best work in the exhibition is by artists equally invested in both the art of painting and their chosen subject matter. It is especially pleasing to see evolution in the work of individual artists in this show, pushing the boundaries of their own practice, expanding their vision of the Highland landscape and that of the viewer in the process.

Isabell Dickson - Breakers

Isabell Dickson’s work has developed significantly in recent years, especially in relation to her rendering of seascapes. In Breakers (Oil), the artist engages with the rich fluidity of her chosen medium in a turbulent composition of greys and steely blues. There is a burgeoning sense of movement between sky, sea and rocky shore communicated in her paint handling which conveys an immediate, visceral response to this ever changing environment.

While the artist’s mountain scenes are more static and less convincing, an adjacent work, Tide Out, Munlochy Bay, gives another tantalising glimpse of promise in a composition as contemplative for its plastic elements – Dickson’s treatment of pigment and mark making – as it is a serene image of the shoreline. The subdued palette and scratched marks in oils retain the freshness and immediacy of a drawing, encouraging the viewer not just to look at a view of the landscape but to feel it texturally, communicating not just optically but emotionally. The artist’s investment in her craft and attitude to her subject is positively reflected in her increasingly confident paint handling.

Edward MacMillan - Rainclouds Over Rodel

A spirit of experimentation can also be found in Edward MacMillan’s works in watercolours. Although this is not yet a leading element, it will be exciting to see how the essential dynamic between design and intuitive or accidental mark will shape future work. Images such as Northern Beach, Harris are well executed in vibrant, robust colour with details such as the striated seaweed sensitively rendered. Similarly The Old Lighthouse, Harris is a densely layered and technically adept design, particularly in the handling of natural textures such as stone and lichen. It is however the introduction of less deliberated marks in the composition that frees the image from being purely illustrative and allows it to become more interpretative.

In Rainclouds Over Rodel the artist introduces a violent splatter of raincloud in contrast to the more formal handling of the stone wall and cottage, introducing accidental marks into the creative process. MacMillan clearly understands his chosen medium and to his credit does not rely on tried and tested technique to depict the scene, allowing the viewer to feel the weather through his handling of watercolour, expanding the parameters of his individual practice as a result.

Edward MacMillan - Luskentyre Shoreline

Similarly, Luskentyre Shoreline, Harris, with its delicately bled pigment operates in counterpoint with more formal elements of the composition. There is a real sense here of the artist actively grappling with his own technique, ultimately the key to a change in perception both for the artist and the viewer. MacMillan’s selection for exhibition at the Royal Watercolour Society’s Open exhibition at the Bankside Gallery in London in 2011 and the 132nd Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour exhibition at the RSA in Edinburgh earlier this year, reflects ongoing development of his work in this challenging medium.

Linda Smith - Far Island

Linda Smith has contributed a series of beautifully atmospheric paintings to the exhibition exemplified by Far Island and Archipelago (Oils). In Far Island, Smith leads the viewer into a psychologically charged landscape or dreamscape, achieved through heightened tonal contrast and a reduced palette, creating an almost mythic interior vision of landscape. The foreground of creviced rock and a lone tree with its De Chirico-like elongated shadows, red fruit or flowers fallen to the ground, is enigmatic and surreal. The dark territory of the ocean and shadowy landmass on the horizon give the image a distinct mood of unease, the tree itself like a lone figure on a precipice of knowing.

Linda Smith - Archipelago

Less conducive to associative narrative but no less potent is Archipelago, an island thrust out of the sea with a shadowy tower of rock behind it. The subject sits intriguingly between the world observed and imagined in the artist’s dream-like rendering of the subject, defined in shadows and ethereal light. Smith’s understanding of the emotional potential of chiaroscuro not just to define the subject but to explore layers of meaning within it is one of her core strengths as an artist.

Clare Blois - Sun on the Sea

Sun On The Sea by Clare Blois is one of the most resonant and joyous paintings in the exhibition, with its thick impasto of cadmium yellow against reverberations of intense blue. The spark of life is in the subject but also in the paint handling – both feel like affirmations in every mark made by the artist’s hand.

Although there is great variation of skills in the exhibition as a whole, there is also evidence of leading elements both within the work of individual artists and within the wider Highland Visual Arts community which is encouraging to see. The exhibition would have benefited from further selection in order to really showcase these qualities, allow them to breathe in the exhibition space and encourage further development of work by both recreational and professional artists alike.

© Georgina Coburn, 2012

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AT THE risk of getting myself into trouble, performances by soprano and piano bring to mind the old adage about buses. You wait for ages for one to come along, then several come at once!

Also remember the immortal description of the omnibus by Flanders and Swann as a “transport of delight”. And this year we have been transported with delight firstly by Moira Harris and Steve Jones, then by Anush Hovhannisyan and Artem Akopyan, and most recently on Saturday evening in a charity event at Tore Gallery on the Black Isle in aid of the British Heart Foundation, by Liz McLardy and Anne McIntyre.

Anne McIntyre and Liz McLardy

Liz and Anne prepared a programme dedicated to the women in music, subtitled “From Mimi to Minelli”; catchy and apt, but some of the finest songs they performed predated Mimi by a considerable time. For example, the opening song ‘V’adoro, pupille’ was by Handel, from Guilio Cesare, with Cleopatra disguised as her own servant presenting herself to Caesar as Virtue. This was Liz McLardy in formal mode, and her voice rang out through the Gallery, a converted church with an acoustic well suited to singing.

By contrast ‘Lucy’s Conversation’ from Menotti’s one act opera The Telephone is very nearly contemporary with the birth of Liza Minelli. Liz had switched into comic mode, but the pace demanded by the libretto put a strain on the clarity of diction required. It is a phenomenally difficult song to get absolutely right and while many of the words were lost, the humour of the piece came over well.

Pianist Anne McIntyre had a pair of solo spots before the interval, the first of which, Debussy’s ‘Girl with the Flaxen Hair’ seemed to have a slightly uneven, almost staccato rhythm that emphasised the phrasing rather than the flow of the music. To end the first half, Anne played ‘The Maiden and the Nightingale’ from Granados’s set of musical pictures, Goyescas. It was fuelled by the passion of the Spanish heat, but was quite a descriptive piece that could well be used a part of a film score.

Between these two piano solos, Liz gave us four more songs from her versatile repertoire, a Mozart pastiche, ‘Little Polly Flinders’, from an anthology of nursery songs by J Michael Diack, then a haunting and unaccompanied ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ that was made famous by Judy Garland in the film The Wizard of Oz.

It was a natural progression to go from Garland to her daughter Liza Minelli for the title song from the film Cabaret. With the prop of a spangly jacket, Liz gave a powerful delivery that ranged as necessary from swing to poignancy. Reference to her friend Elsie being “the happiest corpse I’ve ever seen” made the flashback of nearly three centuries to Dido’s Lament ‘When I am laid in earth’ from Purcell’s early opera Dido and Aeneas seem chronologically normal, although Sally Bowles’ pathos was skilfully replaced by a true feeling of sadness.

The second half started with ‘Pirate Jenny’ from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, one of the most outstanding operatic works of the 20th century. It is often said that this popular work is almost impossible to cast as it needs actors who can sing, or singers who can act, and seldom do the two come together. Liz hit it off nicely with plenty of expressive performance. My sight-line was not good, but it appeared as if she had added a red bandana and a blue apron as props, perhaps using a bit of theatrical licence with the idea of looking like a pirate, whereas in the opera it is a song performed by Polly Peachum to entertain the guests at her wedding to Mack The Knife.

Then came another anomaly, a soprano singing the tenor aria ‘Maria’ from Bernstein’s West Side Story. It was sung unaccompanied and was full of passion and emotion, but somehow the words fell awkwardly coming from a female mouth.

The Minelli of the show’s title came out in the first half. Now it was the turn of the other featured name, Mimi. Few people do not know Puccini’s La Boheme and its heroine Mimi, the role that has everything – poverty, great tunes, possessive love and fatal consumption. And who does not know the ubiquitous ‘Mi chiamano Mimi’? A brave choice to include such a well-known song, but Liz sang it with just the right level of emotion to please all her audience.

Two songs by Samuel Barber gave the audience food for thought.  ‘Must the winter come so soon’ is from a somewhat dark opera called Vanessa, the libretto for which was by Menotti, but it lacks all the humour of The Telephone.  ‘Solitary Hotel’ is a rather tragic song from Barber’s suite Desperate and Still, setting to music words from Ulysses by James Joyce. This song is the reaction to hearing the news of a friend’s suicide.

A piano solo by Anne McIntyre of a Prelude and Fugue by the Norwegian composer Trygve Madsen was inspired by Bach, but had a jazzed up feel to it. Then the final song in the programme was a convincing delivery of the famous ‘Casta Diva’ from Bellini’s Norma, the epitome of all bel canto arias, in which Liz hit all the high notes with minimal vibrato and absolute ease.

For an encore, Liz and Anne took things full circle and back to the composer with whom they had started the evening, Handel.  ‘Care selve’ from Atalanta is a well known item in practically all soprano repertoires and with it the audience left with the feeling of an evening well spent.

© James Munro, 2011