Moment within | GAIL HARVEY

GAIL HARVEY MOMENT WITHIN air, sea & altitude

January 2022

GAIL HARVEY MOMENT WITHIN air, sea & altitude

Year’s end, all corners of this floating world, swept.

Matsuo Basho

Self portrait painted while a student in 1975 oil on canvas 122cm x 82cm

Moment within Moment without

Gail Harvey’s studio in Shetland has stone walls, painted white, like many of Shetland’s walls, to make the most of the light. Its door opens to the sandy bay of Scousburgh, and birds - ravens and seagulls - spin in the wind just below eye level. This is a good November day and the sky is blue. Gail has lived and painted from this elevated place for over thirty years. Before this, she was in Glasgow, first as a child and then an art student. Here in Coubal there is a devotional quality. Everything is simple and clean.

I sense the tangible world around the studio. Everything in this small patch of Shetland is vital: the sound of wind, the smell of salt, the heat of the sun – all of it precious, and everything alchemised into her work.

There is a change when Gail enters her studio. She moves with more purpose than in the house; towards the much-loved wood-burnings stove, a quick spin in her kung-fu-style shoes, and then to a stack of large canvases that face the wall.

‘Would you be interested is seeing these?’

The first viewing of paintings is always an honour, but this time it is more. There is a charge on each reveal, a static spark. Abstract work must be very very good

if it is to create a path that lets the viewer in. It must have twice the cunning of its representational cousins or it will fall flat, but when it works a world of limitless energy, expression and feeling opens up.

‘I like them,’ I say. They are brilliant.

‘Altitude’ has a delicate palette I’ve not seen before: pinks and greens float buoyant with life. It is over two meters long and commands every inch of space. Where is it: east, west, north or south? My eyes go back and forward in a mandala of delight. Gail has a soft kind manner, but these big energetic marks are when she is most alive. Every canvas is different. New colours and compositions tell eleven stories: the yellow of ‘Emerging Light’ cracks out of its dark shell, the freezeframe energetic white of ‘Pause between the Waves’ is a moment caught, and the embracing heat in ‘Softness and Warm Light’ is joyful. In ‘Air and Sea,’ a midnight-blue yin circles a cream-white yan. It is the beauty of these eternal forces which Gail Harvey captures so well. She has the strength to make bold marks and the grace to make them lightly.

‘Success for me,’ she tells me, ‘is when I step out of the work. When I’m no longer there and all that is left

is what is essential.’

This catalogue celebrates this collection of new paintings as well as the turning of a new year - 2022.

What better time to sweep inessentials away and keep what is needed?

Tony Davidson Director of Kilmorack Gallery December 2021

The Pause Between Waves oil on canvas 111cm x 170cm

Air and Sea oil on canvas 121cm x 170cm

Softness and Warm Light oil on canvas 121cm x 170cm

Movement within oil on canvas 131cm x 180cm

Emerging Light oil on canvas 110cm x 151cm

Altitude oil on canvas 82cm x 220cm

The Walker no 6, Iceland oil on canvas 80cm x 120cm

Surge oil on canvas 57cm x 71cm

Glowing Winter Grass oil on canvas 57cm x 71cm

Winter Flurry oil on canvas 60cm x 61cm

White Light oil on canvas 51cm x 66cm

Rising oil on board 55cm x 60cm

01463 783 230 art@kilmorackgallery.co.uk by beauly, inverness-shire iv4 7al

ISBN 978-1-8384862-5-9

Gail Harvey was born in Glasgow and studied at the Glasgow School of Art before moving to Shetland in 1988. Since then, Harvey has taken inspiriation from the rarified light, air and sea which surrounds her island studio: producing work which is both personal and universal.

She has won many awards and exhibited widely throughout the UK.