Kate Downie | Between Seasons | The Scottish Gallery - June 2021

1

2

3 – 26 JUNE 2021

CONTENTS

The Letham Oak (detail), oil & acrylic on linen, 240 x 127 cm (cat. 8)

Foreword by Tommy Zyw 5 Between Seasons by Kate Downie 6 Time Machines: Kate Downie’s Trees by Susan Mansfield 8 Studio photographs 10 Paintings 12 Works on Paper 36 Prints 48 Paintings by Jean & Kate Downie 52 Biography 55 Acknowledgements 56

4

FOREWORD

The Manse Cherry (detail), oil, gesso & pastel on linen, 142 x 130 cm (cat. 9)

Kate Downie is an artist with inexhaustible sense of curiosity. Various Residencies and travel projects have taken her across the globe, creating fresh subjects and the development of new techniques in painting and printmaking. In 2017, her last major exhibition with The Scottish Gallery, Anatomy of Haste, featured works from such diverse locations as Japan, The USA, Norway, Scotland and China. Downie’s plans for this exhibition were no less ambitious. But, as has been the case for many of us, those plans were suddenly and unexpectedly upended by the events of the past year. With research trips abroad cancelled or postponed, Downie faced a lockdown in Fife, balancing the life of a studio artist with the demands of being a full-time carer for her mother Jean. After a period of adjustment, the countryside around Downie’s home and studio – once merely the backdrop to a life well lived – gradually became the focus of her work. Trees, which Downie has painted throughout her life, became her primary subject, representing not only complex habitats for the natural world, but also omnipresent sentinels of the human experience.

A series of ten tree paintings form the heart of this exhibition.

Each painting can be viewed through 180 degrees, with bottom and top image transected by a central horizon line, forming a mirror-like reflection. The trees, which Downie has captured at six-month intervals, move forward and backwards in time, existing in a continual state of transition. Each work is a journey without a beginning or end, a cycle of life, death, and regeneration within which we all play a part. We are thrilled to welcome Kate Downie back for her seventh solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery.

Between Seasons is an exhibition of international standing, reflecting the extraordinary times in which we live. We give thanks to the artist and to Susan Mansfield for their considered insights in the following pages.

Tommy Zyw, Director April 2021

5

BETWEEN SEASONS

What does that mean, to be caught between seasons? Perhaps the bigger question is: what does the passing of time look like? We are brought up to think of the cycle of the year in four tidy sections: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, as taught to us from our earliest days and endlessly the subject of primary school calendars completed with all the attendant tropes of snowmen, falling leaves, flowers and happy radiant suns shining in the top right-hand corner.

When I think of a medieval illuminated Book of Hours, I realise people have always invented structures for our passing of time, marked by the seasons and the workings of the land. How we fill our year and what tasks to attribute to each period in this cycle of 365 days has fascinated me since childhood.

Although our contemporary routines bear scant relation to the Book of Hours, our restricted life in this fearful Covid era makes a mockery of human time; whatever it looked like before has little bearing upon what we have been forced to endure. It seems that only nature carries on unabated. This project is an exploration of that idea, and in the process, it has sparked a new direction in my practice.

It all started during the first UK Covid lockdown. I was not able to make much work as my mother came to live with us for 3 months.

Caring for her was a rewarding task of love and a 24/7 commitment, with this particular exhibition deadline a fixed future date in the miasma of lost days. Amid this period, we received a parcel from my daughter wrapped in re-used printed wrapping paper decorated with 18th Century reproductions of different tree species. It was both attractive and informative – one to be added to my collection of ‘special’ papers.

I have always made drawings of trees in parallel with subjects like the industrial landscape and engineering infrastructure of human migration. However, until this project I chose to only draw them in winter. Although I loved being in the presence of deciduous trees

6

in full canopy, I snobbishly classed them as too leafy green, too undefined as a mass and simply too prone to generic brushwork to bother depicting them in my own work. Instead, I preferred trees which were either recovering amputees from overzealous lopping, whipped into contorted shapes by the prevailing winds, or seen stark against the light. Mondrian with his reductive tree series around 1909, or Van Gogh’s tree drawings had been my teachers in this field.

Around the time I received the special wrapping paper I had started to observe the few dead trees in the verges of our local back roads – through endless rounds of pushing my Mother in her wheelchair anywhere we could reach – stark silhouettes that matched my sometimes nihilistic mood of stasis amidst all the fecundity of 2020.

Making assemblages of torn wrapping-paper trees with modest drypoint etchings inspired by the dead ones became a little game of invention at a time in those early lockdown months when painting just seemed so difficult. Suddenly I had a whole series of what became the Root Metaphor edition, many of which were sold as a part of the Artists Pledge Scheme that blossomed on social media and kept metaphorical wolves away from the doors for 1000s of artists world-wide. These little prints also became the emerging force in my return to the act of painting, the results of which you see here.

To quote artist Louise Scullion this work could best be described as a “local response to how one might collectively navigate our current trauma of lockdown and loss”, an installation of paintings which I hope is able to be enjoyed beyond the virtual, which might stand as a symbol of recovery for all who visit.

Kate Downie, April 2021

Through these acts of painting, I have been learning to stay put, surrounded as we are by village life, nature, mature trees, grateful for my wonderful spacious studio. This new body of work Between Seasons references staying in one place in many quiet, local ways: for example, the paintings are on locally woven Scottish Linen or found wood, most of the subjects are trees and flowers from within five miles of here, many in my own garden.

Perhaps we have all been travelling this past year through time rather than space, so this exhibition is my response to that observed time travel. Many of the paintings are created to work either way up; rotated through 180°, the trees switch from summer to winter, early autumn to early spring, and so forth. As far as possible I have studied each one intimately 6 months apart, so they face each other end-on at opposite points of their cycle. The central horizon was the most difficult, and has evolved to represent for me this accumulated, folded time, like the layering of the days in the Book of Hours.

7

this page: Root Metaphor collected prints (cat. 24–30) opposite page, top: The February Hawthorn, 2019 (private collection) opposite page, bottom: The M8 Tree Masts, 2005 (private collection)

TIME MACHINES: KATE DOWNIE’S TREES When I visit Kate Downie in her studio at the end of March, the Fife countryside is just beginning to shake off the garb of winter.

The trees are still bare, but the buds are swelling. The daffodils are opening. There is the sense of energy mounting, below ground. Ali Smith describes it in her novel, Spring: “Pass any flowering bush or tree and you can’t not hear it, the buzz of the engine, the new life already at work in it, time’s factory.”

By the time this exhibition opens at The Scottish Gallery, spring will be hurtling towards summer. The trees will be in full leaf, the first pale green giving way to a fuller, darker shade. Although poets wax lyrical about the romance of spring, there is an aspect to it which is as relentless as a production line. It drives forward in its own rhythm, regardless of us.

This felt particularly evident in the strange spring of 2020. Confined to our houses and gardens by the threat of the pandemic, we watched nature move forward vigorously from one season to the next. We were stuck, but it was in motion. With roads empty of traffic, skies empty of aircraft, spring seemed louder, faster, more boisterous than ever before.

Kate Downie is an artist of dynamic energy. She is a landscape painter of the post-industrial world who finds a kind of beauty in motorways, bridges and intersections. She draws energy from motion, and her work - particularly her drawings - retain a sense of it, as if recording a performance. She painted the Forth Rail Bridge from a temporary studio on the island of Inchcolm while the trains rattled by overhead. She drew a road junction in Kopervik, Norway, from seven perspectives, somehow containing it on a single huge sheet of paper.

Some of her work is made while in motion herself. She has sketched from the windows of trains and from the portholes of ferries. She travelled round the coast of Scotland in a campervan to make The

8

Coast Road Diaries. Her last major show at The Scottish Gallery, 2017’s Anatomy of Haste, included a drawing done from a train window on the back of a cardboard sandwich packet. She later developed it into a painting.

Travel energises her. In the last decade, she has travelled in Norway, North America, Japan, China. She drew and painted on Route 66, through Arizona. She worked alongside Chinese artists to learn traditional techniques of ink painting. In February 2020, she was due to fly to Russia then travel overland to China, using a carriage on the Trans-Mongolian Express as a studio.

What does an artist such as Kate do when travel is suddenly no longer possible, when she is cut off from the kinds of subjects which have energised her work for the last 30 years? In 2020, she says, painting roads and bridges no longer felt honest. The relentless motion of the modern world which she captured so well had all but come to a stop.

Kate moved from Edinburgh to Fife in the summer of 2018, spending much of the first year supervising the building of a studio in the garden. She was aware that she was looking for a language in which to paint this new environment of fields and farmland, but this was only one project among many. Then 2020 came, and she began to look at trees.

Kate has long painted trees. They found their way into her landscapes. Occasionally, they were even her subject, though they were invariably winter trees: bare, sculptural, trees as structures, as survivors. Trees in full leaf belonged to a bucolic landscape tradition, a vision very different to hers, and she avoided them. Yet, in the vibrant summer of 2020, here they were.

Her Fife garden is home to a number of mature trees, among them an elegant paper birch, two ashes and a bird cherry. Studying them

mirror image. The bare winter trees look, at first glance, like root systems mirroring the branches. She describes them as “an equation for looking”. An equation for looking at time.

These are not easy paintings. Reducing six months to the turn of an hour glass emphasises the vigour, the relentlessness of time passing.

At the centre of each painting is a densely worked horizon, painted, erased, repainted, which seems to contain flashes of colour and movement. This is time folded, the time into which six months of human life is condensed. This is life in lockdown.

Page from sketchbook The Book of Seasons

from day to day, they seemed to possess an energy akin to motion.

Observing their growth patterns took the place of observing the motion of human migration, infrastructure, engineering. It was movement of a different kind: it was movement through time.

On the table in Kate’s studio (Birch Tree Studio, named before well this project) is a large hour glass. The sand in it measures exactly 30 minutes: a half-hour glass. Her large paintings of trees, in which each tree is paired with its own mirror image six months later, look like hour glasses. And, like hour glasses, they will be turned on the gallery walls every few days to display their opposite orientation.

The first trees were painted in the summer of 2020. They are portraits of specific trees, most of them within five miles of Kate’s home, painted on local Kirkcaldy linen. Then she recorded the same trees six months later in the early months of 2021, painting them in

9

These paintings are Kate’s response to a year of pandemic. A challenging response, but a generous one; ultimately, a message of hope. Trees are guardians of the long perspective: they were here before us and will outlive us. What is six months, to a tree? What is a year in lockdown? Trees bend to the wind. They recover after the loss of a limb. They are veteran survivors. Each year, they play out a life cycle, from loss to rebirth, to fullness of life.

Kate painted the summer trees first. When painting their winter skeletons, she knew the life which was contained below the ground.

Henry David Thoreau likened winter trees to sportsmen and women, stripping off to meet their biggest challenge: “In the bare trees and twigs, what a display of muscle.”

Winter trees are not dead, they are mustering their strength for the great expression of life which lies ahead. Ali Smith describes it this way: when it looks like nothing is happening, everything is happening. The future is forming under the ground. The pandemic will end. The hourglass will turn. There is hope.

Susan Mansfield, April 2021

Studio photographs

10

cat. 1 | The Bird Cherry, oil, charcoal & pastel on linen, 155 x 127 cm 180° rotation illustrated left

12

cat. 2 | Between Seasons (study), oil on canvas, 110 x 200 cm 180° rotation illustrated left

14

cat. 3 | Yogurt Flowers (August), oil on larder shelf, 88 x 37.9 cm The Larder Series tryptich illustrated left

16

cat. 4 | Soup Flowers (March), oil on larder shelf, 81 x 38.8 cm

18

cat. 5 | Pesto Flowers (September), oil on larder shelf, 88 x 37.4 cm

20

cat. 6 | The Ceres Ashes (green), oil on linen, 136 x 61 cm 180° rotation illustrated left

22

cat. 7 | The Ceres Ashes (pink), oil on linen, 136 x 61 cm 180° rotation illustrated left

24

cat. 8 | The Letham Oak, oil & acrylic on linen, 240 x 127 cm 180° rotation illustrated left

26

cat. 9 | The Manse Cherry, oil, gesso & pastel on linen, 142 x 130 cm 180° rotation illustrated left

28

cat. 10 | The Night Birch, oil & gesso on linen, 286 x 127 cm 180° rotation illustrated left

30

cat. 11 | The Portobello Wych, oil & glitter on linen, 165 x 130 cm 180° rotation illustrated left

32

cat. 12 | The Turn on the Year, oil on birch panel, 100 x 100 cm

34

cat. 13 | Bird Cherry Summer Canopy, watercolour, 18 x 50 cm

36

cat. 14 | Cloud Canopy Leaf Canopy, ink & watercolour, 44 x 34 cm

37

cat. 15 | Ornamental City Beech, charcoal, 56 x 38 cm

38

cat. 16 | Pear Tree Colour Notes, charcoal, 56 x 44 cm

39

cat. 17 | Winter Ash with Buzzard, pastel, 67 x 50 cm

40

cat. 18 | Pink Canopy Ash, watercolour & gouache, 67 x 50 cm

41

cat. 19 | Storm Night, Leylandiis, ink & oil on paper, 44 x 34 cm

42

cat. 20 | Study for Neil Gow’s Oak, watercolour & gouache, 44 x 34 cm

43

cat. 21 | Study for The Night Birch (Winter), watercolour, 36 x 24 cm

44

cat. 22 | The Night Birch (Summer), watercolour, 67 x 50 cm

45

cat. 23 | Wych Elm Summer Canopy, watercolour, 51 x 80 cm

46

following pages, left to right: cat. 24 | Root Metaphor (in Covid Times), Oak/Ash, drypoint and collage, 33 x 22 cm, variable edition 1/20 cat. 25 | Root Metaphor (in Covid Times), Birch/Hawthorn, drypoint and collage, 33 x 22 cm, variable edition 5/20 cat. 26 | Root Metaphor (in Covid Times), Willow/Ash, drypoint and collage, 33 x 22 cm, variable edition 6/20 cat. 27 | Root Metaphor (in Covid Times), Pollard Oak/Sorbus, drypoint and collage, 33 x 22 cm, variable edition 7/20 cat. 28 | Root Metaphor (in Covid Times), Lime/Hawthorn, drypoint and collage, 33 x 22 cm, variable edition 8/20 cat. 29 | Root Metaphor (in Covid Times), Willow/Sorbus, drypoint and collage, 33 x 22 cm, variable edition 13/20 cat. 30 | Root Metaphor (in Covid Times), Beach/Oak, drypoint and collage, 33 x 22 cm, variable edition 14/20

48

PAINTINGS BY JEAN & KATE DOWNIE I dedicate these pages to some of pictures that my mother and I have created together during the past 15 months during these difficult covid times, caught as we all are between seasons.

As Jean gets older she becomes more forgetful, living very much in the present tense and being well looked after by carers and family.

She came to live with us for the first few months of lockdown, and these pictures are a development of a technique we created of ‘parallel painting’ where I would set up a subject or an idea for a drawing or painting, which we then worked on side by side. More recently, as her needs have become greater, we create work together on one paper for 15 or 20 minutes each time. The process has not been easy for her as she battles with diminishing levels of sight, hearing, mobility and memory, but this process makes us both happy. She gets a sense of achievement of something ‘made’ and I gain valuable insights into the ocular distortions of her advanced macular degeneration and ongoing dementia.

My mother took up painting in her early 60s and she somehow maintains an innate sense of composition and verve, making abstract marks which appear seemingly out of thin air, but which might reference flowers on the kitchen table,her mood at the time or an echo of a recent walk in the park, conversations and so on.

We chat; I describe the colours to her, mindful of her energies and attention span. Working together enables a visual conversational dance between mother and daughter that often delights us both, though it also expresses those darker moments when she feels trapped inside her own body. It must be hard being 95 when once you were so energetic. Very bright acrylic paint pens on black paper help her make out the finished results.

Jean’s friend, the poet Anne Murray, has written to her every week, thus creating a vivid diary of lockdown life. She wrote this poem, dedicated to our shared paintings.

52

Between Seasons Between seed and flowering, the brown unlight of soil, bright yellow of daffodil falls the shadow.

Between mother and daughter memories are misremembered, echoes fade, sight goes.

Memory itself, lost to the mind returns through the sense of touch.

In the caring process between mother and daughter daughter and canvas, canvas and mother paint flows, flowers form – the gift of the mother flowering in the daughter in the betweenness of seasons.

Anne Murray

Collaborative paintings and working images, Jean and Kate Downie

53

54

KATE DOWNIE

Kate Downie was born in America of British parentage, but returned to live in the North East of Scotland at the age of 7. She studied Fine Art at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, graduating in 1980.

She has taken part in artists’ residencies in the USA , Amsterdam, Paris, Corsica, Norway and China. During her career Downie has established studios in places as diverse as a brewery, a maternity hospital, an oil rig and an island underneath the Forth Rail Bridge.

Her ongoing relationship with the Forth Bridges was made manifest in 2014 when she was selected as official resident artist for the Forth Road Bridge during its 50th Anniversary.

As President to the Society of Scottish Artist from 2004 to 2006, Downie co-curated contemporary visual art projects of international standing, including an exchange exhibition with Indian artists and the Bodyparts live art Festival at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh.

Like the Scottish Artists Joan Eardley and DY Cameron in the last century, Downie has spent the past 25 years exploring an artistic vision for both the extremes of a Scottish urban/industrial landscape and Scotland’s coastal ‘edge-scapes’. She is now exploring a more conceptual approach to the secret world of plants & trees over time, and how they impact on our lives.

Downie’s work appears in many public and corporate collections worldwide. In 2005 the artist was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize, and in 2008 became a member of the Royal Scottish Academy. Kate Downie is currently Chair of Development for the

Kate Downie working on her Root Metaphor Series

55

RSA where she has recently been hosting a series of country-wide Live at the Academicians Studio events via zoom. She has been a trustee for both Art in Healthcare and the Wilhelmina BarnsGraham Trust in the past ten years.

Kate Downie has been represented by The Scottish Gallery for many years and has had six exhibitions since 2007, including Anatomy of Haste for the Edinburgh International Festival in 2017. With this latest body of work showing a new direction inspired by her current surroundings but also as a personal response to nature in Lockdown.

Kate lived and worked in Edinburgh for many years and recently relocated to Fife where she now has a beautiful purpose-built studio.

Covid willing, 2021 will see the creation of a new Forth Bridges print edition for the City Art Centre, Edinburgh to coincide with their New Acquisitions Exhibition, an exciting painting project in conjunction with Glasgow Museums to honour Joan Eardley’s 100th anniversary, as well as a residency and exhibition with the University of Corsica in France. 2021-22 sees the conclusion of Outside Edge, an international collaboration with artists from Beijing and Brighton which began on Mull in 2019, culminating in a bilingual exhibition and publication opening in Beijing and touring to the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Published by The Scottish Gallery for the exhibition Kate Downie: Between Seasons held at 16 Dundas Street from 3 t0 26 June 2021 Exhibition can be viewed online at: www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/katedownie isbn 978 1 912900 34 3 Artworks © Kate Downie 2o21 Text © the authors 2021 Catalogue © The Scottish Gallery 2021 All rights reserved Photography by Michael Wolchover Designed by James Brook, www.jamesbrook.net Printed by Gomer Print, Wales

The Artist would like to thank: Tommy Zyw and The Scottish Gallery Michael Wolchover Susan Mansfield Edinburgh Arts Picture Framers Brien + Brown Scottish Linen, Kirckaldy Anne Murray for her beautiful poem Alicia Bruce and Scarlet Annelise Rafferty – The Wych Elm team in Portobello Barbara Davey and St Johns Lodge Quiet Garden The Rev Jim Campbell and Angela Pragnell – models under the Manse Cherry Louise Scullion RSA Mathew Burrows of the Artists Support Pledge Jean Downie and all my siblings Xu Yun, Hong Shen and Helen Goodwin – the Outside Edge team, for advice, inspiration and moral support HMRC HEISS

Creative Scotland Hardship Fund

front cover image: Between Seasons (study), oil on canvas, 110 x 200 cm (cat. 2) back cover image: Green Canopy Ash, watercolour, 67 x 50 cm (cat. 31)

1

2