Scottish Art News Issue 24

A R T

ISSUE 24 AUTUMN 2015 £3

F L E M I N G | COLLECTION Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 1

SCOTTISH ART AUCTION IN LONDON 18 NOVEMBER 2015

Viewing 13, 15 – 17 November

2 | ART

16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ • TEL 0131 558 1200 • EMAIL mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

FRANCIS CAMPBELL BOILEAU CADELL Florian’s Café, Venice. Estimate £400,000–600,000 Enquiries +44 (0)20 7293 6132 jane.oakley@sothebys.com 34–35 New Bond Street, London W1A 2AA. sothebys.com/scottishart

The Fine Art Society London and Edinburgh

6 St James’s Place · London SW1A 1NP · +44 (0)20 3696 5285 · www.patrickbourne.com

6 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ www.fasedinburgh.com | art@fasedinburgh.com +44 (0)131 557 4050

John Byrne Girl with Poppies, 1972

Cyril Gerber Fine Art 19th-21st Century British Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture

Arthur Melville rws arsa rsw 1855–1904 The Sortie, Baghdad, 1883 Watercolour, signed, dated and inscribed 13¾ x 20 in · 35 x 51 cm Provenance: Private Collection, Scotland

Patrick Bourne & Co are proud sponsors of Arthur Melville: Adventures in Colour, an exhibition at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, 10 October 2015−17 January 2016.

One of our areas of specialist interest is Melville and The Glasgow Boys, and are always pleased to hear from anyone thinking of buying or selling their work.

Cyril Gerber Fine Art, established forty years ago, in an intimate space, this gallery is a place for art enthusiasts, collectors and first time buyers to browse through an exciting collection of works. The atmosphere is informal and relaxed and you can just enjoy looking and chatting, without apologising for not buying. Here you can see works by prominent 19th to 21st century British Artists, Glasgow Girls & Boys, the Scottish Colourists, 20th Century Scottish Masters, St Ives School, Modern British, and regular exhibitions of current Contemporary Scottish Artists.

178 West Regent Street, Glasgow, G2 4RL

0141 221 3095

mail@gerberfineart.co.uk

www.gerberfineart.co.uk

Gallery open Mon-Fri 9.30 - 5.30, Sat 10 -5

NEWS 7

REGULARS David Pollock

44

Recent Acquisitions Rachael Cloughton

50 FEATURES

Art Market Tim Cornwell

13

54

Private View William Littlejohn (1929–2006) Laura Simpson

18

The women that shaped the Scottish Art scene Susan Mansfield

Silhouette, Proximity, Panopticon, Score Modern Edinburgh Film School

PREVIEWS 26

The Flâneuse Laura Campbell

30

Drawn from the Collection Alumni from The Royal Drawing School

35

Talking Tales Edward Humphrey

40

56

Joseph Crawhall James Knox

57

58

60

62

Bobby Niven and Niall Macdonald Sophie Morrish Grace Ndiritu – A Return To Normalcy: Birth of a New Museum Neil Cooper South of No North Kathryn Lloyd Turner Prize 2015 Chloe Reith Document Scotland Marion Amblard

ISSUE 24 / AUTUMN/WINTER 2015 EDITOR’S NOTE On the cover of this issue is a painting by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004), titled Studio Interior (Red Stool), 1945. The work is currently on display in ‘Modern Scottish Women’, a major exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which uncovers and celebrates women’s contributions to modern art history. The show comes just months after the opening of ‘Ripples on the Pond’, GoMA’s major exhibition focusing on the impact and legacy of Scottish women artists. Both have been inspirations for this issue, and our first feature is a discussion between their curators Alice Strang and Katie Bruce on the motivations behind each exhibition (p.13). Looking forward, we have new works from four emerging women artists who are currently shaping the Scottish art scene, created especially for the magazine under the direction of the Modern Edinburgh Film School.

This issue of Scottish Art News also serves as a platform for some of the Fleming Collection’s recent projects: it is a space for Duncan of Jordanstone graduate Edward Humphrey, recipient of the 2015 Fleming-Wyfold Bursary, to share his current research with readers. We have re-staged ‘Drawn from the Collection’, the Fleming Collection’s summer show created in collaboration with alumni from the Royal Drawing School, and have included a new ‘Diary’ section with some of our recommendations for shows to catch in Scotland and beyond over the next six months.

Lastly, I would like to use my first editorial note as an opportunity to extend a thank you to the staff at the Fleming Collection for their support and guidance in putting this publication together, the magazine’s designer Lizzie Cameron and all of the advertisers in this edition. I would like to thank my colleague Briony Anderson in particular; Briony edited Scottish Art News over the last six years and developed it to be one of the most informative and significant publications on Scottish art. It is my aim to continue Briony’s work, keeping readers informed and inspired by the endless creativity of the Scottish art scene.

64

The Artist and the Sea Marion Amblard

Rachael Cloughton

65

Arthur Melville: Adventures in Colour Perrine Davari

The Fleming Collection is widely recognised as the finest collection of Scottish art in private hands. It was originally conceived in 1968 as a corporate collection for the London premises of Scottish merchant bank Robert Fleming Holdings Ltd. Since 2000 the collection has belonged to the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation which aims to promote Scottish art and creativity to national and international audiences. The collection includes works by many of Scotland’s masters, from 1770 to the present day, including works by Raeburn, Ramsay, Wilkie, the Glasgow Boys, the Scottish Colourists and many contemporary Scottish names.

THE DIARY 66

Scottish Art News Diary Perrine Davari

SCOTTISH ART NEWS The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street London W1J 8DU United Kingdom T: (0)207 042 5730 E: scottishartnews@flemingcollection.com Scottish Art News is published biannually by the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation, London.

Publication dates: May and November.

SUBSCRIPTIONS One-year subscription UK £9 | Europe £14 | International £20 Two-year subscription UK £18 | Europe £28 International £40 T: (0)20 7042 5730 E: gallery@flemingcollection.com

ADVERTISING Rachael Cloughton T: (0)20 7042 5730 E: rachael.cloughton@flemingcollection.com Behind Scottish Art News at the Fleming Collection Director James Knox Editor Rachael Cloughton Editorial assistance Amber Foot, Catherine Hooper, Janet Casey and Paul McLean Design Lizzie Cameron www.lizziecameron.co.uk Printed by Empress Litho Limited © Scottish Art News 2015. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Scottish Art News accepts no responsibility for loss or damage of unsolicited material submitted for publication. Scottish Art News is published by the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation but is not the voice of the Fleming Collection or the Foundation. All images copyright of the artist or artist’s estate unless otherwise stated.

Cover Image Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004), titled Studio Interior (Red Stool), 1945 Courtesy of The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

6 | ART

Scottish Art News | CONTENTS | 7

CHRISTMAS EXHIBITION

SCOTTISH ART | NEWS

Sandy Murphy RSW RGI PAI | James Cosgrove RSW RGI PAI Michael Durning PPAI PAI RSW | Euan McGregor PAI

1 George Leslie Hunter, Peonies in a Chinese Vase, (Late 1920s) © Fleming Collection

5th December 2015 to 10th January 2016 Preview Saturday 5th December 12-5pm Open 12-5pm Saturday and Sunday, appointments very welcome at any other time 45 Dirleton Ave, North Berwick EH39 4BL | www.fidrafineart.co.uk 1

TATHA G A L L E R Y

The Tatha Gallery in Newport-on-Tay specialises in art that we are passionate about, including some of the best Twentieth Century and Contemporary British Art. Emerging talent mixed with time-honoured, established artists makes for a recipe for interest, excitement and excellence in our regularly changing programme.

We have the refreshingly simple ethos of making art accessible.

JOSEPH URIE New Monotypes and Early Oils 31 October – 29 November 2015 Preview Friday 30th October 6-8pm Open weekends 12-5pm, viewing welcome at any other time by appointment

1 High Street, Newport-on-Tay, Fife DD6 8AB T 01382 690800

www.tathagallery.com

45 Dirleton Ave, North Berwick EH39 4BL | www.fidrafineart.co.uk

My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose: L’Art En Ecosse The belief of curator Caroline Hancock is that the forthcoming exhibition ‘My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose: L’Art en Ecosse’ at the Musée du château des ducs de Wurtemberg in the city of Montbéliard, is the first complete retrospective of Scottish art history to be held in France.

While her research has turned up shows with narrower focuses of interest – the Scottish Colourists or the contemporary era of Turner prize winners, for example – this show’s focus from the 18th century’s Enlightenment up to the present day will be unique.

Set in the east of the country, close to the Swiss border, and with an industrial history as the home of Peugeot, Montbéliard is famed for its Christmas markets. Themed around a different nation every year, the local municipal museums tie in their seasonal show on the same basis; this year it’s Scotland’s turn.

Around 50 loans have been sourced with the largest group of works coming from the Fleming Collection. Other lenders are the Universities of Edinburgh, Dundee, Stirling, Perth’s Fergusson Gallery, the British Council, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, FRAC Limousin and FRAC Bretagne. Two important private collectors have also lent significant works at the introduction of the Fleming Collection.

Director James Knox said: “I am delighted that the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation are lending such an important group of paintings from its collection to Montbéliard, which will bring home to a French audience for the first time the potent ties between Scottish artists and France.

The significance of this show cannot be underestimated in terms of building a narrative about Scottish art for a French audience which fits perfectly with goals of cultural diplomacy.”

Artists featured include Henry Raeburn, Charles Rennie Mackintosh,

SJ Peploe, Margaret Tait, William MacTaggart, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Martin Boyce, Douglas Gordon, Lucy McKenzie and Luke Fowler, working in a range of media including painting, sculpture, installation, textile design, furniture, film, decorative arts, photography and text-based work. Jacinto Lageira, professor at the Université de Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne, is planning a conference day on Scottish Aesthetics to coincide with the closing of the exhibition in February 2016.

My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose: L’Art En Ecosse 21 November 2015–28 February 2016 Musée du château des ducs de Wurtemberg, cour du château, 25200, Montbéliard, France T: +33 (0)3 81 99 22 61 | montbeliard.fr Open: Wednesday to Monday 10am–noon, 2–6pm, closed Tuesday

Scottish Art News | NEWS | 9

2

Mackintosh rebuilding Work proceeds apace in the build-up to the renovation of Glasgow School of Art’s landmark Mackintosh building, partly destroyed by fire in May 2014, with the news that detailed architectural drawings of the building as it was have been gifted to the school and will be used in the restoration process. Created by George Cairns (now a professor at QUT Business School in Brisbane, Australia) while he studied for a PhD at GSA in the early 1990s, the plans are as accurate a version of the Mackintosh building as completed in 1909 that could be gleaned from available records.

Earlier this year, it was announced that Glasgow-based Page\Park Architects had won the commission to

3

lead the restoration of this iconic building, having previously conducted work on Mackintosh’s Hill House, the Glasgow Herald Building – now The Lighthouse centre – and the ‘Mack’ building itself during the Mackintosh Conservation and Access Project between 2007 and 2009. The restoration process is being undertaken to a forensic degree, with the GSA’s Digital Design Studio creating a 3D visualisation of the building and, for example, one library lampshade being reconstructed from over 650 pieces of metal and glass. It is anticipated at time of writing that work will begin in the spring of 2016 and be completed in time for the 2017–18 academic year.

5

1

4

6

Fleming Collection Loans The Fleming Collection has loaned works to two major exhibitions at the National Galleries of Scotland. Orange Market, Saragossa (1872), A Cairo Street (1883) and Highland Glen (1893), watercolours

by Arthur Melville (1855–1904), are currently exhibited in the artist’s acclaimed retrospective exhibition ‘Adventures in Colour’. While Fleming Collection works Girl with Fruit (1925) by Dorothy Johnstone (1892–1980) and Fieldworkers (1883) by Flora Macdonald Reid (1879–1936) are displayed in ‘Modern Scottish Women’, a major critical reflection on the life and works of women artists in Scotland working between 1885 and 1965 (see p.13).

10 | ART

Arthur Melville | Adventures in Colour Until 17 January 2016 Royal Scottish Academy, Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL T: (0)131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org Open: Daily 10am-5pm, 7pm on Thursday Modern Scottish Women | Painters and Sculptors 1885–1965 7 November 2015–26 June 2016 Modern Two, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR T: (0)131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org Open: Daily 10am-5pm

7

Celebrating Scotland’s art: The Scottish National Gallery Project Headlined ‘Celebrating Scotland’s Art’, the Scottish National Gallery Project is a proposed multimillion-pound extension to the Scottish National Gallery building on Edinburgh’s Mound, which will afford three times as much viewing space for the gallery’s collection of art from around the country. The most popular art gallery in the UK outside London, the William Henry Playfair-designed building saw 1.295 million visitors pass through in 2014.

The new development is intended to tell the story of Scottish art using work and artefacts from the 17th to the mid-20th centuries, with a special section dedicated to the Scottish Colourists.

The new development has already passed the first stage of National Lottery funding application, and it is intended that work will commence in 2016 for a 2018 opening. Designed by the Glasgow-based Gareth Hoskins Architects, whose other projects include the city’s National Museum of Scotland redevelopment and new plans for Aberdeen Art Gallery, the £15.3 million renovation will create greater and easier access to a larger proportion of the gallery’s collection, as well as a welcoming new entrance to the gallery from Princes Street Gardens through a landscaped public pathway and terrace.

1 Arthur Melville, A Cairo Street, 1883, Watercolour on paper © Fleming Collection 2 Flora Macdonald Reid, Fieldworkers, 1883, Oil on canvas © Fleming Collection 3 Arthur Melville, The Highland Glen, c. 1893 Watercolour on paper © Fleming Collection 4 Arthur Melville, Orange Market, Saragossa, 1872 Watercolour on paper © Fleming Collection 5 George Cairns detailed architectural drawing of the west wing of Mackintosh Building © Glasgow School of Art 6/7 NGS extension, Architectural drawings courtesy of Gareth Hoskins Architects

Scottish Art News | NEWS | 11

British Art Show 8 A survey exhibition of the British art scene has occurred every 5 years since 1980 seeking to give a snapshot of the UK art scene at the time of its display. The British Art Show’s eighth instalment will return to Scotland in 2016, after a previous sojourn to Glasgow during the European Capital of Culture year in 1990. Organised by the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre, the current show premiered in Leeds in October and will journey to Norwich and Southampton after Edinburgh.

Three of Edinburgh’s major galleries – the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Talbot Rice Gallery and Inverleith House – are involved, and will be turning over their spaces for commissioning by the Hayward team.

Although in its earlier years the British Art Show came in for criticism for centralising

its view upon the south of England, this year’s vintage features significant Scottish involvement.

Among the range of new and never-before-seen works will be Feed Me

by Edinburgh filmmaker Rachel Maclean (b.1987) and a textile piece created by Liverpudlian visual artist Linder Sterling (b.1954) in association with Northern Ballet and Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios. Work by Ciara Phillips (b.1976), Hayley Tompkins (b.1971) and Charlotte Prodger (b.1974) will also feature. Nationwide, ‘British Art Show 7’ was visited by 420,000 people.

W. Gordon Smith Painting Award 2016 A new open-submission painting prize has been announced for artists working in Scotland and Scottish artists working across the world, with a total prize fund of £15,000. Named the W. Gordon Smith Painting Award, the scheme is supported by Edinburgh’s Dovecot Gallery in conjunction with Scotland On Sunday, and is named in honour of the newspaper’s former art critic. The deadline for submissions is 7 December, with an exhibition of all successful artists’ work to be held at the Dovecot Gallery in January 2016.

When he died at the age of 67, Smith (1928–96) left behind an impressive career that stretched across the arts: he was a playwright of acclaimed Scottish

‘ The British Art Show’s eighth instalment will return to Scotland in 2016, after a previous sojourn to Glasgow during the European Capital of Culture year in 1990’

British Art Show 8 13 February–8 May 2016 National Gallery of Modern Art, the Talbot Rice Gallery and Inverleith House, all in Edinburgh.

2

1 Rachel Maclean, Feed Me, 2015. © the artist

4

2 Linder Sterling, Diagrams of Love Marriage of Eyes, 2015.

Courtesy of Dovecot Tapestry Studio 3 Sandy Moffat, W Gordon Smith.

Courtesy of the W Gordon Smith Painting Award 4 Tamara Henderson, Sans Tête Au Monde, 2014. Installation View: with Santiago Mostyn, Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway. Courtesy of Rodeo Gallery, London 5 Cosima von Bonin, Hippies use the Side Door. The Year 2014 has Lost the Plot, 2014. Installation View: Mumok, Vienna.Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York 1

12 | ART

5

plays, including Jock (starring Russell Hunter), a biographer of such figures as Robert Louis Stevenson, a columnist and writer on theatre, as well as an art critic. It was the passion he brought to discovering young artists that has informed the naming of this award after him. Open to artists of all ages, backgrounds (Scottish criteria excepted) and experience levels, the close of the exhibition will see one artist awarded £10,000 and two awards of £2500 presented.

W. Gordon Smith Painting exhibition 12–30 January 2016 Dovecot Gallery, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1LT T: (0)131 550 3660 | dovecotstudios.com Open: Monday to Saturday 10.30am–5.30pm

Glasgow International The forthcoming seventh edition of the Glasgow International (GI) – the biennial festival of visual art – is a manifestation of Glasgow’s current prominence and versatility as a hub of contemporary art in the UK. Following her appointment ahead of the 2014 edition, Sarah McCrory will for the second time direct the programme, which will explore not only current trends in Scottish, British and international contemporary art, but also the possibilities of Glasgow as an exhibition space.

Over 18 days in April, GI will feature 40 group shows and 36 solo exhibitions, comprising the work of 228 artists. Among their number will be German artist Cosima von Bonin (b.1962), who will present sculptures, paintings and sound works at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), a tie-in with a show running later next year at the New York Sculpture Center. Also exhibiting are Turner Prizewinner Simon Starling (b.1967), who will be showing a new commission in response to the work of W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) at

3

The Common Guild and Glasgow’s Jim Lambie (b.1964), who will be installing a billboard work in Partick.

There will also be a major group exhibition at the Tramway – host venue of the 2015 Turner Prize show – which will explore in various media Glasgow’s status as a post-industrial city. Co-curated by artist Martin Boyce (b.1967), it will encompass a video project about the imagined return of the QE2 from Dubai to its birthplace in Glasgow by Lawrence Lek (b.1982) and another video work on labour, inequality and consumerism by Mika Rottenberg (b.1976). Diverse new venues around the city will include the Roller Stop Roller Rink, flat gallery 1 Royal Terrace and Edwardian arts and exhibition centre Kelvin Hall, which will house a site-specific response to the building by Glasgow artist Claire Barclay (b.1968).

Glasgow International 8-25 April 2016 Various venues around Glasgow.

Scottish Art News | NEWS | 13

1 Helen Flockhart, Encounter, 2009. © Ian Marshal

THE WOMEN THAT SHAPED THE SCOTTISH ART SCENE Susan Mansfield

1

The Scottish Endarkenment Following the Act of Union with England in 1707, Scotland spent the 18th century flourishing as a hub of creativity, education and enlightenment, both scientific and philosophical, as great thinkers including David Hume (1711–76) and Adam Smith (1723–90) brought advancement to the nation and eventually the Continent as part of the movement now known as the Scottish Enlightenment.

With this new exhibition, however, curators and art historians Bill Hare and Andrew Patrizio propose a new, flip side phase in the artistic life of the nation, with particular reference to the years after World War II: the Scottish Endarkenment.

The proposal document for the show explains: ‘Since the earliest times of rival tribal society to our present age of anxiety, antagonism and alienation, the ever-present threat or outbreak of conflict and violence has characterised much of Scotland’s ancient and modern historical experiences. While Scottish literature – from Scots Ballads to modern Gothic tales – has creatively engaged with this recurring theme, it is only relatively 14 | ART

recently that innovative Scottish artists have turned to this type of subject matter as inspiration for their art.’

The intention is to gather together many of Scotland’s greatest contemporary artists in what amounts to possibly Dovecot Studios’ largest show to date. There will be a number of proposed sub-themes, including the grotesque, the uncanny, victimhood, divided selves, and more, drawing together work in a variety of media from hoped-for artists including John Bellany (1942–2013), Joan Eardley (1921–63), Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006), Douglas Gordon (b.1966), Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) and David Shrigley (b.1968).

Throughout, the aim is to engender reflection on the themes of violence and conflict, yet perhaps in unlikely ways; expect everything from the fearsome to the satirical to be explored here.

The Scottish Endarkenment: Art and Unreason, 1945 to the Present 13 May–31 August 2016 Dovecot Gallery, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1LT T: (0)131 550 3660 | dovecotstudios.com Open: Monday to Saturday 10.30am–5.30pm

Two major exhibitions focusing on Scottish women artists have opened in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Curators Alice Strang and Katie Bruce explain why the conversation about women artists continues.

‘Since the earliest times of rival tribal society to our present age of anxiety, antagonism and alienation, the everpresent threat or outbreak of conflict and violence has characterised much of Scotland’s ancient and modern historical experiences’

In today’s art world, questions about gender balance seem passé.

Men and women have equal access to art education, and participate equally in professional practice. Describing a particular kind of art as ‘male’ or ‘female’ is not likely to win you friends.

For all that, two overlapping exhibitions in Scotland this autumn concentrate solely on art made by women. Together, they tell a story of women’s art in Scotland over the last 130 years, reminding us that today’s equality is a very recent thing, and that some unanswered questions on the subject may still remain.

‘Modern Scottish Women’, a survey show at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, takes as its starting point the year 1885, when Fra Newbery (1855–1946) was appointed Director of Glasgow School of Art, opening up an era of unprecedented opportunities for women artists, and ends in 1965, the year Anne Redpath died. ‘Ripples on the Pond’ at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art starts in the present day and works back 50 years through the Glasgow Museums’ Collection (GMC), presenting works on paper, photography and film by contemporary women artists alongside those of Barbara Hepworth (1903–75), Joan Eardley (1921–63) and Bet Low (1924–2007).

The shows have very different purposes. ‘Modern Scottish Women’ concentrates on painting and sculpture – the art

forms thought most traditionally masculine – aiming to reveal the women who worked on the cusp of modernism and who are often little known or exhibited today. ‘Ripples on the Pond’ takes as a launch point a selection of prints from ‘21 Revolutions’, the series commissioned to mark the 21st anniversary of Glasgow Women’s Library last year, and uses that as a lens through which to explore works on paper in the city’s art collection.

‘Modern Scottish Women’ celebrates the achievements of women in painting and sculpture at a time when they were casting off the image of the lady watercolourist and training to become professional artists. ‘There were very obvious inequalities: the number of female to male students, the number of female exhibitors to male at the RSA,’ says curator Alice Strang. ‘But, in general, I’ve tried to take a glass-half-full approach, celebrating the artists who did achieve, won prizes, had solo exhibitions.’

It was a time when women were fighting for access to life-drawing classes, long thought improper for ladies, but considered the linchpin of professional practice. Even in 1955, when Joan Eardley exhibited Sleeping Nude, a portrait of a male friend, visitors to the gallery were appalled by the idea of a male nude painted by a woman artist. But, at the same time, women were making their own strides forward in artistic innovation.

Strang elaborates: Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 15

1

1 Joan Eardley, Sleeping Nude, c.1955 Š Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh: Presented

by Mrs Irene Eardley 1964

16 | ART

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 17

2 Agnes Miller, Round Pond, c.1930 © Serpentine Gallery 3 Dorothy Johnstone, Anne Finlay, c.1920 © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections: Purchased with the assistance of the National Fund for Acquisitions 1983 4 Anne Redpath, The Indian Rug (or Red Slippers), c.1942 © Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh: Purchased 1965 5 Mary Cameron, Les Joueurs, c.1907 © City of Edinburgh Council: Presented by the Scottish Modern Arts Association 1964

4

3

6 W Barns-Graham, Studio Interior (Red Stool), c.1945 © The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust: Bequeathed by the artist 2004 7 Helen de Main, Spare Ribs, c. 2012 © The Artist

2

6

5

William McCance (1894–1970) and William Johnstone (1897–1981) are the two Scottish artists always described as the ones most engaged with developments in London between the wars. ‘But what we’ve found out is that McCance’s wife, Agnes Miller Parker (1895–1980), did the most extraordinary series of Vorticist-inspired paintings. By putting those on the walls, we’re rewriting art history. Next time someone writes a textbook about Scottish art history you have to include William Johnstone, William McCance and Agnes Miller Parker.’ says Strang.

Many of these stories have not been told before, and were uncovered through historical detective work. Women artists’ careers are often differently structured: their work ebbs and flows to accommodate family responsibilities rather than accumulating steadily through a sequence of solo shows; names change with marriage; work passes to family members or is lost. Strang says: ‘They don’t have long careers in which to produce lots and lots of work. You have really talented artists like Mabel Pryde Nicholson (1872–1918), who died at the age of 47 – I think we know of 25 paintings that she made. They are not going to fill a gallery, so having a group exhibition allows us to show the work of lots of different artists together.’

Katie Bruce, the curator of ‘Ripples on the Pond’, says that, although much has changed, domestic ‘pressures’ still interrupt women’s careers: ‘I think this is still an unspoken reason why women artists’ careers ebb and flow more [than men’s].

The personal is also often associated with women artists and their 18 | ART

practice in a way that is never discussed about male artists, though it is slowly changing. I find it interesting that a lot of women work with the themes of time, disruption of time and the ephemeral in their work.’

Beginning with the prints from ‘21 Revolutions’, including works by Ciara Phillips, Claire Barclay, Jacki Parry and Sam Ainsley, and with themes of play, landscape, portrait and the visibility of women’s history and practice, Bruce began to look back through the Glasgow Museums’ Collection. Remarkable works were discovered, including a rare print by Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) and a watercolour by Bet Low, both of which are unlikely to have ever been shown before.

Bruce explains: ‘For me, it was an exploration or a revealing of the work in the collection, and a repositioning of that work beside newer work, and starting a conversation around them.

I’m interested in challenging the institutional exhibition as the voice of authority; for me, it’s much more conversational, I want people to see connections. Works on paper are not necessarily seen as significant and I liked the idea of curating a large show of work on paper as a significant practice in its own right.’

Many of the women in ‘Ripples in the Pond’ are actively interrogating the question of what it means to make art as a woman. While she steers clear of defining ‘women’s practice’ too closely, Bruce says: ‘If I was pressed about features or qualities particular to women’s practice, I feel that there is often a personal element that deftly comments on or relates to the wider world.

7

The body, for example, or personal history is used to make work that relates to global issues or makes us think about our place in history or time.’

Of the modern Scottish women Strang sought out, some depicted subject matter one might consider typically ‘female’ – domestic interiors and portraits of their children – while others ranged much more widely – Eardley painted the sea at Catterline in the teeth of a storm and Mary Cameron (1865–1921, known as ‘Bloody Mary’) painted bullfights in Spain at the beginning of the 20th century. Strang elaborates: ‘[Cameron’s] work is astonishing, technically brilliant, compositionally ambitious and very graphic.

When she was interviewed for magazines, they’d make a big deal of the fact that she’s pretty, but she’s having none of it; she shows them her muscular, sun-tanned hands from working outdoors.’

Both curators agree that there continues to be value in exploring women’s work in isolation. The making of both exhibitions has raised questions about the visibility of women artists in public collections. Bruce says: ‘There are still questions to be asked about institutions and women artists, what we show and what we acquire. There is still a sense that, although there are women on the Turner Prize shortlist, there are a lot of women artists and curators, tutors and gallery directors, but a lot of the key positions at a national level are held by men and the big retrospectives are still of male artists. There are still conversations that are not finished.’

Susan Mansfield is an arts journalist based in Scotland Alice Strang will be giving a talk on Modern Scottish Women at the Fleming Collection on Wednesday 16 December, 6:30pm Modern Scottish Women | Painters and Sculptors, 1885–1965 7 November 2015–26 June 2016 Modern Two, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR T: (0)131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org Open: daily, 10am–5pm Ripples on the Pond Until 24 April 2016 Gallery of Modern Art, Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow, G1 3AH T: (0)141 287 3050 | glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/GoMA Open: Monday to Thursday and Saturday 10am–5pm, Friday and Sunday 11am–5pm

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 19

SILHOUETTE PROXIMITY PANOPTICON SCORE Modern Edinburgh Film School

‘ The arrangement here adds the voice as a subject to ‘Ripples on the Pond’s’ central theme of visibility in relation to women’s practice through landscape, feminism, portraiture and female presence. It questions how the voice is heard, sustained, quoted, read and reproduced’

A new work by the Modern Edinburgh Film School for Scottish Art News.

‘Silhouette, Proximity, Panopticon, Score’ is the bringing together of recent works by four contemporary women artists living and working in Scotland: Lauren Printy Currie, Kirsty Hendry, Lyndsay Mann and Jessica Ramm. Alongside their images taken from film, performance, sculpture and text, is a painting from the Fleming Collection, Flowers and Red Table by Elizabeth V. Blackadder (b.1931). Taking cues from Blackadder’s careful arrangement of objects, this pentagonal shape of works, artists and subjects lines up with Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art exhibition ‘Ripples on the Pond’ (1 May 2015–24 April 2016).

The next pages in the magazine in turn form an echo to the exhibition’s exploration of women and works on paper from Glasgow Museums’ Collection.

The arrangement here adds the voice as a subject to ‘Ripples on the Pond’s’ central theme of visibility in relation to women’s practice through landscape, feminism, portraiture and female presence. It questions how the voice is heard, sustained, quoted, read and reproduced. It reinforces some of the subtle elemental qualities in the exhibition, particularly air and water, and returns ephemeral activities, like film and performance, to works on paper. The title ‘Ripples on the Pond’ becomes an action, illustrating like waves and breaths, the connectedness of it all, 20 | ART

the overlaps, abrasions, proximity, materials, and the gathering and deepening of its enquiries. This particular project forms a conversation with the parent exhibition and illuminates its ideas further from a distant but entirely integrated vantage point.

Glasgow-based Lauren Printy Currie presents a new piece bleus (2015), a hybrid sculptural and text work produced while on residency at Cove Park, Argyll and Bute. Currie’s working processes, which bring together image, text, objects and sound, are part of an ongoing enquiry into the multiple artefacts and encounters through which sculpture exists. Her intertwinement of matter and written language illuminates and describes new meaning for both. Her recent exhibitions also include ‘read the room/you’ve got to’ at SALTS, Basel, and ‘Mood is Made/Temperature is Taken’ at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, both in 2014.

Glasgow-based artist Kirsty Hendry, who works with moving image, writing and print, presents a text extract she produced while on a recent residency at Hospitalfield in Arbroath.

Mutinous Parts (2015), a description of the body and its organs, their distinct yet interdependent properties distilled from her interest in the relationships between objectivity, technology and the internet and subjectivity. She explores new media’s

politics of image production, its proliferation and consumption.

Forthcoming projects include Cursor, a commission by New Media Scotland and the symposium and work session ‘RWX (Read/Write/eXecute)’ at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, while her texts have been included in the experimental writing anthology Gnommero and the exhibition ‘Studio Jamming’ at Cooper Gallery in Dundee.

Lyndsay Mann is an artist filmmaker currently completing her PhD at the University of Edinburgh. A Desire For Organic Order (2015) interweaves passages of documentary film with the film poem. The film forms seamless shifts between narrative, voiceover, image and research, with sequences of ambiguity, reflection and anecdote exploring the subjective and mutable nature of perception. Centred on the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, which holds one of the world’s leading collections of botanical specimens and is home to the garden’s Centre for Middle Eastern Plants, the film work oscillates between observations of the site, its scientific methods of codification and acquisition, and dialogue that offers an immersive and speculative sampling of its intertwining political, philosophical and cultural histories.

Edinburgh-based artist Jessica Ramm’s Cloud Dispersal (2014) brings together the synthetic and the natural for the briefest of moments, capturing the detonation of water vapour to re-create a cloud, with representations of durability and endurance. Her research consists of ongoing, haphazard experiments that examine an ordering of nature and the environment through technology and science, while she employs her body to test the properties and behaviours of matter. Ramm, who works across video, performance and installation, was recently represented at ‘Platform’ at Edinburgh Art Festival 2015 and at the exhibition ‘Leave the Capitol’ at the Fleming Collection in 2013.

Modern Edinburgh Film School (MEFS) has developed a complementary artist film programme for ‘Ripples on the Pond’ at GoMA, with screenings taking place across Glasgow. MEFS has also produced a sister-essay in the exhibition publication, titled ‘A Poetic Measurement’.

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 21

1

22 | ART

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 23

3

2

24 | ART

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 25

4

1 Elizabeth Blackadder, Flowers and Red Table, © Fleming Collection 2 Lauren Printy Currie, I am interested in devices, individuals and events, 2015, © courtesy the artist 3 Kirsty Hendry, Mutinous Parts, text, 2015.

Developed during Hospitalfield Summer Residency 2015, © courtesy the artist 4 Lyndsay Mann, A Desire For Organic Order, HD video stills, 2015, © courtesy the artist 5 Jessica Ramm, Cloud Dispersal, screenprint, 2014, © courtesy the artist

5

26 | ART

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 27

THE FLÂNEUSE Laura Campbell

1

3

The most important role of the artist is to notice things, something Glasgow-based Tessa Lynch does very well indeed.

Drawing inspiration from the maelstrom of everyday life is the age-old problem facing all creatives, but Tessa Lynch seems to take it in her stride, easily interpreting the multiplicity of the contemporary world and responding with objects and scenarios that subvert the ordinary. The most quotidian of objects and unexceptional of occurrences are likely to provide subject matter for one of her slick and minutely realised projects.

The artist’s most recent solo exhibition ‘Café Concrete’ was held in Glasgow at The Whisky Bond, a studio complex and gallery space in what was a bonded warehouse for Highland Distilleries. It is useful to take location into consideration when commenting on Lynch’s work: often her projects are site-specific, subtly or explicitly exploring the social and political associations of place. In this instance, ‘place’ is the artist’s own workplace and the exhibition takes as its starting point the artist’s daily commute. Focusing on the concept of the female flâneur or flâneuse – a person who strolls around observing society – ‘Café Concrete’ offered a (self-) portrait of the female artist living in the historically industrial city of Glasgow.

The concept of the flâneur has long been associated with the artist or creative. In The Painter of Modern Life, Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur is an artist-poet of the modern metropolis; for Walter Benjamin, he was the astute spectator of modern urban life. From the perspective of these intellectual heavyweights, one thing he definitely was not was a she. Of course, this is partly 28 | ART

due to the fact that women were not (and still to some extent are not) able to wander freely without fear of repercussions. It may no longer be a scandal for a woman to roam the city without direct purpose, but as Lynch so vigilantly observed during our conversation about her motives for producing some of her sculptural works, women are far less likely than men to be seen simply watching the world go by without some form of prop, be it an oversized handbag, buggy or iPhone.

Lynch’s enduring interest in the possibility/impossibility of the existence of the flâneuse is perhaps linked to her desire to critique her own role as a female artist. Indeed, the role of the artist in the 21st century is unrecognisable from that in the rosetinted past: nowadays an artist must handle tax returns, funding applications and budgets related to her practice; she must hold down a job, usually as a shop assistant, waitress or administrative assistant; she is an impeccable self-promoter requiring skills to maintain a website and social media channels; she remains active in her local art scene, attending events and supporting peers. All of this against the backdrop of a visually saturated culture and oversubscribed art world. With stark competition and a multitude of extra-curricular activity, it is little wonder that Lynch calls into question her own ideal of the artist living as flâneuse. An artist today has more in common with a businesswoman than a sauntering observer set apart intellectually from the gritty and competitive real world.

2

By choosing to address her own predicament as a female artist, Lynch adds another dimension to her oeuvre, already defined by its proximity to real life. This proximity manifests itself in a number of ways. Materially, Lynch’s sculptural works are executed in such urban materials as aluminium, rainwater, paper mulch, copper and chewing gum. In the case of ‘Café Concrete’, these materials are transformed by the artist’s subtle reconfiguring, and, more obviously, by the appropriation of these materials within the context of a white cube gallery space.

Obsessive attention to detail ensures that the experience in the presence of her sculptures-cum-simulacra is dreamily uncanny.

Dimensions of objects and their arrangement are not formalities that Lynch takes lightly – the magic is found in the finer detail, and she revels in the specificity of her creations, which result in ambiguous but familiar scenarios, like the fleeting thoughts of a meandering mind projected on to everyday objects.

Moreover, the subject matter of the work deals purposefully with ‘the here and now’, making it an extension of real life, rather than something that merely mimics it. Diverse present-day issues, such as community, housing and topical news stories, are all absorbed into Lynch’s extended reality. When asked how important it is to her that art is in some way ‘active’, she responds without hesitation: ‘It’s the most important thing.

Art should at least be attempting that.’

Lynch’s multifaceted practice is a fusion of the highly personal and the universal that makes a strong case for artists to be socially and politically engaged rather than observing the world as if through a window.

Laura Campbell is an arts writer based in Glasgow Tessa Lynch will be exhibiting at Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2016 as part of the Director’s Programme.

8 – 25 April 2016 GoMA – Gallery 3 Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow, G1 3AH T: (0)141 287 3050 | glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/GoMA Open: Monday to Thursday and Saturday 10am–5pm; and Friday and Sunday 11am–5pm

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 29

1 Tessa Lynch, Café Concrete, c. 2014, Installation shot, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, © Ruth Clark (Detail of Painters Gondola/Cradle, 2014 – Aluminium, rope, knots, cagoule, rainwater, plastic) 2 Tessa Lynch, Selfie, Table with Attachments, c. 2014, © Ruth Clark 3 Tessa Lynch, Footprint - logistic drawing Building 1, c.2014, Graphite, plaster, A5 © Ruth Clark 4 Tessa Lynch, Café Concrete, c. 2014, Installation shot, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, © Ruth Clark

4

30 | ART

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 31

DRAWN FROM THE COLLECTION 1 John Duncan Fergusson, Jonquils and Silver

A re-staging of works by alumni from the Royal Drawing School, with an introduction by artist Michelle Cioccoloni

2 Michelle Cioccoloni, Pear or Plum 3 ‘Drawn from the Collection’ exhibition 1

Over the summer, the Fleming Collection opened its doors to alumni of the Royal Drawing School. Artists selected works from the Collection that shared an affinity with their own, and hung these pieces side-by-side.

For ‘Drawn from the Collection’ I chose Jonquils and Silver (1905), a quiet picture by John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961). I was struck by its formal qualities: each element of the picture had been carefully considered so that the whole was held together by a solid and balanced composition. The simple arrangement can be appreciated for its abstract qualities – two similar silver pots placed at a distance from one another, echo each other beautifully – as well as the artist’s ability to render different surfaces in oil paint. It is a wonderful example of his early work and, as a young artist, I was inspired by the development of Fergusson’s visual language.

The importance that Fergusson accords tone over colour gives the picture its distinctive mood. He has deliberately made the background very dark to make the objects stand out in an almost sculptural manner. Fergusson admired Diego Velázquez (1599– 1660) and Edouard Manet (1832–1883), whose work he was able to see in Paris in the 1890s and whose influence can be seen in this painting. The drawing technique I use is likewise influenced by the study of other artists, in particular, the Old Masters.

In 2014, I travelled to Spain as Artist in Residence at the Prado Museum in Madrid. There, I was able to make many studies of masterpieces by Velázquez and to experience first-hand and close-up his extraordinarily subtle technique – the way in which he was able to conjure up the presence of his subject on a twodimensional surface, giving a real feeling of space and air with a minimal amount of paint. In a similar way, I use a fine metal-nib pen to put down marks that slowly release the form from the page, giving the feeling of a three-dimensional form that exists in a real space.

32 | ART

3

2

The artist Leon Kossoff (b.1926), who will be 89 in December, talks about the value of such studies: ‘When you are drawing a painting, you see and experience it quite differently, your mind wakes up.’ A whole new world of ideas can be opened up to you during the process of digesting a painting. You realise that the history of art is a succession of wonderful, visionary individuals whose genius lies in the depth of feeling they had for their subjects, so when we copy from them, we also learn how to care and feel more. It is the power that artists have to move us deeply that I am striving for and trying to respond to in my ‘copies’, so that I can channel it later in my own work. The point of copying is to find out what the artist means to you, to uncover your own creative response and to understand how a picture that is hundreds of years old can have relevance to you today.

When you stand in front of a painting for a long time, you begin to notice the visual aspects of the picture: how it works, why it works. There is a huge difference between glancing at a picture and concentrating on it. Museums are often crowded places and, as Philippe de Montebello comments in Rendez-vous with Art (2014), ‘the result is that one sees things superficially, because to fully enter into a picture’s world and allow it to yield its many different layers of meaning requires at least several minutes – and several minutes is an eternity in a museum.’ Looking at originals at close range reveals marks that offer insight into how the picture was made.

For an artist wrestling with the same problems such insights can be invaluable.

Alison Boult Joan Eardley (1921–63) Rag and Bone Shop, Glasgow (watercolour on paper)

1

1 Joan Eardley, Rag and Bone Shop

2

Joan Eardley’s painting never appears to be fixed or set down until the last possible moment. Her decisions seem impulsive or urgent, yet every lump of paint harmoniously balances next to the others. Drawing is present in her painting and is also brought back into works to add definition.

The works I chose to display alongside Eardley’s Rag and Bone Shop share a similar approach. In Kitchen, Cannery Row and Wales the subject begins in an observed, domestic setting and the act of painting and continual reshaping brings forth hints of another narrative.

2 Alison Boult, Wales

Michelle Cioccoloni studied at the Royal Drawing School in 2012-13 Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 33

Olivia Kemp George Leslie Hunter (1877–1931) Ceres, Fife (Fifeshire Village) (oil on canvas, c.1924–27)

Joseph Goody Margaret Nairne Mellis (1914–2009) Passing in the Night (painted wood, 1994)

I am interested in the places where the countryside is marked with the evidence and strangeness of our presence amongst it: curious buildings and structures that jar and clash with our perception of the picturesque. The towns and villages ebb away into the field and scrubland; and it is here, in this painting, where this part of the world can be found.

Wildlife and wilderness become braided into the manmade, creating the most fascinating dialogues, real and imagined, and breaking down our perception of where the wild truly ends.

It weaves into our towns and edge lands. We sprawl out into the wild, ploughing, cutting, harvesting, building, culling, fencing and dredging. Simultaneously, it floods, blights, flourishes, creeps, blooms, sprouts, shoots and blossoms.

We can be rendered either an observer or a desperate opponent in this endless activity.

I chose to exhibit alongside Mellis’s Passing in the Night.

Initially, the deep blues and muted tones that I find myself working with frequently drew me in. I had some reservations given that the work is not a two-dimensional painting, but upon further reflection and research into Mellis’s work, I found this all the more exhilarating. Passing in the Night is a demonstration of the very thing that I find exciting about painting: Mellis’s construction highlights the tension between the surface and the space that can exist within painting. The edges of the blocks and shapes have a physical presence, yet their state of partial decay undermines this physicality.

This raises questions about the role of these dilapidated objects in supporting the fragmented depiction of a boat. In the same way a mark of paint on a canvas can fluctuate between portraying something with a sensation of integrity and existing upon the surface of the canvas itself. These elements laid bare remind us that painting is a construction.

1

1 George Leslie Hunter, Ceres, Fife 2 Olivia Kemp, The Cold Clearing

2

1

1 Samuel Bough, Summer Evening 2 Fraser Scarfe, Tree near Burton Road

2

34 | ART

1 Margaret Nairne Mellis, Passing in the Night 2 Joseph Goody, Seem

2

Timothy Betjeman Joan Eardley (1921–63) Field of Barley by the Sea (oil on board)

Fraser Scarfe Samuel Bough (1822–78) Summer Evening, Cadzow (oil on board) I was delighted when looking through the Fleming Collection, that I came across Summer Evening, Cadzow by Bough. The study has a freshness and understated presence, which I suspect is why I often respond to studies over finished works.

We were asked to pick an artist whose work had an affinity with our own; as a landscape painter, Bough had an obvious pull, but I was also struck by the serendipity of having recently started a series of drawings in some woodland close to my house, visiting a particular tree at different times of day and attempting to document the fast-moving changes of spring. As a nod to the Bough, I began going out to work about an hour before sunset.

The two works presented in ‘Drawn from the Collection’ are a response to Bough’s study and homage to the timelessness of trying to record a brief event in nature. During my evening walks I liked to think of Bough heading out at the end of a hot summer day to absorb his surroundings and enjoying the process as much as I did.

1

1

1 Joan Eardley, Field of Barley by the Sea 2 Timothy Betjeman, Manhattan from the Greenpoint Docks

2

I love this painting by Joan Eardley because it is completely immersive. You are moving into it as soon as you look at it, trudging along, half in the hedgerow, the tall grasses and flowers and thistles in your fingers as the barley whips your right leg and sea air grazes your face.

Eardley painted this field in Catterline several times, and on one outing she picked stalks of wild grass and shoved them into the paint surface. This sense of urgency, of neck-deep desperation, is present here, too, though conveyed solely in paint.

It looks as if it were made out of necessity, not in any effort to demonstrate skill or dominance – the opposite in fact.

I find that when walking around a city, or surrounded by nature, looking for something to paint, I settle on scenes that inspire a similar sense of swimming or drowning to what I imagine Eardley felt in making this painting. Scenes that are disorientating because they contain an overabundance of sensory information, in which things are moving too fast or there is simply too much natural detail to capture through systematic means.

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 35

TALKING TALES

Tyga Helme Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935) Lady in a White Dress (oil on panel, 1906) Peploe offers us Lady in a White Dress with all the energy and immediacy of working from life, but coupled with a seemingly easy fluidity and economy of drawing. There is an intimacy and lightness with which he holds on to his subject that I find compelling.

Working always from nature but never imitating it, the informal composition and brushstrokes draw us close to the seated lady, but we might also lose her at any moment.

The painting becomes more illusive than first imagined.

She might readjust her pose and disband the drawing or dissolve entirely into Peploe’s slicks of white on white.

Edward Humphrey

1

1 Samuel John Peploe, Lady in a White Dress 2 Tyga Helme, Phoenix Garden

2

1

1 Alison Watt, The Bathers 2 Paul Fenner, Coming Or Going

36 | ART

2

Paul Fenner Alison Watt (b. 1965) The Bathers (oil on canvas, c.1988) Two wan young women – they are perhaps paler than the Classical frieze behind their heads – gaze out at us, their hands hovering oddly, the act of washing momentarily suspended. The activity they are engaged in could be ritualistic, or erotic, it is difficult to tell. The Neue Sachlichkeit strangeness of the scene, the heightened manner in which the various objects – cane chair, tub, bar of soap – are rendered, adds to the sense of opacity.

Edward Humphrey, winner of the 2015 Fleming-Wyfold Bursary shares with us a new text piece, created for Scottish Art News.

It’s a crisp morning and I’m collecting audio snippets of dialogue that sound like an idea being expressed for the first time. The advantage of our working memories being so full of potholes is that there is always room for an old idea to feel like a new one. When we hear ideas, we start connecting and assimilating them into our knowledge. It is the halfremembered or the unfamiliar idea, uncannily expressed, that makes the ears prick up.

I used audio quotations to soundtrack my 2014 film, Another Fiction, a dual-screen installation filmed in and around Dundee, which explored ideas of myth, memory and reality. These snippets of recorded dialogue were ordered one after the other, collectively making a single fragmentary voice. The process of putting literal and visual ideas together and finding their relationship is a kind of metaphor making.

Using quotations that do not immediately belong together, creates space in the viewer for problematic ideas that fall between differing pronouncements to arise. I’m interested in avoiding statement art, and investigating the problematic and contradictory nature of things, but doing so in a pleasing way. The idea is not to convert or persuade, but to open and offer the viewer the satisfaction of making personal connections.

In the case of Another Fiction, I looked at the randomness of consciousness and evolution, which are so incompatible with our desire for narratives of causation – where one thing must follow another, and all things are explainable using individual reason. There is some reassurance in comprehending the limits of our understanding. Acknowledging the insufficiency of narrative, and using narrative to communicate this, is not as contradictory as it sounds; rather, it demonstrates our deep need for stories and our prickly relationship with fragmentation.

Our desire to make sense of things means that the narrative can be significantly fractured, but not to the point of obscurity. It interests me to move around in this area between perception and abstraction; what we think happened and what happened, between the word and the thing. Somewhere in this grey area connections happen, and the synapses firing to make these connections is how we engage with things.

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 37

1

38 | ART

The performance of speech – its urgency and intimacy – creates, embellishes or contradicts meaning in the words spoken.

John Berger talks about the power of voiceover in his Ways of Seeing series for the BBC, and it is a technique used to great effect in Patrick Keiller’s Robinson films, and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil documentary. Planning a film collage of the sort I’ve made is about choosing a visual language that sits with the audio language. Seeing how these elements work together, figuring out what to say, show and evoke and how to do this is the focus of the practice.

Looking at film editing as a way of conveying meaning, Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent classic Man with a Movie Camera carries the message of its content in its presentation, and we absorb the stylisation of the filming and editing in harmony with the content. The ideas that I’m interested in are not as certain or as confident as Vertov’s accelerating vision of a pulsating city, but this does not mean that there is not a way of editing to follow less definite ideas.

In Daniel Reeves’ film, Obsessive Becoming, the fluid, soft-cut style conveys the feeling of his exploration of personal, often traumatic history, memory and mythology, as well as acting as a metaphor for his Buddhist approach to reconciling these ideas. The film also reflects our human need to make sense of ourselves after the fact of living. Once events have occurred, we apply a narrative mesh, and bring them into our world view. Where this cannot be done, the irreconcilable ideas remain and transform, perhaps into neuroses. ‘Irreconcilable ideas’ demand navigation, often in the form of a personal story. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes that Freud discovered that after ‘the old-fashioned solutions of childhood come the repetitions of adulthood’. There is an idea of neuroses being worked or worried into shape, then explained, preserved and maintained by stories.

I remember a block of concrete that used to lie in the garden, with marbles set in it, something my dad did when he was about ten to claim ownership of them. The inflexibility of those preserved marbles awkwardly arranged in weathered concrete is three or four stages removed from the textual metaphor, and about ten from the actual neurological processes, but it seems to fit.

I just need to find the block. I have a feeling I might have smashed it 20 years ago in an attempt to liberate the marbles. Now we’re talking.

Film shots can be pre-planned or emerge from close looking and experimentation on location, and seeing what works. The latter is how I have preferred to work, but when a specific set piece occurs, then I storyboard it, like any narrative film.

2

3

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 39

4

40 | ART

In this print, made for a publication on still life, I looked at words as objects in a physical space. The words are by Seamus Heaney and relate to signs and the idea of something being a symbol for something else, in this case, a turf-cutter’s kettle rig.

The idea of words physically standing in for the thing they describe was interesting to me, as was transposing them out of the linguistic peat bog, to a visual location.

The TT Shape of the sticks reminded me of Thomas Tresham, a Tudor Catholic who specialized in depicting his religion in idiosyncratic codified iconography in the various buildings he designed, such as his triangular lodge in Northampton.

Stories have an interesting relationship with belief, from bedtime to sermon.

On a daily basis, though, we forget our own past beliefs with incredible ease; belief is belief in what works at the time it is needed to work. Who knew conviction could be so unconvincing, until you actually think back to how certain you were when you really were sure of something you have since revised.

Beliefs can be seen lightly as something to be moved through, rather than followed. The suspension of disbelief, which is therefore a form of belief, is experienced on a visit to the theatre. Plays allow us to acknowledge the possibility of being an agent or player in the world, rather than a fixed entity.

Simon McBurney and Complicite’s show The Encounter at the Edinburgh International Festival explored the possibilities of narrative, using headphones to put other people’s voices inside the heads of the audience. This creates a feeling of intimacy and implicates an audience more fully in the action. Stories occur in time, whether the eye is moving around a still image, or the body is moving around a sculpture. McBurney’s play investigates some of these ideas and does so in a way that, like Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, embodies its message.

I remember someone saying about Robin Hood that he used to be an ephemeral natural figure in the old rhymes, rootless and re-appropriable. He didn’t become a gentleman until he needed a context for dramatic performance. This can be related to the formation of an identity in the case of the marbles, fixed in time and concrete context.

We are often without context, moving through thought or physical action. Abstraction can be a form of disembodiment, just like the sensation of looking from a great height. In a sense, a voyage through some of these ideas and voices is disembodying. Losing yourself can be a by-product of following a line of mind-occupying thought. It is called ‘cognitive overload’ and is the reason why people stop talking on the approach to roundabouts.

The effect of showing many images and sounds could also induce this.

6

Thinking about the presentation of film work, Another Fiction worked best at degree show in a blacked-out room. This added to the intimacy of the voices, but also had the effect of distorting the size of the room and exaggerating the space between the viewer and the screens. Physical space can also work as a space to think, and further allow ideas to emerge. Seeing James Turrell’s Skyspace structure at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, I considered it in relation to cinema; by optically focusing on the sky, the room became blurred and somehow we moved into that sky environment, in the same way we move into the film in the dark theatre.

It reminded me of entering a train tunnel, looking out of the back window and feeling the pull of the receding outside as a physical as well as emotional sensation.

In Ross Birrell and David Harding’s Where Language Ends show at the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh, the light of the gallery space was controlled with translucent coloured plastic over the windows. This changing of the light environment can complement the content of the work, and also make a show more memorable by encouraging a physiological response to the physical environmental change.

Perhaps I could take one of those marbles and sit it in a spotlight, replace the bulb with a ball of forest-green glass, for Sherwood.

These are the ideas and the ways of looking that reflect my development on the film so far. I hope it can be realised to carry some of them in a way that works and makes people think.

Edward Humphrey’s new film, made with the support of the Fleming-Wyfold Bursary, will be exhibited in 2016

1 Edward Humphrey, White Moss, 2015 Photograph 2 Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929 3 Edward Humphrey, Text work , 2014. Digital Print 4 Edward Humphrey, Spells TT in the Hillhead Moss

5

5 Edward Humphrey, Distant Ship, 2015 Photograph 6 James Turrell, Skyspace 7 ‘Another Fiction’ 2015 Video installation.

Digital film projection, and canvas screen

7

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 41

JOSEPH CRAWHALL James Knox

An exhibition in February 2016 at the Fleming Collection in London offers a rare opportunity to see the finest works by one of Scotland’s most dazzling artists, Joseph Crawhall, lent from the Burrell Collection’s unsurpassed holdings.

When that most discriminating of collectors, Sir William Burrell, was offered a work by Degas, he would, according to Studio magazine in 1922, dither for days for or against: ‘But if you offered him a Crawhall,’ it reported, ‘he would succumb at once.’ Neither did price come into it. So fierce was competition among Scottish collectors in the 1920s that Crawhall watercolours fetched significantly more than Degas pastels. Eventually, Burrell’s obsession and deep pockets outgunned his rival Glaswegian plutocrats to the extent that by the end of his life he had amassed over 140 of the approximate 400 extant works by the artist.

Thanks to the vast holdings in the Burrell Collection, the works of Joseph Crawhall (1861–1913), which epitomise all that was most daring and accomplished about the group known as the Glasgow Boys, have long been an object of fascination in Scotland. However, down south it has been a different matter; this store of beauty has only been glimpsed once in London since the war with a loan exhibition staged in 1990 at the Fine Art Society.

Public collections in London offer scant compensation: the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum and Tate Britain have only one first-rate example between them - Tate Britain’s watercolour on silk, The Dove (1985).

Crawhall’s reputation was not always so occluded, to use a dandy word from the 1890s, which was his period par excellence.

By then, he was exhibiting in London alongside Edouard Manet (1832–1883), Edgar Degas (1834–1917) and James Abbott McNeilWhistler (1834–1903). Whistler declared of his work as a watercolourist: ‘I believe Crawhall to have been the truest artist of the Glasgow men, and, as far as I know, the best in England.’

Who was this blazing star in the artistic firmament – and 42 | ART

ferment - at the dawn of the twentieth century? Joseph Crawhall was born in 1861 in Morpeth, Northumberland into a cultivated family, which rated the importance of artistic endeavour. His father, cushioned by a small fortune derived from Newcastle’s rope works, was an author, antiquary and published cartoonist in the humorous magazine, ‘Punch’, who mixed in artistic circles in London – his great friend being the celebrated illustrator, Charles Keene (1823–1891). Under their approving eyes, the young Joseph, who was schooled in Yorkshire and London, developed into an accomplished draughtsman (with an amusing line in caricature) and by the age of eighteen was exhibiting in public exhibitions in Newcastle.

At this point, his destiny as an artist became fixed with the arrival into the family circle of the young Glaswegian painter, Edward Arthur Walton (1860–1922), whose brother was courting Joseph’s sister. With Walton along came another young Glaswegian, James Guthrie (1859–1930) and the three tyros struck up an intense working friendship on painting expeditions to picturesque spots long favoured by artists on the Firth of Clyde and in the Trossachs. Here they took their first steps to becoming modern artists by experimenting with a subdued palette and eschewing incident in subject matter in favour of scenes from contemporary rural life. Hovering in the wings was the radical French realist painter, Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884), whose paintings on show in London in 1883 had a profound impact on the youthful trio. That summer was spent in Crowlands in Lincolnshire where they painted farm workers and labourers in the unremitting flatness of the fens executed in the square brush strokes of Bastien-Lepage.

1

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 43

5 1 Joseph Crawhall, The Aviary, 1888.

The Burrell Collection © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

2

2 Joseph Crawhall, The Black Cock, c.1894.

The Burrell Collection © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection 3 Joseph Crawhall, The Race, c.1890.

The Burrell Collection © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection 3

4 Joseph Crawhall, The Greyhound, c.1884.

The Burrell Collection © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection 5 Joseph Crawhall, The Flower Shop, c.1894-1900. The Burrell Collection © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection 6 Joseph Crawhall, Goats on a Hill Side, Tangier 1887, The Burrell Collection © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection 6

4

Another qualifying influence was also in play. Crawhall had seen his first Japanese print in 1882, which as fellow Glasgow Boy, John Lavery (1856–1941), reported had had enormous impact: ‘he stood before it a long time in silence’ he wrote ‘and then with great enthusiasm wished to buy it.’ Crawhall’s Lincolnshire landscapes characterised by high horizons, so conducive to a flattened picture plane and the geometry of pattern, as practised by the Japanese print makers, was to become a key quality of his mature work in watercolour.

Having earned his credentials as one of the protagonists of the cutting edge Glaswegian school, Crawhall increasingly turned to watercolour to achieve his unique vision of “rustic naturalism” which, to quote, scholar, Roger Billcliffe “was at the core of the Glasgow Boy’s achievement.” To do so, Crawhall adopted extreme measures such as scratching the painted surface to expose patches of white or as artist, Archibald Standish Hartrick (1864–1950), observed: ‘putting the drawing under the tap…till it came to the state he sought for; then, laying it flat, he 44 | ART

would finish it with few bold touches of sharp drawing or strong colour which brought out the character and life to perfection.’

The ‘character and life’ that Hartrick mentions was no longer of people and animals as one in a landscape, but focussed on the animal kingdom, up close and personal, as illustrated in his study, The Greyhound (fig.4) Crawhall’s Northumbrian roots had sown the seeds of his passion for animals as well as an enthusiasm for traditional country pursuits not to mention zoos, aviaries and circuses. Whistler described Crawhall as ‘going about with straw in his teeth’ and on his annual winter visits to Tangier, he rode as whipper-in to the Tangier foxhounds ‘kitted out’ wrote his friend Robert Cunninghame Graham, (1852–1936) ‘in a faded red coat, cord breeches and cracked, ill-cleaned boots’.

But as the writer observed, his down at heel appearance only added to Crawhall’s charisma highlighted by ‘his hands wellshaped and delicate, his sleek dark head, and deep brown almost chocolate eyes, eyes that impelled you to follow them.’ Despite his magnestism, Crawhall’s personal life remains a mystery: he

never married nor had any known lovers. His emotional life was expressed in his ‘love and awe of the natural world’ wrote Billcliffe.

His paintings are his attempt to make something as beautiful as his subject matter.’

Crawhall’s personality and art reflect the zeitgeist of the 1890s. An American critic, seeing his work on tour in St Louis in 1895 declared him to be one ‘of the most remarkable men of the [Glasgow] school [who] paints birds and animals…in a manner that justly has been described as epigrammatic.’ Indeed, his finest watercolours, which by the 1890s are characterised by a formal purity and a stillness, compare to the brilliant wordplay of Oscar Wilde (whom his father knew) as well as the swagger painters of the belle époque, such as his friends, William Nicholson (1872–1949), James Pryde (1866–1941) and William Rothenstein (1872–1945), – and it is in this light that his paintings should be viewed.

When Joseph Crawhall died in 1913, aged 52, his lifelong friend and fellow Glasgow Boy, James Guthrie, wrote that he had ‘…always been a consummate artist, the perfection of the means for the end he had in view, the fineness of his instinct for form, colour and design…these things will always give him a unique place.’ And this is why the pick of Burrell’s Crawhalls on show in London will come as a revelation to those new to his work.

James Knox is the Director of the Fleming Collection Joseph Crawhall at the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation 4 February – 12 March 2016 The Fleming Collection 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU T: (0)20 7042 5730 | flemingcollection.com Open: Tuesday to Saturday 10am – 5pm

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 45

Rachael Cloughton

RECENT ACQUISITIONS 46 | ART

Scottish Art News highlights some of the latest acquisitions to permanent collections across Scotland.

1

2a

2b

3 A Classical Landscape with Judah and The National Museum of Scotland has Tamar by Pierre Patel (1605–76) has also been secured five rare ivories by 17th century French artist acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland.

David Le Marchand (1674–1726), one of the most The work has been in a Scottish private collection prominent ivory carvers and portraitists of his day. The since the mid 19th century and has been shown set comprises of four medallions and a miniature bust. in public on only one previous occasion. This One of the medallions depicts Sir James Mackenzie outstanding landscape has now been allocated to of Royston and is dated 1696, the year Le Marchand the gallery through the government’s Acceptance arrived in Scotland, suggesting that the ivories are in Lieu (AIL) scheme. likely to be the very first he carved in the UK after fleeing France following the revocation of the Edict of Mother and Child by Norah Neilson Gray Nantes, which saw the ensuing persecution of French 4 (1882–1931) will be the very first of Gray’s works to Protestants. Still in his early twenties, Le Marchand enter the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s settled in Edinburgh and was given a licence to practise (SNGMA) collection. Celebrated during her lifetime the art of ivory cutting on the condition that he trained for her portraiture, Gray completed this piece in Scottish apprentices in the craft. The ivories will go the early 1920s. Depicting a mother and child in a on display in one of the ten new galleries opening in tender embrace, Gray’s treatment of this traditional summer 2016 at the National Museum of Scotland. subject is radical: a palette limited to shades of grey 2 Nine photographs of South Uist by the and burnished gold is combined with a flattening of influential American photographer Paul Strand (1890– volume and graphic outlining of form, which together 1976) have been acquired by the Scottish National create an unexpectedly dramatic effect that verges Portrait Gallery (SNPG). Strand was inspired to visit on the abstract. This distinctive oil painting is an the island off the west coast of Scotland following a important example of her work and a highlight of radio programme about the Gaelic songs of South Uist. the SNGMA’s current exhibition ‘Modern Scottish The SNPG has also acquired a self-portrait Women’ (see p.13). by one of the principal Scottish Colourists, FCB Cadell (1883–1937). Self-Portrait is the first work by Cadell to enter the SNPG’s collection and will be exhibited alongside portraits of fellow Colourists, including SJ Peploe (1871–1935) and JD Fergusson (1874–1961).

(Read more p.52 ).

1

5

6

Lorenzo Bartolini’s The Campbell Sisters Dancing a Waltz (c.1821) has been acquired jointly by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS), where it will be on display until 2020. Bartolini (1777–1850) was trained in Florence and Paris and became one of the leading European sculptors of his day. Showing two women in graceful movement, The Campbell Sisters Dancing a Waltz is unusual in being a full-length, life-size group by an artist primarily known for his portrait busts.

The University of Edinburgh Library and University Collections have acquired Timepieces (Solar System) (2014), an installation of nine clocks that tell the time on the eight planets in our solar system and the Earth’s moon, created by Scottish artist and Edinburgh College of Art graduate Katie Paterson (b.1981). Each clock reflects the varying length of days from planet to planet, from the shortest on Jupiter to the longest on Mercury, and each is an astonishingly complex work, accurate to within 5 decimal points. To realise the installation, Paterson worked closely with Professor Ian Robson, recently retired Director of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Alan Midleton of the British Horological Institute and Dr Steve Fossey, University of London Observatory, UCL.

3

4

5

6

Scottish Art News | REGULARS | 47

7

8a

7

Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work From About 1992 Until Now (1992 onwards) by Douglas Gordon (b.1966) has been acquired by the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (GoMA). This encyclopaedic collection brings together 82 film and video works by Gordon, including 24 Hour Psycho (1993) in which the artist famously slowed down Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which led to his Turner Prize nomination and subsequent win. The collection will continue to grow as his new pieces are added to it.

8

Two gouache panels, Buy a Fine Singing Bird and White Onyons from the ‘Cries of London’ series by Alison McKenzie (1907–82) have entered St Andrews Preservation Trust Museum’s collection. The acquisition is part of the organisation’s wider strategy to develop the local art collection, particularly the work of the McKenzie sisters, Winifred and Alison.

The McKenzies arrived in St Andrews during World War II to escape the London Blitz and made it their permanent home. They put their artistic talents to use running wartime wood engraving classes for the allied forces stationed in St Andrews, exhibiting the work made by soldiers at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh in 1944. The panels join the sisters’ archive: two paintings by Winifred (one of poppies, the other of roses) and a British Rail poster painted

by Alison in 1954.

8b

9

The BAFTA-winning film director Bill Forsyth and his partner Moira Wylie have donated Fake Ophelia (1991), a large collage on canvas, formed of paint, textiles, string, wallpaper and paper, by the late Steven Campbell (1953–2007) to Glasgow School of Art (GSA). The work was made by Campbell to form part of ‘Pinocchio’s Present’, an exhibition staged at the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh in 1993.

The work was made at a particularly challenging period in the artist’s life just after he had lost his brother and was being sued for breach of contract by his former New York dealers. In an interview in 1993 with the former art critic of The Glasgow Herald, Clare Henry, whose papers are held in the GSA Archives & Collections, the painter said: ‘“The misery was incredible.” Sticking string till his fingers bled was therapy, “I didn’t have to think about anything.”

Campbell’s kitchen range bears witness to these months. Two multi-coloured metal rods over the Aga are forever stained by the string that he boiled up in pans of dye and hung over to dry. These threads, diligently aligned, create the flesh-toned torsos of Fake Ophelia.’

9

48 | ART

Scottish Art News | REGULARS | 49

10a

10

11

50 | ART

10b

The McManus, Dundee’s art gallery and museum, has acquired two photographs by Ron O’Donnell (b.1952): No Articles Beyond This Point (2000) from the ‘Day of the Dead’ series and Referendum (2014). The former shows the moments before the subject (a papier-mâché skeleton) returns underground, taking one last look at his treasured photographs, memorials to his time on earth. In contrast, Referendum is a digitally constructed work that takes as its source the iconic image of French nationhood Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). The painting was considered an incendiary work when first exhibited in 1831, and O’Donnell’s adoption and reworking of the image is done in full knowledge of its power as a statement of nationalism. O’Donnell’s subversive humour is evident – he poses as every figure, brandishing a series of ineffectual plastic weapons and even crossing the barricade as Liberty herself.

A significant new addition to the contemporary art collection held at Kirkcaldy Galleries, Fife, is Salt Corrosion (2014) by Toby Paterson (b.1974). The work is a relief created in acrylic on aluminium, set against a vivid blue panel. It was first shown at the galleries in 2014 in a touring exhibition of Paterson’s work, curated

by Fife Contemporary Art & Craft, as part of the GENERATION project. The piece draws its

11

inspiration from the forms, textures and surfaces of the precast concrete construction of the large car park on Kirkcaldy’s esplanade. The strong local resonance of the work helped attract funds from the Friends of Kirkcaldy Galleries to assist Fife Cultural Trust with the purchase. The trust also received a grant from the National Fund for Acquisitions.

12

The Scottish Maritime Museum in Irvine, Ayrshire, has unveiled three new artworks: Figure of a Shipbuilder (c.1949), a sculpture in ciment fondu by Benno Schotz (1891–1984), The Clyde Coast (c.1956), an historic travel poster printed by British Railways to promote the Clyde Coast railway and steamer connection services, and Propping Through Riverside (2011) created by architect Ann Nisbet and artist Patricia Cain for the ‘Drawing (on) Riverside’ exhibition held at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, in 2011. The works are the first to be purchased in a new strategic, three-year acquisitions’ programme, SMMart: Enriching the Imagery of Scotland’s Maritime Heritage, which has been made possible by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Collecting Cultures programme.

13

12

The Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney, has acquired a highly significant piece by Barbara Hepworth (1903–75): Two Forms (Orkney) (1967).

Hepworth and Margaret Gardiner (1904–2005), the founder of the Pier Arts Centre, met in London in the 1930s and became close friends and confidantes.

Gardiner became one of Hepworth’s key early patrons, supporting the artist in times of need through friendship and the purchase of work in the 1930s and 1940s. Two Forms (Orkney) is now on permanent display alongside other important works by Hepworth and pieces by pioneering Russian artist Naum Gabo (1890–1977) and British Modernist Ben Nicholson (1894–1982).

13

1 David Le Marchand, medallion depicting John Mackenzie, 2nd Earl of Cromartie (1656-1731) © National Museums Scotland 2a Paul Strand , Mrs. Archie MacDonald, South Uist, Hebrides, 1954.

Scottish National Portrait Gallery © Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Purchased with support from the Art Fund 2b FCB Cadell, Self-portrait, c.1914.

Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Purchased in 2015 with the assistance of the Art Fund and the Patrons of the National Galleries of Scotland 3 Pierre Patel, A Classical Landscape with Judah and Tamar 4 Norah Neilson Gray, Mother and Child, 1920s.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Purchased with funds from the Cecil and Mary Gibson Bequest 2015 5 Lorenzo Bartolini, The Campbell Sisters Dancing a Waltz, c.1821.

Image courtesy of Sotheby’s. Purchased jointly by the National Galleries of Scotland and the Victoria and Albert Museum, with the aid of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, and a donation in memory of A. V. B. Norman, 2015 6 Katie Paterson, Timepieces (Solar System), 2014.

Edinburgh, The University of Edinburgh Library and University Collections.

Image courtesy of the artist and Ingleby Gallery. Purchased with support from the National Fund for Acquisitions

7 Douglas Gordon, Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now.

Courtesy of Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums) and Studio lost but found, Berlin. Installation view Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, 2014. Photography by Aland McAteer. Purchased with support from the Art Fund 8a, 8b Alison McKenzie, Buy a Fine Singing Bird and White Onyons. Two gouache panels from the ‘Cries of London’ series. St Andrews Preservation Trust Museum. Purchased with support from the National Fund for Acquisitions 9 Steven Campbell, Fake Ophelia, 1991.

Image courtesy of Glasgow School of Art. Donation by Bill Forsyth and Moira Wylie 10a, 10b Ron O’Donnell, No Articles Beyond This Point, 2000, from the ‘Day of the Dead’ series and Referendum, 2014. Image courtesy of Leisure and Culture Dundee. Purchased with support from the National Fund for Acquisitions 11 Toby Paterson, Salt Corrosion, 2014.

Image courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow. Photographer: Chris Park.

Purchased with support from the National Fund for Acquisitions 12 Benno Schotz, Figure of a Shipbuilder (c.1949).

Courtesy of the Scottish Maritime Museum.

13 Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), Carved slate sculpture, Two Forms (Orkney), 1967, © Pier Arts Centre, Stromness

Scottish Art News | REGULARS | 51

Tim Cornwell

ART MARKET

Tim Cornwell with the latest from the Scottish art market, including the Scottish women artists making an impact, Vettriano’s auction at Bonhams and the highlights of Sotheby’s Scottish Sale.

This November, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA), Edinburgh, unveils what promises to be a milestone show: ‘Modern Scottish Women, 1885–1965’. Surveying artists from Phoebe Anna Traquair to Anne Redpath, it will track the ‘ebb and flow of opportunities for Scottish women artists to train and practise’.

As ever, big public exhibitions enhance artists’ reputations and exposure, and drive trends on the commercial side of the art world. So, the private Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh will stage its own November show, ‘Four Women Artists’, to include the work of Elizabeth Blackadder (b.1931), Victoria Crowe (b.1945), Alison McGill (b.1974) and Emily Sutton (b.1983). Director Guy Peploe says he will be watching to see what broader impact the SNGMA’s show will have on the market with regard to featured painters and sculptors and other women artists.

In an August show entitled simply ‘In Context’, the Scottish Gallery featured 20 works by Joan Eardley (1921–63) and associated artists. A delightful picture of Martin Macaulay, the son of the gallery’s senior partner, billed as Eardley’s only formal portrait, rightly sold before the show opened for £17,500.

How do gender roles, historic or contemporary, play out in the market? Walk into any Scottish auction room selling traditional offerings and the works on the

52 | ART

walls will be dominated by male artists, such as the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists. Yet, among the most significant and popular later 20th or early 21st century Scottish painters the names Redpath, Blackadder, Eardley and, latterly, Alison Watt (b.1965) spring to mind.

One of the highest prices ever paid for a Scottish painting was the then-record £744,800 in 2004 for The Singing Butler (1992), by Jack Vettriano (b.1951), in whose work women typically appear as sultry sex objects. In 2008, however, The White Rose and the Red Rose (1902), by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (1864–1933), became, at £1.7 million, the most expensive Scottish artwork ever sold at auction.

On the private gallery scene, one Scottish woman artist labelled a ‘talent to watch’ this summer was Audrey Grant. Her summer show at Edinburgh’s Union Gallery, displayed her evocative, lonely, abstracted female figures and was a complete sell-out.

Born in 1964, Grant studied at the Leith School of Art, Edinburgh, in the 2000s as a mature student. Her reputation and sales have been building steadily in recent years, although her prices are still modest – under £2,000 for smaller pieces, including ballet urchins with echoes of Eardley or Degas. She went on to another show at Panter and Hall in Pall Mall in September, where sales were also strong.

2

3

1

The Union Gallery, meanwhile, is promising to expand after six years in Broughton Street, to a newer and bigger space.

On the other side of the country in Glasgow, Jill Gerber at the Compass Gallery flags up the work of another newly graduated mature student, Anna Geerdes. Born in 1960 in the Netherlands, Geerdes moved to Orkney in 1991, where she remained for 15 years before studying at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Her show ‘As Far as the Eye Can See’ in March sold ten works, including the largest, Arcadia Revisited.

The story circulating at the Edinburgh Art Festival this summer was that Helen Bellany – who is writing an autobiography of her tumultuous life with the late and much-loved John Bellany (1942–2013) – deliberately put ambitious prices on his works in the Open Eye Gallery in the hope or expectation that they would not sell. But, ‘The Capercaillie’s Song’, the summer exhibition that she curated, drawing on the family collection, not only won warm praise from the critics but also strong interest from collectors. Red dots went on museum-quality earlier works like Celtic Sacrifice (1972), the top-priced piece at £100,000, as well as on some of the highly desirable early drawings, whose stickers went as high as £24,000.

Two years after Bellany’s death, the show seems to have cemented the affection – with the public and the marketplace – for an artist whose talents were sometimes obscured by his rollercoaster life and a an huge outpouring of later more generic work.

More broadly, a certain jauntiness seemed to return to the Scottish art market this year, with familiar names bobbing up like old friends. Auction results for Vettriano, an artist the critics generally love to hate, have see-sawed along with his reputation.

In April, Bonhams’ auctioneers, from their Edinburgh offices on George Street, sold seven out of 12 works by Vettriano in their Scottish sale for a total of £840,000.

It was billed as the most significant collection of his work to come up in a decade. Waltzers (1992) sold for £236,500, against an estimate of £200,000–300,000, while The Road to Nowhere (1997) sold for £218,500 (estimated £150,000–250,000).

Bonhams sold two pictures by FCB Cadell (1883–1937) in that same Scottish sale: The Blue Jug (c.1922) for £194,500 and Venice (after 1910) for £158,500. Meanwhile, a self-portrait by Cadell, the Colourist and famous Edinburgh bon vivant, for all his death in penury, was among the most significant purchases by the National Galleries of Scotland this year, helped by an Art Fund grant of £100,000.

Scottish Art News | REGULARS | 53

‘Other highlights at the Sotheby’s sale are SJ Peploe’s Pink Roses, estimated at £350,000–450,000, and photographer David Eustace’s Four Steel Workers (Brazil, 2011), one of an edition of ten’ Two major works by Cadell will also be on offer at Sotheby’s, London, when it returns to dedicated Scottish art sales in November. They are Florian’s Café (after 1910), with a £400,000–600,000 estimate – Cadell’s one and only trip to Venice in 1910 was the making of his career – and The Cheval Glass, from his ‘Reflections’ series (1913–15), at £250,000– 300,000. Other highlights at the Sotheby’s sale are SJ Peploe’s Pink Roses, estimated at £350,000– 450,000, and photographer David Eustace’s Four Steel Workers (Brazil, 2011), one of an edition of ten. The impending sale will include 90 works priced from a modest £2000–3000, and its impact on competitors will be a talking point in November.

In the meantime, Christie’s, London, has pushed ahead with selling Scottish work in the context of British and Irish art sales: in June it sold Melon and Pears by Peploe (1871–1935) for £170,500, under estimate of £200,000–300,000, and Still Life with Roses and Fruit by GL Hunter (1877–1931) for £188,500, estimated at £150,000–250,000.

One more unusual Scottish highlight at Christie’s was Sir William Russell Flint’s A Gift of Gladioli: Cecilia (1965), which realised £56,250 in June, twice its low estimate. Like Vettriano, Flint (1880–1969) relied closely on his use of models, in more or less sultry poses, adding a touch of genteel spice to otherwise dull auction days. Cecilia Green, whom he met when he was 72, became a favourite for the following 15 years, and was painted in poses from gypsy to nun.

Lyon & Turnbull, meanwhile, has pursued busy and varied sales, from Asian art to auctions marking the Waterloo bicentenary and the 300th anniversary of the 1715 Jacobite uprising, where a portrait miniature of Prince Charles Edward Stuart made £8750 and a pair of portraits of Charles Edward 54 | ART

Stuart and his brother Henry made £42,500. The auction house also hosted such varied events as a fundraising auction for the edgy Hidden Door arts festival in Edinburgh (with sadly underwhelming sales) and the hugely successful Elements, a selling fair for leading Scottish jewellery makers.

Aside from the Cadell self-portrait, the National Galleries of Scotland’s recent acquisitions have ranged from nine vintage portraits of lives and land in South Uist, Hebrides, by American photographer Paul Strand (1890–1976) to the sculpture The Campbell Sisters Dancing a Waltz (c.1821) by Lorenzo Bartolini (1777–1850), which was bought jointly with the Victoria and Albert Museum and with Art Fund and other support for £523,800.

Market prices for John Byrne (b.1940), grand older man of both Scottish art and letters, reflect his continued popularity. The Fine Art Society, Edinburgh, after strong sales in its summer survey of Scottish art, was recently offering a lovely but modestly sized early ‘Patrick’ work, Girl with Poppies (1972), for £6500.

In Glasgow, two selling shows received a good deal of attention in September. The Compass Gallery’s excellent exhibition of Adrian Wiszniewski (b.1958) featured some particularly fine smaller paintings in gesso, ranging in price from £2000 to Road to Recovery (2012) for £5000. The Glasgow Print Studio, meanwhile, was showing quite exceptional etchings and pricier monotypes by Ken Currie (b.1960), from charming Scottish highland and fishing scenes to much darker portraits, including one of murdered revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.

4 5

6

1 Audrey Grant, All things want to fly, “Alles will schweben” from Sonnet II, 14, The Sonnets to Orpheus 2 Audrey Grant, The world is large, but in us it is as deep as the sea “Le monde est grand, mai en nous il est profound comme la mer” 3 John Bellany, Fisherman II, 1964, ballpoint drawing

4 Anna Geerdes, Arcadia Revisited, Oil on paper on canvas 5 Anna Geerdes, Weatherstation, 6 Sir William Russell Flint, R.A., P.R.W.S., R.S.W. (1880-1969), A Gift of Gladioli: Cecilia 7 Samuel John Peploe, R.S.A. (1871-1935), Melon and Pears

Tim Cornwell is an arts journalist working from Edinburgh and Istanbul 7

Scottish Art News | REGULARS | 55

Laura Simpson

PRIVATE VIEW 56 | ART

1 William Littlejohn, Untitled, 1970 photo by Pheobe Hill

2

2 William Littlejohn, Untitled, 1972 3 William Littlejohn, Still Life on a Plinth.

All images courtesy of Hospitalfield Arts

1

A look at the William Littlejohn paintings held in Hospitalfield Art’s Collection.

Hospitalfield’s collection of 237 oil paintings are mostly from the 19th century, painted, collected and commissioned by Patrick Allan-Fraser and his wife Elizabeth Allan-Fraser, who developed the house from their marriage in 1843 until their deaths in the late 1800s. Walking around Hospitalfield House, visitors experience an excellent Victorian, early Arts and Crafts interior that perfectly reflects the era of the paintings and feels very complete.

However, there is another story just under the surface, one of continued artistic practice through the 20th and into the 21st century as Hospitalfield House functions as a place for living artists. An art school was formed in 1901 through the direction of Patrick Allan-Fraser’s will, a year-long postgraduate programme and a well recounted summer semester started in the middle of the 1900s and, in the later part of that century, art-school study trips began to visit. The activity of the 20th century is not clearly in evidence within the public rooms. It surfaces in the bedrooms and refectory, where the current artists in residence eat, talk and test out their ideas.

One 20th century display is of William Littlejohn’s early paintings. At first viewing almost unrecognisable from his late style, these works are bold, colourful and graphic oil paintings. This study group has been built over the last two years, as two pieces already within Hospitalfield’s collection were joined by another early, untitled work (c.1970).

In 2006, Littlejohn (1929–2006) left the contents of his studio including his library, sketchbooks, studio objects and some 300 paintings, to the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA). The contents of the studio and library, along with around 50 works spanning the artist’s career became part of the RSA’s collections. The academy then devised a gift programme, whereby (predominantly) Scottish collections connected to Littlejohn’s life story were researched for their holdings of his works and, where any gaps were noted, gifts were offered to enable a broader understanding of the life of this important Scottish artist and lecturer. Hospitalfield selected the untitled work as part of the gift programme.

Littlejohn was born and lived in Arbroath for most of his life, teaching at Arbroath High School early in his career and keeping it as his base when he later taught at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, as Head of Fine Art. Studying the collection of his early paintings at Hospitalfield prompted conversations that revealed another layer of his influence in the town. Painter Richard Hunter (1935–2014) attended Hospitalfield Art College in the 1950s, during which time Littlejohn had been an accessible and influential figure for the students. Hunter recounted that he had built up a friendship with Littlejohn, which had led to an exciting trip hitchhiking to Italy.

The work gifted by the RSA is astounding. It is a two-part stretched canvas with a scintillating pink

corner. This truly abstract painting references some shapes and gestures from previous and future works, which break into representation: a V arrow, a dark square. The freshness of the colours, the vibration of their contrast is one of the strengths of the piece.

Another is the subtlety in the application of the paint; Littlejohn has incorporated smooth and sharp-edge forms alongside rougher brushstrokes and also flicks of paint, which all give energy and visual depth to the composition.

The work, situated in the social space of the current artists in residence, is a frequent inspiration for discussion and new work, an appropriate legacy of Littlejohn’s commitment to art education.

Laura Simpson is Programme Manager at Hospitalfield, Arbroath To visit Hospitalfield, please take a look at the event programme, which includes tours and open weekends Hospitalfield House, Arbroath, Angus, Scotland, DD11 2NH T: (0)1241 656 124 hospitalfield.org.uk

3

Scottish Art News | PRIVATE VIEW | 57

Bobby Niven and Niall Macdonald PREVIEWS

Grace Ndiritu – A Return To Normalcy: Birth of a New Museum

Sophie Morrish

Neil Cooper

1 Installation view and detail of Untitled Fragments in Acid Green, (2015) Niall Macdonald

1/2 Grace Ndiritu exhibition.

Photos by Alan Dimmick, courtesy of Glasgow School of Art

2 Installation view Proceedings of The Society, (2015) Bobby Niven

1/2

1/2

Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre, North Uist Until 7 November 2015

Glasgow School of Art (GSA) Until 12 December 2015

Archaeology and sculpture are most directly linked through their mutual exploration of the material world. One pursues meaning through the material remains of the past, the other utilises material reality to manifest cultural artefacts in the present. This relationship is made explicit in the concluding exhibitions of Atlas Arts’ two-year curatorial residency at Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre in North Uist.

Invited to respond to specific archaeological sites on the Hebridean islands of North Uist and Skye, artists Niall Macdonald and Bobby Niven have each created a body of work that signals a history of human engagement with place through object discovery.

In ‘Untitled Fragments in Acid Green’, Macdonald (a native of Uist himself, now living and working in Glasgow), takes historical evidence of manufacture at Udal, North Uist, as his starting point. More than 6000 years of continuous human occupation, from the mid-Neolithic to the early 1900s, is evident at this site. In the midden at Udal,

‘The things people think about Africa,’ says the down-to-earth and very Englishsounding voice of Grace Ndiritu in her video piece Raiders of the Lost Ark (2015) ‘and they never go to Africa. Fuckin’ Hell, man.’

Filmed on location at the Wusha Mikel Church in Ethiopia and the Samye Ling Tibetan Monastery in Scotland, Raiders of the Lost Ark’s prosaic observation sums up everything Ndiritu’s vast catalogue of film and video works, paintings, photographs and performances are about. Raised in the UK and with a Kenyan heritage, Ndiritu bridges the shadowland of cultural assimilation, appropriation and fetishisation of the exotic. A transformative visual poetry emerges that fuses shamanic ceremonial with trash-pop notions of ethno-delic glam chic and ancient-future ritual.

This is made most explicit in Holotropic Breathing for the Masses (2015), a film of what in September of this year Ndiritu styled as ‘an Afro-futuristic Performance’, in which she set herself up as a high priestess overseeing a form of

58 | ART

among the multitudinous shells, bones and pottery shards, Macdonald found and became intrigued by a misshapen lump of iron ore, evidence of smelting.

Back in his Glasgow studio, considering this archaeological detritus in relation to discarded fragments from his own creative process, hitherto superfluous waste took on the status of curious relics whose throwaway status spoke something of our contemporary attitude to the material world. Unified by the use in each of a cast ‘e-reader’, these twelve plaster relief sculptures invite contemplation of the status of objects in our lives today and what might be inferred from their future fragmentary remains.

Each object sits in the palm of a crudely carved, somewhat comical, wooden, hand-like shape and appears offered forward in a gesture of sharing.

Macdonald explained this derives from the presentation of finds by archaeologist Martin Wildgoose on their site visit to Rubh’ an Dunain. Within the context of the installation, this open hand can perhaps also be read as a metaphor for

the impulse of curiosity that underpins all archaeological and artistic inquiry.

Similarly evoking meaning through a combination of disparate elements, a fascinating and playful matrix of objects constitutes Bobby Niven’s installation, ‘Proceedings Of The Society’.

Natural, found and bronze-cast items work in concert to address the viewers’ imagination. Made in response to the extraordinary archaeological site of Rubh’ an Dunain, Glen Brittle, the Isle of Skye, these contemporary artefacts, biomorphic in appearance, straddle figuration and abstraction, raising questions through their intriguing appearance and odd juxtaposition.

Sophie Morrish is an artist based in North Uist Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre, Lochmaddy Isle North Uist Outer Hebrides, HS6 5AA T: (0)1870 603970 | taigh-chearsabhagh.org For opening hours, please see the website

rebirthing of GSA’s Mackintosh Building following the fire that destroyed part of this most iconic of buildings. The film is screened beside the set on which Ndiritu performed, with a circular yellow rug at its centre flanked by mock-ups of giant crystals and vividly coloured sculptural shapes. In this re-creation of Ndiritu’s temple-like construction, the film itself finds her banging a drum as she attempts to conjure up the Egyptian god Osiris.

Even more hypnotic is the singing-bowl-like drone composed and performed by Ndiritu that forms the soundtrack for Journey’s North: Pole to Pole (2009), a twin-screen video installation in which adaptations of Native Alaskan poems by Melody Jackson are beamed alongside images of a snowdriven landscape.

With the paintings that make up the series Workers: Post-Hippie PopAbstraction (2015) exploring New Age totems co-opted by fashion-victim cultural tourists, and the ongoing photo-based installation, AQFM VOL.6 GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART, an ever-expanding

archive of multicultural mash-ups, this is as much a personal spiritual quest as anthropological excavation.

‘Today I am more Native than yesterday’ are the first words on-screen in Journey’s North: Pole to Pole. ‘I see I am more Native than tomorrow’ are the last in a telling meditation on how identities can shape-shift depending on where you are at as much as where you are.

Neil Cooper is a writer and critic on theatre, music and art Reid Gallery, Reid Building, Glasgow School of Art (GSA), 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow, G3 6RQ T: (0)141 353 4500 | gsa.ac.uk For opening hours, please see the website

Scottish Art News | PREVIEWS | 59

South of No North Kathryn Lloyd

1 Alan Currall, How I would probably do it (2004), 4min, miniDV, photo by Alan Currall 2 Anthony Schrag, Lure of the Lost A Contemporary Pilgrimage (2015), A walk from Huntly to the Venice Biennale 100 days 2500 KM, photo by Stuart Armitt 3 Fred Daniels, Margaret Morris at the opening of her Cromwell Road school (1935) b&w photography © Fred Daniels Estate

1/2

Siobhan Davies Dance Studio, London Until 29 November 2015 Curated by Ben Harman, Director of photography centre Stills in Edinburgh, ‘South of No North’ is a group exhibition at London’s Siobhan Davies Dance Studio, which explores the use of the human body within performance-based artistic practice.

The works on display are staggered throughout the building – in the office spaces, studios, meeting rooms, landings and staircases – and culminate under the undulating roof on the top floor.

Contemporary works by Scotlandbased artists Ruth Barker, Alan Currall, Romany Dear and Anthony Schrag are exhibited alongside early 20th century photographs by Fred Daniels. Daniels’ images document the choreography of Margaret Morris, showcasing groups of women in engineered movement – often resembling that of synchronised swimmers – static on land. Exploring the relationship between the study of design and dance, the physical forms created are both elegant and robust, their strength and flexibility often stretching figures to the point of gender ambiguity.

60 | ART

Against the backdrop of these historic images, more recent works perforate the remaining space, their performative fluidity highlighting the static nature of the photographic document. The environment in which these works are housed, and their autonomy from wall or floor space, means that some are partially obscured, melting into the backdrop of everyday office life and dance classes.

On the first floor mezzanine, Alan Currall’s Head – a recorded monologue in which a male voice details the attributes of an ideal body – emanates from a pair of headphones. Currall’s musings on the perfect form meanders from limb to limb, detailing what constitutes ‘successful knees’ and carefully navigating the notion of perfect genitals by comparing them to the arrangement of fruit in a fruit bowl ‘as in a still life’.

Romany Dear and Ruth Barker both present text works that correspond to their respective choreographed performances. Barker’s Score for a work about the impossibility of describing

an action comprises a script, in three interlocking parts, which will form the basis for a new live performance.

Here, Barker’s practice subverts the performance/documentation relationship – the documentation precedes the performance itself, but still retains its evidential force (of something that has yet to happen).

This group of works is a fascinating exploration into the possibility of the document as an authentic experience of something that was once performed, spoken or danced. Harman’s subtlety as curator and the exhibition’s location amongst perpetual activity affords the show a dexterity of movement. Alongside the works on view, the rhythm of staff, visitors and classes becomes an integral part of the display: all is constant, all is performance.

Kathryn Lloyd is a critic and artist based in London

‘South of No North’ Siobhan Davies Studios 85 St George’s Road, London SE1 6ER T: +44 (0)20 7091 9650 siobhandavies.com

3

‘ This group of works is a fascinating exploration into the possibility of the document as an authentic experience of something that was once performed, spoken or danced’ Scottish Art News | PREVIEWS | 61

Turner Prize 2015 Chloe Reith

1 Nicole Wermers, Infrastrucktur (2015) 2 Bonnie Camplin, The Military Industrial Complex (2015) 3 Janice Kerbel, DOUG (2015) 4 Assemble, Granby Workshop (2015) All images courtesy of Glasgow Life

1/2

Tramway, Glasgow Until 17 January 2016 The recently itinerant Turner Prize comes to Scotland this year with a measurably slight and light-footed presentation.

Occupying the cavernous Tramway in Glasgow, this year’s nominees – three incongruent artists and, for the first time, an architect’s collective – have been separated out by a series of maze-like corridors, uncertain areas and white cubes in miniature.

The first of these, Nicole Wermers (b.1971), presents a cold, disinterested shoulder to the visitor in Infrastruktur.

Congregating in pairs and trios around the gallery are elegant chairs made of tubular steel in the unmistakable vernacular of Bauhaus design. Draped over their backs are sumptuous (and real) fur coats that mark private territories. This cool arrangement of finery, however, seems all too simplistic an observation of ownership, wealth and power to impact the way the artist intends, the configuration of luxury commodity and fashionable object feeling closer to Instagram than social critique.

In contrast, the high pomp and discomfiting opera DOUG by Janice 62 | ART

3

Kerbel (b.1969) positively invigorates the gallery with urgency and dark humour.

Comprising nine compositions variously performed by a sextet of classical vocalists, DOUG chronicles the fictional misadventures of Kerbel’s hapless and acutely accident-prone muse. Doug’s calamitous slips, trips and falls are communicated through suitably alarming shrieks, vocal blasts and rapidly cascading phrases that accumulate in one terrible mass. DOUG is a squeamish songbook of physical disasters – enjoying it, an exercise in schadenfreude.

Even from the vantage point of our post-Snowden age of accepted surveillance, very few of us find it possible to operate outside established social systems or conceive different registers of truth. Bonnie Camplin (b.1970), however, gravitates towards its farthest reaches, and this installation, The Military Industrial Complex, peels back the multifaceted façade of what the artist calls ‘consensus reality’. The gallery is starkly arranged like an evidence room with books and printouts that traverse the occult,

cosmology, warfare and capitalism all laid out for browsing and photocopying.

Centrally positioned video monitors offer extended testimonials from individual outliers who claim to have been supersoldiers, subject to government testing, mind control and secret experiments.

These well-rehearsed conspiracy theories, treated with distrust and dubiety by the mainstream, are proffered by Camplin as possible truths – and why not?

The final installation, Assemble’s Granby Workshop, is positioned within a cul-de-sac to the rear of the space. Here, an enclosed low-lit display space complete with pitched roof has been constructed to resemble a snug, welcoming tenement house decorated with Assemble’s extremely affordable and very desirable domestic products. This presentation demonstrates the collective’s ingenuity with found material and urban detritus; much of it waste cleared from derelict homes in Toxteth, Liverpool, the area and community Assemble is helping to reinvigorate.

This disparate group – perhaps more so than in previous years – does not make for the most cohesive presentation, but why should it? As always with the Turner Prize, the winner is anyone’s guess.

Chloe Reith is a writer and Curator of Exhibitions at Inverleith House, Edinburgh Tramway, 25 Albert Drive, Glasgow, G41 2PE T: (0)141 276 0950 | tramway.org For opening hours, please see the website

4

Scottish Art News | PREVIEWS | 63

Document Scotland and The Shock of Victory Marion Amblard

1 From the series ‘Unsullied And Untarnished’. Garry Ramsay, Right Hand Man, 2014, at Jethart Callant’s Festival, Jedburgh, Scotland, 8th July 2014.

Photograph © Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert 2 Alec Finlay, Better Tale to Tell, 2015 from ‘Shock of Victory’ courtesy of CCA

1/2

The Shock of Victory. Until 1 November 2015 Document Scotland: The Ties that Bind. Until 24 April 2016 These two exhibitions run across the first anniversary of Scotland’s historic independence referendum. Named after the essay by David Graeber, ‘The Shock of Victory’ at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow is inspired by the reactions to the referendum result and explores the meaning of ‘victory’ through artistic practices. The multifaceted programme includes an exhibition, film screenings, a forum, a symposium and a digital publication. The exhibition features international artists Antonis Pittas (b.1973), Oraib Toukan (b.1977) and Mairéad McClean (b.1966), who won the 2014 Mac International Art Prize, the largest art prize in Ireland, for her video installation No More, (2013), now on display at the CCA. The pieces by McClean and Toukan were produced in response to political events. In No More, McClean’s inspiration lies in the politics of Northern Ireland at the beginning of the 1970s and in her father, a civil rights activist in Northern Ireland who was arrested and imprisoned without trial. In her series 64 | ART

of photographs of buildings and urban landscapes in Palestine, Toukan focuses on the links that can be found between our way of seeing architecture and the evolution of the Palestinian political landscape.

The exhibition also showcases installations by Scottish artists Sarah Forrest and Virginia Hutchison, who have formed the collaborative project ‘In the Shadow of the Hand’. Their audio installation, entitled The Referendum Made Me Horny, focuses on what has changed one year after the referendum.

This piece is a new version of a work of the same title first produced in 2014 and consisting of recordings of some of the most frequently used words on social media three months before the referendum. For the 2015 version, they have added a new series of ten recordings in which the listener can hardly hear the distinction between words, creating a sense of chaos that suggests that a year after the referendum Scotland’s role and future within the United Kingdom still remains unclear.

Alec Finlay (b.1966) presents a new poem, A Better Tale to Tell, composed of extracts from the 14,000 emails and letters submitted in response to the Smith Commission on further devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament.

One room of the CCA is devoted to the display of books, flyers, reports and other items collected by the National Library of Scotland for its project ‘Collecting the Referendum’. Every week, essays dealing with political and cultural issues are published on the CCA’s website and are downloadable online for the duration of the exhibition.

In Edinburgh, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery is presenting a new photography exhibition entitled ‘Document Scotland: The Ties that Bind’.

Document Scotland is a photographic collective created in 2012 by Sophie Gerrard, Stephen McLaren, Colin McPherson and Jeremy SuttonHibbert, four world-renowned Scottish photographers. Their work has been inspired by the referendum and its aftermath. For this exhibition celebrating

contemporary Scotland and the Scots and exploring the notions of personal, local and national identity, each artist has created a group of works dealing with four different themes: land, legacy, engagement and tradition.

With her project Drawn to the Land, Gerrard offers a glimpse into the lives of six women farmers in different parts of Scotland. Her photographs show how these women are connected to the landscape, which has been one of the main visual symbols of national identity since the 19th century; with her work she explores another aspect of Scottish scenery, which contrasts with the traditional representation of Scotland as ‘the land of the mountain and the flood’ (Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1805). Her photographs illustrate the complex relationship between these women and the land in which they live and work; they also celebrate the beauty of Scottish scenery but show that farmers have to work even in extreme weather conditions.

Stephen McLaren’s series of photographs, entitled A Sweet Forgetting, reflects on Scotland’s role in the slave trade and in the sugar economy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jamaica. He also investigates what is left of the Scottish colonists’ legacy in contemporary Jamaica and Scotland. In Scotland, he has taken photographs of the mansions bought with the money earned from the slave trade, while during his visit to Jamaica, he photographed descendants of Scottish settlers, such as Andrew McLean Lynch, and places whose names have been influenced by famous Scottish towns.

Colin McPherson’s project When Saturday Comes reveals how football helps to create intergenerational bonds within local communities throughout Scotland. With his photographs of supporters, players and people in charge of running second-league or lower-league clubs, McPherson celebrates the sense of engagement and loyalty in these people

of all ages and from all backgrounds who, regardless of the weather, get together in the stands to support their favourite football team.

Unsullied and Untarnished by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert focuses on the Borders area and its traditional summer festivals, known as the Common Ridings.

His photographs include a series of portraits of proud young men wearing traditional outfits to represent their town during the festivals. For centuries these ceremonies have been drawing together the entire community to commemorate the past and the people who risked their lives to protect the town and its inhabitants.

‘The Ties that Bind’ demonstrates the vitality and quality of Scottish documentary photography and, together with ‘The Shock of Victory’, shows the profound influence the independence referendum has on Scottish contemporary culture one year on.

Dr Marion Amblard teaches at Université Grenoble Alpes and is a researcher in British studies. She is a member of the French Society for Scottish Studies ‘The Shock of Victory’ Centre for Contemporary Arts, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3JD T: (0)141 352 4900 | cca-glasgow.com Open: Tuesday–Saturday 11am–6pm, Sunday 12 noon–6pm ‘Document Scotland: The Ties that Bind’ Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JD T: (0)131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org/ portraitgallery Open: Daily, 10am–5pm, 7pm on Thursday

‘ ‘The Ties that Bind’ demonstrates the vitality and quality of Scottish documentary photography and, together with ‘The Shock of Victory’, shows the profound influence the independence referendum has on Scottish contemporary culture one year on’

Scottish Art News | PREVIEWS | 65

The Artist and the Sea

Arthur Melville Adventures in Colour

Marion Amblard

Perrine Davari

1 Arthur Melville, A Cairo Street, 1883, Watercolour on paper © Fleming Collection

1 Thomas Buttersworth, The Arrival of George IV at Leith Harbour, 1822 1 2 Thomas Buttersworth Hannah Clarke Preston MacGoun, St 2 Andrews Fisherfolk © City Art Centre, Hannah Museums MacGounand Galleries Edinburgh

1/2

1/2

City Art Centre, Edinburgh Until 8 May 2016 ‘The Artist and the Sea’ includes approximately 40 artworks drawn exclusively from Edinburgh’s City Art Centre collection. The works on display span different time periods and mediums, from painting, engraving and etching to a sculpture by Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925– 2006), a silk screen by Robert Tavener (1920–2004) and a calotype entitled Two Newhaven Fishwives by David Octavius Hill (1802–70), a pioneer photographer in Scotland. Hill collaborated with Robert Adamson (1821–48) and together they produced many photographs of the fishing community of Newhaven, which today form a valuable record of 19th century life in a Scottish seaside village.

This exhibition demonstrates that the sea has been inspiring Scottish artists for several centuries. One of the earliest works on display is Shipping at Leith Port (1824) a pencil drawing by Alexander Nasmyth (1758–1840), often called the father of Scottish landscape painting. Other 19th century pieces include paintings by Thomas Buttersworth (1768–1842) and William McTaggart 66 | ART

2 Arthur Melville, Orange Market, Saragossa, 1872 Watercolour on paper © Fleming Collection

(1835–1910), the latter sometimes called ‘the Scottish Impressionist’ for his free brushwork and his rendering of light and atmospheric effects. Buttersworth was a marine painter who had been a seaman during the Napoleonic wars. His painting The Arrival of George IV at Leith Harbour (1822) commemorates the King’s visit to Scotland, the first British monarch to visit the country since 1651, and several ceremonies were orchestrated to celebrate the event. The Preaching of St Columba (1895) is one of two oil paintings by McTaggart dealing with the beginning of the Gaelic Christian civilisation in Scotland; this picture shows St Columba preaching at Gauldrons Bay on the Kintyre peninsula where the painter grew up.

In 1920 Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935) visited Iona for the first time, returning regularly thereafter, and was inspired to paint numerous views of the island, such as A Rocky Shore, Iona (c.1929). The Obsession (1966) by John Bellany (1942–2013) depicts fishermen at the gutting table and is reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Drawing

Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh Until 17 January 2016 inspiration from his admiration of the Old Masters and from his childhood in Port Seton, a fishing village on the east coast of Scotland, Bellany painted this work at the beginning of his career.

Besides famous works by some of Scotland’s leading artists, the exhibition also provides us with the opportunity to see The Comet (Smack) (1809), a painting that has only recently been attributed to William John Huggins (1781–1845) and has received conservation treatment ahead of the show.

Dr Marion Amblard teaches at Université Grenoble Alpes and is a researcher in British studies. She is a member of the French Society for Scottish Studies City Art Centre, 2 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DE T: (0)131 529 3993 edinburghmuseums.org.uk/venues/ city-art-centre Open: Monday to Saturday 10am–5pm, Sunday noon–5pm

Even to those less acquainted with the particulars of Arthur Melville’s work, the first painting in the exhibition, A Cabbage Garden (1877), may appear familiar. Before being exhibited on the grand upper floors of the Scottish National Gallery, it was permanently displayed in the basement alongside other Scottish artworks in the collection. Somewhat overlooked, yet brilliant, it is a fitting symbol for the artist himself (1855–1904), who, despite being a master of watercolour, closely aligned with the Glasgow Boys, is only receiving his first retrospective now, over a century after his death.

A Cabbage Garden immediately demonstrates Melville’s mastery of colour; green and red hues of the cabbage leaves swirl across the canvas in brilliant contrast.

This dexterity in colour is most vivid not in his oils, however, but in his watercolours, the medium in which the artist took his most daring adventures in colour.

The first two rooms of the retrospective are the most compelling; they exhibit Melville’s aptitude for watercolour through a parade of pieces

inspired by the artist’s travels through Europe and the Middle East in the 1880s.

From his quicker watercolours to his more ambitious compositions, the skills he demonstrates are rarely paralleled.

Two loans from the FlemingWyfold Art Foundation – Orange Market, Puerta de los Pasajes (1892) and Highland Glen (1893) – are exhibited in these rooms. The detailed orange reflections in the refracted blue water of the Orange Market create a sparkling, absorbing work. Highland Glen shows Melville’s understanding of the very nature of watercolour itself, with only the need for a minute number of brushstrokes to convey the feeling of the landscape. Perhaps this is what the artist meant when he stated that ‘accidents are the making of a picture’.

He understood that the simplest stroke of his brush held the possibility of describing the entire composition, giving way completely to the character of the painting in just one movement of his hand.

Moving into the third and final room of Melville’s retrospective, the viewer is met by his large-scale oil paintings.

These have a murkier palette, one distinct from the vivid colours and adventurous nature of Melville’s watercolours. The chronologically ordered exhibition closes with shades of grey, works sapped of the energetic colourfulness of earlier days, creating an unexpectedly melancholic note in a brilliant and animated exhibition.

Perrine Davari is an artist and writer based in Edinburgh Scottish National Gallery, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL T: (0)131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org Open: Daily, 10am–5pm, 7pm on Thursday

Scottish Art News | PREVIEWS | 67

Perrine Davari

SCOTTISH ART NEWS DIARY 68 | ART

Glasgow Turner Prize 2015 Tramway Until 17 January 2016 W: tramway.org Europe’s most prestigious visual arts award opens for the first time in Scotland this autumn.

Before the winner is announced on 7 December, the shortlisted artists exhibit at Tramway, as the public becomes the jury.

Rachel Lowther Reid Gallery 16 January–27 March 2016 W: gsa.ac.uk/visit-gsa/ exhibitions/ Glasgow artist Rachel Lowther was commissioned to spend time researching the Glasgow School of Art World War I holdings. These include records of GSA staff and students who suffered as a result of the war. Lowther’s exhibition is a culmination of this research.

Ripples on the Pond GoMA Until 24 April 2016 W: glasgowlife.org.uk/ museums/GoMA/exhibitions/ Pages/default.aspx ‘Ripples on the Pond’ is a major exhibition of works by women on paper and moving image.

The exhibition sets out to create a dialogue between the works, gaining unseen insight from one to the other.

Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art Various venues 8–25 April 2016 W: glasgowinternational.org This biennial festival of contemporary art brings

together over 200 local and international artists, with the Director’s programme examining Glasgow’s industrial heritage alongside its cultural status today.

Edinburgh Luc Tuymans: Birds of a Feather Talbot Rice Gallery Until 19 December W: ed.ac.uk/about/museumsgalleries/talbot-rice One of the most influential painters today, Luc Tuymans is holding his first exhibition in Scotland. He brings together his work with the portraits of Scotland’s own Henry Raeburn, drawing on shared notions of socio-political provocation.

Arthur Melville: Adventures in Colour Scottish National Gallery Until 17 January 2016 W: nationalgalleries.org This retrospective of Arthur Melville’s career celebrates the artist’s character of adventure, in both life and art, splattered in colour.

Scottish Artists 1750–1900: From Caledonia to the Continent The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse Until 7 February 2016 W: royalcollection.org.uk The first exhibition from the Royal Collection solely dedicated to Scottish Art is now open at the Queen’s Gallery, highlighting the influence of the artists whose works were shaped by the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment.

William Gear (1915–97): The Painter that Britain Forgot City Art Centre Until 14 February 2016 W: edinburghmuseums.org.uk Coinciding with the centenary of his birth, this William Gear exhibition presents around 100 diverse works spanning the artist’s career, deservedly naming him as one of the most advanced British abstract painters of his generation.

The Artist and The Sea City Art Centre Until 8 May 2016 W: edinburghmuseums.org.uk Images of Scotland’s maritime heritage are brought to the City Art Centre. Showing the sea’s varied character, from sublime beauty to ferocious destruction, the exhibition draws from the centre’s own collection of historic and contemporary Scottish art.

RSA: New Contemporaries Royal Scottish Academy March–April 2016 W: royalscottishacademy.org The eighth annual exhibition once again graces Scotland in spring 2016, presenting the best contemporary work in Scotland from the young artists and architects that reaped the rewards in their degree shows in 2015.

British Art Show 8 Various venues 13 February–8 May 2016 W: britishartshow8.com The most ambitious and influential exhibition of contemporary British art comes to Edinburgh from Leeds in 2016, before continuing its journey to Norwich and Southampton.

Document Scotland: The Ties That Bind Scottish National Portrait Gallery Until 24 April 2016 W: nationalgalleries.org/ portraitgallery Document Scotland is a photographic collective created by four Scottish photographers who all capture elements of documentary photography.

While the show recalls the politics of the referendum, it aspires more to engage with the many views surrounding the debate.

Modern Scottish Women | Painters and Sculptors, 1885–1965 Modern 2, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 7 November 2015– 26 June 2016 W: nationalgalleries.org More than 80 works by Scottish women artists in the fields of sculpture and painting will be celebrated at Modern 2 this year. With pieces by Phoebe Anna Traquair and Joan Eardley, the exhibition uncovers women’s contribution to Scottish art history.

Elsewhere in Scotland Undoing the Tide by Gaëtan Robillard An Lanntair, Stornoway Until 29 November W: lanntair.com This autumn, French artist Gaëtan Robillard unveils his video and sound installation that integrates nature into mathematical space.

Judah Passow – Jewish Life in Scotland Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries Until 9 January 2016 W: tartanarts.com/venues.php Documentary photographer Judah Passow’s 2013 photographs recording contemporary Jewish life in Scotland return home after being exhibited in the USA. In the Eye of the Storm Kirkcaldy Galleries, Fife 25 November 2015– 14 February 2016 W: onfife.com/whats-on/detail/ eye-storm Including works by William McTaggart, SJ Peploe and John Duncan, the exhibition explores how many an artist becomes fascinated by the varying tempers of the sea.

Printmaking Exhibition Tatha Gallery, Dundee March/April 2016 W: tathagallery.com Japanese watercolour woodblock printing from Paul Furneaux, RSA, woodcuts from Shetland’s artist Paul Bloomer and dramatic, bold, abstract prints from Hetty Haxworth.

Human Presence Drum Castle, Aberdeenshire Until 31 March 2017 W: nts.org.uk/Site/ Human-Presence Drum Castle hosts work selected from the collection of Aberdeen Art Gallery during its closure.

The exhibition explores how artists, from mid 20th century to today, capture a human presence in their work.

Outside Scotland North to South Towner, Eastbourne, UK Until 24 January 2016 W: townereastbourne.org.uk It seems as if the rest of the country profits from the Aberdeen Art Gallery closure as some of the collection’s works are displayed all the way down south alongside pieces from Towner’s own collection, for a unique collaborative exhibition.

Northern Lights: Aberdeen Art Gallery at The Fleming Collection The Fleming Collection, London Until 27 January 2016 W: flemingcollection.com London also plays host to works from the collection of Aberdeen Art Gallery. These iridescent treasures from the north have been especially selected for the Fleming Collection, and include works by JMW Turner and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

The Glasgow Boys – Scottish Impressionism 1880–1900 Drents Museum, Assen, The Netherlands Until 7 February 2016 W: drentsmuseum.nl Drents Museum presents the first retrospective of the Glasgow Boys to be exhibited outside the UK since 1900.

Focusing on the group’s heyday, the museum displays ten of the most prominent members of this group of comrades.

My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose: L’art en Ecosse Musée du château des ducs de Wurtemberg, Montbéliard, France 21 November 2015– 28 February 2016 W: montbeliard.fr The first complete retrospective of Scottish art history to be held in France, this exhibition is set to coincide with Montbéliard’s Christmas Market, the theme of which this year is Scotland.

Loans have come in from all over Europe to tie the show together, including London’s Fleming Collection.

Scottish Art News | THE DIARY | 69

Fine art by fine printers

Peter Graham R.O.I. Hosts a guided tour of The Royal Institute of Oil Painters Annual Exhibition

Fine Art Printers & Photographers Superb Quality Fine Art Prints Exceptional

On Friday 4 December 2015 at 12 noon

High Resolution Scanning Art Cards

‘ Within the tour I will spotlight distinct ROI members’ work as well as giving a critique on the new artists and young painters. I will also be illuminating on my own colour choices and inspiration.’

Invitations

Peter Graham ROI

Art Posters Greeting Cards Gallery Catalogues Printable Silks Cotton Linens Poplin and Canvas Banners, Flags and Pop Ups Perfect Bound Art Catalogues

Giclee UK Ltd

The Mall Galleries ROI Annual Exhibition runs 2 December - 13 December 2015 Mall Galleries The Mall London SW1 (Guided tour free with entry) Tel:02079306844 | www.mallgalleries.org.uk

Summerhall

Edinburgh info@gicleeuk.com 0131 555 6444

Image: Age of Elegance 91cm x 91cm oil on canvas Peter Graham R.O.I. © 2015 on show during the Annual Exhibition

Scottish Arts Mag_2.indd 1

23/10/2015 12:04:02

Support our Campaign We are in one of the most exciting periods of Aberdeen Art Gallery’s history with a major redevelopment to create a world class cultural centre celebrating art and music.

Inspiring Art and Music will restore the Art Gallery complex of buildings, feature a stunning new rooftop gallery, dedicated learning spaces and will allow us to showcase our nationally recognised collections.

Northern Lights, an exhibition of our paintings with a Scottish connection, is on display at The Fleming Collection until 27 January 2016.

PLEASE TEXT/SMS AAGM001 to 70970 togive£5

* APP/WEB

Use the free App: http://don8.to/ AAGM001

OVERSEAS VISITORS www.don8.to/ AAGM001/ language

www.aagm.co.uk

www.empresslitho.com 70 | ART

Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Development Trust is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation, Number SC045363

* Your donation is to the National Funding Scheme (NFS) and indicates a specific cause. The NFS takes a minor share of any Gift Aid (or 2.5% on a no Gift Aid donation) to cover advertising and transaction services. Text charges will be as per your standard network plan. Please see www.nationalfundingscheme.org/donor-terms for full details. To access our customer support please visit www.nationalfundingscheme.org/help or call 020 3287 0971.

F L E M I N G | COLLECTION

F L E M I N G | COLLECTION

Events November 2015 – March 2016

Become a Member

We run a varied programme of events such as guest lectures, artists’ studio visits and curator-led exhibition tours. Members receive a discount on ticket prices and are the first to know about new events.

Membership for you and a loved one this Christmas

PLEASE NOTE advance booking for ticketed events is essential.

Modern Scottish Women: Painters and Sculptors 1885-1965 16 December, doors open at 6pm for a 6.30pm start Alice Strang, Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, will discuss the contribution made by women artists to this chapter of Scottish art history, particularly that made by Joan Eardley, Bessie MacNicol, Phoebe Anna Traquair and Cecile Walton, whose work is in the Northern Lights exhibition. £15/£10 students/Free for Members Bar available

London Art Fair

School Holiday Family Arts

20-24 January For Fleming Collection Members only

Tues 16 February, 10.30am-12.30pm Free, bookings required For ages 3+ and their families

London Art Fair is the UK’s premier Modern British and contemporary art Fair. The 28th edition of the Fair brings together over one hundred carefully selected galleries from the UK and overseas, with two curated sections, Art Projects and Photo50, running alongside the main Fair.

As a Member of the Fleming Collection, you can purchase discounted day tickets until 19 December. Please contact the Fleming Collection for more information.

Create, play, imagine. What better way to spend your school holidays than in a gallery creating artworks? Parents and children are encouraged to create together during these free sessions.

Drawing Animals Workshop Thursday 23 February, 10am–2pm £40/£30 Members & Students Suitable for 18 years + Join Scottish artist, Janet Casey, for an animal drawing workshop using pen, pencil and paint. You will be using techniques drawn from the artist Joseph Crawhall, a prolific painter of nature and animals, being shown at the Fleming Collection at this time.

Those joining us as members before Christmas will be eligible for our festive, joint-membership offer.

In addition to your membership, we will send your loved one a wonderful gift on your behalf, including a card with details of their membership and a copy of ‘A History of Scottish Art’ (RRP £39.95) a 288 page, hardback publication detailing works in the Fleming Collection, all beautifully wrapped in a tartan ribbon.

Members enjoy exclusive benefits: • Monthly Newsletter & annual Director’s letter • Scottish Art News magazine twice yearly • Reduced ticket prices for events • Invitations to special Members events, tours and talks Our Festive Joint Membership offer, including gift and delivery, can be yours for only £40 Fleming Collection members are invaluable in the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation’s charitable endeavours to support and promote Scottish art, which includes the preservation and display of our own historic collection and maintaining a varied events and exhibitions programme.

Please return this form to Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DU or hand to a member of staff at the gallery. To find out more about membership visit flemingcollection.com or to join over the phone, please call 020 7042 5730.

All materials and refreshments are provided.

Christopher Wood (1901-1930), The Bather, c.19251926, oil on canvas © Jerwood Gallery Alice Strang, curator of Modern Scottish Women

Life Drawing

‘Provides an important new historical survey’ – COUNTRY LIFE PUBLISHER: Merrell Publishers Ltd (23 May 2003) LANGUAGE: English PRODUCT DIMENSIONS: 30.3 x 26 x 2.8 cm

Fortnightly Thursdays, 6.30-8pm £15/£10 Members & Students Fortnighly sessions taught by Scottish artist, Janet Casey, focusing on all forms of life drawing. Please check the website for upcoming dates.

All materials and refreshments are provided.

Contact: W: flemingcollection.com T: (0)20 7042 5730 Life drawing class at the Fleming Collection

To ensure that your gift is sent before Christmas please complete the attached membership form before Monday 19th December.

Offer only eligible for UK addresses.

Membership application Type of membership: Festive Joint membership offer £40

Please tick this box if this is a gift membership & provide your name and contact telephone number Individual membership £25 Student membership

£10

Additional donation

Membership details: Your Name Address

Postcode Telephone Email

Friend’s membership details for Festive offer: Friend’s Name Address

Postcode Message

Payment Method: Cash Cheque (made payable to Fleming-Wyfold Foundation) Credit/Debit Card (please complete form below) Gift Aid

I am eligible as a UK taxpayer and consent to the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation claiming Gift Aid on all qualifying subscriptions and donations from the date of this declaration until I notify you otherwise. FWAF’s reference number for the HM Revenue and Customs is XR76701.

Signed Date

Paying by card: Card number Start date Expiry date Security number Issue Number Address (card registered to)

Postcode

Come and visit the Burrell Collection before it undergoes a transformation from October 2016. The magnificent Category A-listed building is being redeveloped to open up its collection of 9,000 world-class objects to audiences worldwide.

While it’s closed, objects from the Collection (including

Henry VIII’s marital bedhead and Rodin’s The Thinker), will be on the move, touring museums and galleries in the UK and internationally.

To see the Burrell Collection one more time before October 2016, come and visit us soon.

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 77

Art Fair

13th - 15th November | Edinburgh Corn Exchange | EH14 1RJ

Art for Everyone!

Doors Open 11am Each Day | Admission ÂŁ5 Concessions ÂŁ3

For further information telephone : 01875 819 595 or visit

www.artedinburgh.com

Media Partner

EdinburghLife Magazine

and the Lothians

Paintings | Sculpture | Ceramics | Glass | Photography | Printmaking

Edinburgh

Scottish Art News | FEATURES | 78