From the Sublime to the Concrete

From the Sublime to the Concrete

From the Sublime to the Concrete

6-30 June 2018 An exhibition about the landscape STEPHEN BIRD JAMES CASTLE DOUG COCKER DAVID COOK VICTORIA CROWE KATE DOWNIE DAVID EUSTACE RONALD FORBES MARTIN GREENLAND JOHN HEWITT CALUM MCCLURE JOCK MCFADYEN DAWNNE MCGEACHY HANNAH MOONEY JAMES MORRISON PAUL REID ALAN ROBB PAUL SCOTT GRAEME TODD MICHAEL VISOCCHI ARTHUR WATSON

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Foreword From the Sublime to the Concrete is an exhibition about the landscape.

From the Sublime to the Concrete is an exhibition about the landscape. It is the outcome of a conversation with the visual artist Derrick Guild which led to the invitation to curate a show for us. In his eloquent introduction he recognises his psychological separation from the narrow, if rich, genre of landscape painting. Instead Guild sees landscape as a poetic and intellectual environment, a paradigm for the creative experience from which the artist draws inspiration across media and subject. Art history has identified movements as sub-categories of landscape: Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and post-Impressionism and each has its vital Scottish contribution. Individuals like the modernist J D Fergusson and the abstract expressionist Joan Eardley produced shifts in perception of the possibilities of landscape in Scotland and today these possibilities seem as rich as ever; as productive as any other conceptual territory.

The exhibition is also a recognition that landscape is embedded into the DNA of The Scottish Gallery.

Aitken Dott laid the foundation when he sought to represent Scottish landscape pioneers such as Horatio McCulloch, Sam Bough and William McTaggart in his new gallery, which opened in May 1842 in Edinburgh. The RSA’s annual exhibitions from 1824 continued to provide a showcase for artists who would reflect a new confident identity in Scotland; visual confirmation of the intellectual achievements and freedoms of the enlightenment.

Today landscape continues to provide inspiration and current Academicians are inevitably included in an exhibition which celebrates a genre which extends beyond the physical into the metaphysical.

The Scottish Gallery thanks Derrick Guild for his insightful, curatorial eye and we thank all twenty-one artists for their contributions.

Christina Jansen, The Scottish Gallery

Left: Arthur Watson, Voyage, 2014, constructed from ply, 93 x 160 cms (cat. 58)

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From the Sublime to the Concrete When Christina Jansen at The Scottish Gallery asked me to curate a show on landscape, I was surprised.

Landscape is probably the one thing that I have never attempted to make art about. It is a vast subject that spans centuries, and it’s an area that I have left purely to enjoy as a viewer. I brought this appreciator’s approach to choosing the work for the show, and had no fixed point of view. The title From The Sublime to the Concrete allowed an open field to bring together a fairly eclectic exhibition. The idea of the sublime in visual art, is something elusive, and extremely subjective: one person’s sublime could be another’s kitsch, and vice versa. To me the sublime within the context of landscape has a certain disquietude, a moment to take a deep breath, and pause slightly slack jawed in appreciation. All of the artists in this show, for many different reasons can have this effect on me. I believe it happens when the artist connects to something very personal. The proximity to such a personal creative response, has something of the

sublime experience about it. The concrete aspect of the title relates both to concrete poetry and the building material of the urban landscape. I have chosen artists who work in sculpture, painting, ceramic, photography, drawing and film. Works that are surreal, lyrical, psychedelic, realistic, documentary, political and poetic rub shoulders to create a potent exhibition. What has become apparent to me whilst curating this show, is how the artists construct and invent their landscapes from many different sources. We can recognise elements, and may even recognise particular places, but much like the physical landscape itself, what we perceive is a fabrication is as much a mental space as a physical one.

Derrick Guild

Left: Jock McFadyen, From Calton Hill, 2016, oil on wood, 55 x 92 cms (cat. 34)

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STEPHEN BIRD

1. Walking Man Plate, 2015

Living in a mega city the size of Sydney, Australia, with a population approximately the same as the whole of Scotland, the sublime landscape only appears in small urban pockets or parklands and is always populated. The landscape in my work is contained within the rim of the platter or plate and becomes a mise-en-scène where a comic-tragic event is depicted through a succession of sapphire blue marks. The familiarity of pottery, the sensual nature of clay, the sexual metaphors and violence all adds to a playful, cathartic experience where one feels compelled to react or even laugh out loud.

clay, pigment glaze, 25 x 25 cms

Stephen Bird, March 2018

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2. The Remains, 2012 tin glazed ceramic, 44 x 54 cms

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JAMES CASTLE

3. House/Smoke, 2012

4. Landscape Elements, 2017

mixed media, 32 x 20 cms Photo: Robin Dare

mixed media, 32 x 20 cms Photo: Robin Dare

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5. Night Studio, 2012 painted limewood, 75 cms high Photo: Robin Dare

My studio sits in a hollow in the ancient Wiltshire town of Malmesbury, where during the winter months a plume of smoke from its chimney can sometimes be seen long before the building itself.

Night Studio is a painted wood carving, one of a series of wall pieces and one of a number of works which engage with sleep. The studio nestles into a landscape, which takes on the form of a pillow and a relaxed pencil drifts into the land of Morpheus.

I often take a backward glimpse as I climb the hill home; seeing the smoke rise, and spread and disappear.

James Castle, April 2018

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DOUG COCKER

These works are, first and foremost, sculptures with significant formal and aesthetic dimensions; elegant, abstract constructions that are the product of an interior landscape, which is as fertile as the physical landscape to which they refer.

Finlay Coupar on the work of Doug Cocker, Leaving Jericho, 2003

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6. Fast Landscape No. 5, 2016 ash, 117 x 135 x 37 cms

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DAVID COOK

7. Small Mine Operation, 2018 oil on canvas, 23 x 28 cms

Over the last few years, I have produced a large body of work, on a subject which has always set my mind in motion, is the paper factory by Inverkeithing.

What first caught my eye about this subject was the huge rolls of coloured paper neatly stacked outside the factory, the piles of shredded coloured paper, red chimneys belching smoke and the scrapyard with its cranes and rusting boats and ships. The word ‘comfort’ on the carpet store. All this set by the water’s edge. From Inverkeithing you look over to Lochgelly, a once thriving mining town. Coal ships brought coal into Seagreens, Milton and Johnshaven. The main sea-borne trade of Johnshaven was the importation of coal for domestic use from Sunderland and the Forth, also occasional cargoes of lime for agricultural use. This would be around 1760. So it is warming to think that once the coal my ancestors cut, was delivered here to Seagreens.

David Cook, Change, Ripeness & Decay, December 2017, The Scottish Gallery

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8. Paper Factory, 2018 oil on board, 39.5 x 46 cms

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DAVID COOK

9. The Jenny, 2018 oil on canvas, 32 x 52.5 cms

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10. Little row of houses called Lauchenhead, 2018 oil on board, 54 x 61 cms

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VICTORIA CROWE

The archaic meaning of sublime is in the idea of the elevated, or lofty and in Vertiginous Landscape, the artist has created a sense of place at once vertiginous and spectacular. The strelitzia, like a trio of haughty (sublime) Phoenix, in harmony of pose but mutually isolated, their stems unanchored in the ground, are posed in front of the dark, mineral, rocky headland.

Beyond, a double horizon promises dirty weather beneath a sky ranged like a theatrical backdrop on which a cavalcade of cloud also suggests violent events. The picture seems to be a paean, not of triumph, but of sorrow and dignity in the face of the unknowable.

Guy Peploe

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11. Vertiginous Landscape, 1997 oil on linen, 90 x 100 cms

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VICTORIA CROWE

In Ice and Fire, Victoria’s second contribution to the exhibition, Crowe has identified another aspect of the sublime in the detailed filigree of the tree in winter, its delicate structure at once robust and vulnerable, permanent and ephemeral. The skeleton is posed in front of a tree in full leaf, the positive behind the negative, while all around a red sky, the colour of an approaching forest fire, speaks of the cycle of growth, destruction and regeneration, the greatest paradigm for the cycle of life.

Guy Peploe

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12. Ice and Fire, 2014 oil on board, 38 x 27 cms

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KATE DOWNIE

THE QUEENSFERRY CROSSING A Facebook Tale Posted on Facebook in early February 2018: “A strange and exciting request: does anyone know a lorry driver who might be willing to take me as a passenger across the Queensferry Crossing?

I am making crossing studies for my next series of paintings but need a higher viewpoint than from a mere car. I would be happy to swap an etching or print for the privilege of a high moving viewpoint of the bridge.”

This simple post was shared nine times and within an hour I had the ‘friend of a friend’ who ran logistics for freight transport across Europe, mostly between Italy and Scotland, making it happen. Three days later I was on an Italian lorry driven by a delightful Romanian, crossing the new bridge at 20 miles per hour, about 12 feet above the road surface with an excellent view, drawing fast and filming all the while with an iPhone taped to the windscreen.

Sometimes the best implementation of fresh work happens fast and with proper intensity. And so it is with the crossing drawings of the new bridge.

Is it trickier to draw than the other bridges? I think so: more elusive, less bridge, more crossing. It is unexpectedly graceful and certainly not a place to linger on. It’s all about the journey.

The surreal psycho-thriller that is Iain Banks’ The Bridge was published in 1986, the year after my first Edinburgh show Coastlines which plotted the edges of the Forth Estuary, from Seacliff to South Queensferry, Rosyth to Burntisland, taking in the immensity of the two bridges on the way. The philosophical act of crossing, the wonderfully surreal writing and the beautiful engineering cemented my love affair with these bridges. Living in the Scottish capital, but hailing from the North-East, the bridges are a powerful link, as for thousands of others, from my own past to the present and now on into the future.

Kate Downie, April 2018

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13. Lorry Drawing 1: New Day Drawing Study, 2018 ink, gouache, pencil, 32 x 28 cms

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DAVID EUSTACE

[David Eustace’s] travels have taken him around the world documenting the landscapes and city scenes of places as diverse as Burma and Barra, New York and Lebanon. Just as with his portraits, David views the landscapes with an openness and sincerity, at times even delight and awe, that evokes a certain quality of the place.

Anne M. Lyden, International Photography Curator, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, David Eustace, Selected Works, February 2015, The Scottish Gallery

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14. Highland Heart Portfolio, Plate 39, 2012 archival pigment print, 81 x 106 cms edition of 15

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DAVID EUSTACE

15. Northern Landscape No. 1, 2018 printed on a Japanese Bamboo Rag Stock, 21 x 30.5 cms edition of 8 + 1 AP

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16. Northern Landscape No. 2, 2018 printed on archival pigment paper, 21 x 30.5 cms edition of 15 + 1 AP

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RONALD FORBES

My work is about illusion, belief and reality – and the fuzzy edges between these. I typically paint illusionistic collage elements and array these like players on a stage in a multi-layered composition.

I often use fragments of landscape or garden images as part of an on-going contemplation of our relationship with Nature. Here both the painting and the film share imagery. We have the notion of a table in a landscape setting. On the table is an array of quasi-animals and plants. They are collaged from various elements to create fake creatures, reminiscent of the trickery of taxidermists who capitalised on people’s belief in the fantastical, a common example being mermaids created from parts of fish and small mammals. Beside the table is the image of a man and a woman apparently using cameras or binoculars, engaged in the process of looking. However, these figures are only described by their profiles, and then we see that their form has been created as if by cutting a hole in the sky and landscape, revealing an additional background layer.

In other words their image is created by absence.

Ronald Forbes, March 2018

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17. The search for all that never was, 2018 acrylic on linen, 111 x 137 cms

17A. HD digital film, 1 min 15 sec repeating

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MARTIN GREENLAND

My painting has always stemmed from memory and imagination. I largely work in the landscape tradition and though I still don’t consider myself to be a landscape painter, I suppose this is what I am.

I try to make my work a very delicate balance between the believable, based very much upon what is seen, and the unbelievable, which is about the unseen, the imagined. I also make it a delicate balance between appreciating the physical beauty, the technical craft of paint and the concept; subjugating the paint to make it do the job of creating the illusion to carry the meaning behind the imagery.

For me, painting is like a walk; it is an exploration, but if I’m ‘inspired’ by a landscape, I don’t paint the places or landscapes I encounter, I paint about them.

They are the catalysts for my invention. I need to be able to make changes and yet keep the paintings convincingly rooted enough in our ‘real’ world.

On a walk I’m in the real world but I’m also wonderfully lost in my own world which is my own interpretation of it. Here I’m taking it all in; in the studio I’m letting it all out, then embellishing it, adding to it, discarding parts, dissecting it, scattering its parts and allowing them to mingle with imagery from my memory or imagination. Painting thus becomes a realization, in both the understanding and making real sense of the word. However, no matter how much I plan, my paintings, what you see, are the result of evolution on the canvas, and increasingly I just start with an empty canvas and see where the paint, the broad and indefinite beginnings, take me.

Martin Greenland, February 2010

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18. Blue Morning (Easdale Walk), 2015 oil on canvas, 61 x 71 cms

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MARTIN GREENLAND

19. Below Cleabarrow, chill (memory), 2015 oil on linen, 26 x 31 cms

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20. March Italianate, 2017 oil on canvas, 56 x 87 cms

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MARTIN GREENLAND

Artful, artifice, artificial: the language of deceit derives from the word art which, isolated, speaks to the most elevated and sublime aspects of human character and aspiration. A tension between reality and imagination is inherent in much discourse on aesthetics. Ruskin urged his followers to look at nature and be faithful in its reproduction, to embrace the concept that it could not be improved upon and this was a radical idea: the abandonment of idealisation was shocking to Victorian taste which understood that art should serve higher, religious or didactic purposes. But any art form is from the first a process of invention and construction, whatever the intention of the artist.

For a realist painter the commitment to a particular subject is significant and the process a long one, given the fine brush and controlled gesture of the hand holding it. In art history some of the greatest achievements of hyper-realism came before photography: the northern European Renaissance masters, once perspective was mastered, had no limit to the refining of technique, a pinnacle achieved in Jan van Huysum’s flower pieces of the early eighteenth century; impossible assemblies of flowers become symbolically charged status symbols.

Landscape painting has never ‘gone away’ and with Constable and Turner it achieved a romantic apotheosis in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In the last century, in the sixties, realism reasserted itself in the context of pop art and the urban landscape became the primary subject of American photorealism.

Martin Greenland has the technical mastery to fulfil any mimetic requirement but chooses to be more like Bruegel than Chuck Close: he eschews a slice of the real to be faithfully transposed into a painted version and instead uses his memory and imagination to make the process of painting into a journey of discovery, relying on an instinct for composition to guide him, and a deep familiarity with his native landscape, the Cumbrian marchlands, to underpin his vision. This freedom allows him to include elements to disquiet the viewer: in March Italianate a church campanile stands in a wild corner of the landscape, enclosed behind a tall fence, its purpose lost and nature reasserting its hold. A caravan is half hidden in the trees while through the branches on the right, far off, a modern, flat building is enigmatically sinister.

In his masterpiece of this year, Eternal, his view is over the top of a broad, rounded hill so that the landscape extends to a far horizon around, suggesting the curvature of the earth. Subtly across this dome the seasons change from right to left, from winter to summer, but in the way that in any day all seasons can be present. On the right side, dark against dark cloud, the horizontal branches of an otherwise invisible tree could as easily be the crackling trail of a witch’s broomstick on the wind.

Guy Peploe

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21. Eternal, 2018 oil on canvas, 90.5 x 122 cms

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JOHN HEWITT

I have been making daily sketchbook drawings since 2nd June 2013. I work with an 0.5 gel pen in pocket sized black sketchbooks. The landscape element of my work begins with dog walking. Other exhibited subject groups are columns of smoke, nesting birds, roadside snack vans, and a small miscellany. The sketchbooks have accompanied me on all my walks, so the studio for the daily drawings is often a hillside or a lay-by. The drawings are dated and timed and have appeared on Instagram each day since June 2015, with short contextual commentaries. The daily deadline imposes some urgency. There is limited scope for correction and the conditions of their making are seldom ideal – the impact of climatic conditions has often been less challenging than the patience of my canine companion.

The principal territory that I walk through is a region of disputed borders straddling Lancashire and Yorkshire. While the subject of each drawing is presented to me through the encounters of walking, a common trigger is the sense of things being on boundaries. These might be buildings teetering between ruin and renovation, small businesses perched on the geographic boundaries of heath, crag and road, the seasonal cycles of animal and bird life, both nurtured and wild, the boundaries of cultivated land and moorland, of productivity and waste, and individuals walking a line between isolation and independence. The sketchbook drawings have a secondary purpose as a journal. By the time I conclude this project in its current format, in June 2018, there will be 52 sketchbooks and over 2000 drawings.

John Hewitt, April 2018

22. A downpour on Deer Hill End Road, 10 February 2018, 9.15am 23. An old cup, 30 March, 9.30pm 24. The burnt-out farm at Castleshaw from Castleshaw Roman camp, 14 July 2016, 5.00pm

35 giclée pen drawings, 14 x 18 cms

25. Sheep on road, 4 August 2017, 4.44pm 26. Crows near Kettle Lane, 23 September 2017, 8.55am

27. Bare trees in Skid’s field, 29 October 2017, 1.55pm 28. Ice cream eaters at Buckstones Moss, 9 July 2017

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JOHN HEWITT

29. The Last of Borderway, 2014 pencil, 26 x 26 cms

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30. Highland Bull at Holly Grove with Dobcross Loom Works Behind, 2013 pencil, 21 x 21 cms

31. Old Spring Tup, 2012 pencil, 22 x 22 cms

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CALUM MCCLURE

32. Pool and View Abstract, Benmore, 2018 oil on canvas, 20 x 20 cms

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33. Japanese Composition, Benmore, 2018 monotype, 92 x 92 cms

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JOCK MCFADYEN

Edinburgh, like Rome, is a city built on hills so that much of its character is discovered by climbing up and looking out. It is here that McFadyen finds his outdoor subject, where he has always been drawn to the horizontal: his Scapa Flow paintings in Orkney, the flatlands, hypermarkets and autoroutes of northern France where he has a home (the subject of Roadworks, his seminal show for The Edinburgh Festival in 2004) and recently in Edinburgh, including his series from Calton Hill, and his extraordinary lunar paintings one of which was the leitmotif for Endarkenment (Dovecot, Edinburgh, 2016). In Calton Hill No. 5 the moon’s occult presence is suspended over the folly of Edinburgh’s miniAcropolis. In From Calton Hill the high, hazy sky dominates over the familiar, jagged profile of the city, the suggestion of East Lothian beyond. McFadyen, for so long an unflinching eye on the human condition at the dog track, canal path and go-go bar can see beauty where others might look away; the still, quiet comforts of the night, lights through a tangle of undergrowth all fit subjects for a painter increasingly seduced by the beauty of oil paint but intellectually as unpredictable as ever.

Guy Peploe

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34. From Calton Hill, 2016 oil on wood, 55 x 92 cms

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JOCK MCFADYEN

35. Everything is going to be alright, 2017 oil on MDF board, 80 x 99.5 cms

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36. Calton Hill No.5, 2017 oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cms

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DAWNNE MCGEACHY

Growing up on the peninsula of Kintyre (Campbeltown) I was obsessed by the scale of the ocean, its physicality, poetry and my father’s voyages on it to catch fish. I loved his tales of the stars on a clear night and their use in navigation. However, the flip side of this was being awoken as a child by terrifying wind and rain, knowing that my dad was on the Firth of Clyde on a 45ft skiff. As the child of a fisherman I was aware of what the sea gave but also acutely aware of the cruelty of what it was capable of taking away. I go to the coast as often as I can, largely to build a bank of experiences and photographic reference material for the studio. I often take short films so I can study the movement when I get back to the studio. I love watching the wind drag across the surface, pulling and agitating, making slants and troughs, noticing the troughs get deeper and steeper as they collect the wind and realising this long, rolling swell originated in an ocean storm prior to breaking away from the disturbances of the unsettled sea miles away from the shore and me.

Dawnne McGeachy

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37. Beaufort 12 – Eshaness – ‘white with driving spray’, 2018 oil, ink and wax encaustic, 91.4 x 122 cms

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HANNAH MOONEY

38. Dark landscape study, 2017

39. Towards the Ferry House evening study I, 2017

oil on board, 12 x 16 cms

oil on board, 13.5 x 16 cms

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Although I am based in Scotland, my Irish heritage is ultimately the driving force behind my work.

It is difficult to not appreciate the wealth of beauty that resides in the landscapes of Donegal and Mayo, and I find myself returning there frequently for new inspiration. The mood of the Scottish landscape is similar to that of the Irish landscape.

It is unpredictable, often dark, sometimes sullen, troubled, and mysterious. Outside or in the studio, I try to think about how the landscape feels and remember its nuances, lyricism and subdued colour palette. None of my paintings are greatly detailed as I like to ignore superfluous details. I like to treat paintings like observational sketches in which the spirit and elemental drama of the landscape is captured.

Hannah Mooney

40. Tree at Ballyglass I, 2017

41. Study of trees in wind, 2017

oil on board, 14 x 10 cms

oil on board, 12 x 15 cms

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HANNAH MOONEY

42. Co. Mayo Landscape II, 2017

43. Across Ballyglass III, 2017

oil on board, 15.5 x 12.7 cms

oil on board, 15.2 x 13.2 cms

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45. Ballyglass at Midday, 2017 oil on board, 15.2 x 12.5 cms

44. Across Ballyglass II, 2017

46. Co. Mayo II, 2017

oil on board, 15.5 x 13.3 cms

oil on board, 15.3 x 19.8 cms

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JAMES MORRISON

Over the best part of seventy years James Morrison has responded to landscape in an heroic fashion, melding the personal and universal, experimenting with media, scale and technique. In the fifties his subject was the demolition of parts of Glasgow, making way for the motorway and high-rise living.

By the end of the decade, living in Angus, he pared the landscape down to a minimal recording of information, his paint the physical equivalent of the earth, chiming with the American and European avant-garde. Over the subsequent fifty years, living just south of the Montrose Basin, his engagement with the landscape has been profound, full of the wonder of nature, ever changing but always anchored by the rigour of composition. He has sought new stimulation in the adventure of travel: after all the landscape artist is at least one-part naturalist.

In Canada, Botswana, the high Arctic, Alps and arid Mediterranean, in Assynt, the Borders and the flatlands around Ely he has added to his vocabulary.

But all paths are circular and he has returned to The Mearns where the turn of the seasons provides all the stimulation he could ever need.

Guy Peploe

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47. Green Valley, 1972 ink and watercolour, 63.5 x 105 cms

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JAMES MORRISON

The escarpment of the Lammermuir Hills rises to the south and east of Gifford opening up broad views north to Fife and west to Edinburgh and the Pentlands. Morrison’s day in late July 2005 saw a parched landscape but with thunder and rain on the way, weather that brought a tornado to the Midlands and welcome inundation for the rich farmland of East Lothian.

Guy Peploe

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48. Looking West from Quarryford, East Lothian, 28.vii.2005 oil on board, 92 x 155 cms

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PAUL REID

I wanted the East Coast Seascape to be an imagined place (somewhere you cannot actually go to), similar to the backdrops in my large Mythological paintings and constructed in the same way. It was inspired by views of the East Coast of Scotland but with elements taken from my last trip to Crete. I had in mind the Celtic Myth of ‘Tir Na Nog – The Land of the Young’, where the souls of the dead live on in eternal, heavenly bliss. It is said that each time a wave breaks on the shore, the ‘white horses’, another spirit received permission to enter.

Paul Reid

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49. East Coast Seascape, 2018 oil on canvas, 65 x 105 cms

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ALAN ROBB

At the time I made this painting, I was concerned about looking down and into things and Vanitas was a perfect site. It was also an opportunity to combine the old and the new with a cemetery at the heart of things; a reflection on time. Back in my studio, working up the final painting I ate an apple and remembered a line by Edward Thomas: “I have not yet bitten the day to the core.”

The poet Edward Thomas was still finding his feet, having just arrived in France, and was celebrating the beauty of St David’s Day in his poem. He was killed in the battle of Arras four weeks later.

Alan Robb, March 2018

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50. Lagos, Portugal: Vanitas, 1993 watercolour and gouache, 68 x 46 cms

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ALAN ROBB

I have visited Monterchi many times, the first in 1970, to view Piero della Francesca’s sublime painting Madonna del Parto. At this time, the painting was in its original site in the tiny cemetery chapel of Santa Maria a Nomentana. In my painting, the half hidden building on the far left is where it can be found now.

Alan Robb, March 2018

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51. Monterchi, 2005 (reworked 2009) watercolour and gouache, 59 x 67 cms

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PAUL SCOTT

In my most recent series of collages, transfer decorated tablewares from the nineteenth to twentyfirst centuries are physically deconstructed and re-arranged to disrupt the seamless comfort of hazy blue, so that the viewer is forced once again to see the printed pictorial surface.

The new works in From the Sublime to the Concrete examine the internal narratives of romantic chinoisseries and pastoral landscape. At the same time, by arranging multiple collaged forms together in groups, disparate images interact in novel ways and gold Kintsugi lines mark a unifying, drawn graphic.

Paul Scott, April 2018

52. Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s), Landscape, Wil Low, Wil Low, 2018 collage, cut and re-assembled transferware plates (Spode Willow test, salvaged from closed Spode Works 2009, and Egersund Norsk Willow plate) with Kintsugi, 17 x 17 x 2.3 cms

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PAUL SCOTT

In the early nineteenth century graphic wallpapers, printed textiles and ceramic transferwares formed part of an explosion of imagery enabled by the print revolution. Pictures of landscape became democratised and available for the first time to a wide audience. Imagery that previously had only been available in paintings were disseminated by engraved illustration in books and magazines, then further remediated in transferwares as pictorial decorations.

Printed blue and white tablewares are still produced with images that have travelled through histories and geographies, however over time and in an image saturated world, they have become overly familiar as part of the cultural wallpaper in our minds so that pictorial content is no longer seen or read.

Paul Scott

53. Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s), Landscape (Wil Hefe and Rocd Rosort), 2018 collage, cut and re-assembled 19th century transferware platters (Wild Rose unknown maker and Castle Rochefort by Brameld) with Kintsugi, 21 x 26.8 x 2.8 cms

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GRAEME TODD

On first glance these works appear unfamiliar and spatially disorienting, not seeming to align with any recognisable world, but on closer inspection biomorphic and geological scenes start to emerge on the compactly painted surface depicting rocks, trees, houses, traces of insects, birds and other elements native to his surroundings.

Ola Wojtkiewicz, April 2017

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54. Untitled (Cannon), 2017 charcoal, pastel, varnish on MDF board, 80 x 100 cms

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GRAEME TODD

55. Mount Feastface, 2005 acrylic, ink, pencil, gesso on MDF board, 70 x 90 cms

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MICHAEL VISOCCHI

56. Linescape 1, 2017 plywood, beech, resin, paint, 126 x 94 x 11 cms

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57. Linescape 2, 2017 plywood, beech, resin, paint, 126 x 94 x 11 cms

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ARTHUR WATSON

Voyage was originally made as an element within a larger installation shown at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2014. This work referenced many locations in Scotland from William Daniell’s Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain (1814-25) overlaid with details of remembered journeys with my parents and with artists with whom I later made work: with Donald Addison to overnight on Staffa then Tiree; with Richard Demarco ‘In the Footsteps of Joseph Beuys and St. Columba’ and with Will Maclean to Skye and Lewis.

In common with many of my other works Voyage was reworked on this occasion before the current exhibition, the letters refined then repainted in highgloss signwriters’ enamel. Since studying design at Gray’s School of Art letterforms have fascinated me whether hand drawn, printed from type, painted on gallery walls or, like Voyage, constructed from ply or MDF. Wall texts in Venice, Wrocław, Chicago and Edinburgh still exist on gallery walls but only under many layers of white emulsion. In the Robert Gordon University or the base station of the CairnGorm mountain railway overlapping concentric rings of CNC routed text surround large scale screenprinted or woodcut images.

58. Voyage, 2014

Arthur Watson

constructed from ply, 93 x 160 cms

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ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

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STEPHEN BIRD

JAMES CASTLE

Stephen Bird was born in The Potteries, trained at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee and making his home and a huge international reputation from Sydney, he remains aloof from any artist pigeonhole. He works with both paint and clay and has also undertaken a number of site-specific sculpture commissions. Bird’s influences and interests include English figure and slipware traditions and paintings and artefacts culled from his extensive travels through India, Asia and Australia. His use of words, collage and found objects as part of the final work, results in powerful multi-dimensional imagery which reflect on the global, transcultural nature of myths and ceramic archetypes.

James Castle was educated at Ealing School of Art, Winchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. As well as exhibiting throughout the United Kingdom, James has curated exhibitions of sculpture, most notably at Gloucester Cathedral and Malmesbury Abbey. He was also a senior lecturer in Sculpture and Fine Art at the University of Gloucestershire.

(b.1964)

Public Collections include: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh National Museums Northern Ireland, Belfast Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Dundee Art Gallery and Museum Arizona State University Art Museum, USA The Grainer Collection, Washington, D.C, USA Clayarch Gimhae Museum, South Korea Australian Embassy, Republic of Korea Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Queensland, Australia

RSA, RSS (b.1946)

I work mainly with wood, constructed and carved, as well as plaster and bronze; drawing is used as a speculative activity, which often adds to the narrative of a piece. The sculptural language in my work possibly has its roots in Brancusi, but he would never have engaged with painted form. Dreams, absurdity and other-worldliness are ingredients in my thinking. Landscape is often apparent.

A work can take some time to finish, until elements, formal and narrative, eventually come together in a way, which I feel is emotionally right, evoking the original thoughts and feelings that I aimed to express.

Public Collections include: Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Strathclyde University The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh Malmesbury School Scottish Arts Council Wiltshire County Council

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DOUG COCKER

DAVID COOK

Doug Cocker was brought up in rural Perthshire and comes from a long line of farmers and blacksmiths.

He taught sculpture at Nene College, Northampton and Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen and over a period of twenty years he was visiting lecturer at Edinburgh University, Edinburgh College of Art, The Glasgow School of Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, Tyler University, Philadelphia, Georgian College, Ontario and Newcastle Polytechnic from 1992–1998. He was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1984.

David Cook was born in Dunfermline and attended Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee from 1979–84. He received the first prize at the annual student show at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1983 followed by a travel award which took him to Paris, Amsterdam, Belgium and Cyprus. He was awarded the Guthrie Award at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1985 and was given Scottish Arts Council Awards in 1985, 1988 and 1989. He lives and works in Angus.

RSA (b.1945)

Doug Cocker’s sculpture is the artist’s response to the landscape and natural environment around him.

Public Collections include: Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow Greenshields Foundation, Montreal The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh Kirkcaldy Galleries Perth Museum and Art Gallery The Ballinglen Archive, County Mayo Robert Gordon University Collection, Aberdeen University of Dundee Boswell Collection, University of St. Andrews Arts Council of Great Britain

(b.1957)

David Cook is completely immersed within the landscape around him, and as the seasons change so too does Cook’s subject matter.

Public Collections include: Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection University of Dundee Kirkcaldy Galleries Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow Scottish Arts Council Collection

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VICTORIA CROWE

KATE DOWNIE

Victoria Crowe studied at Kingston School of Art from 1961-65 and at the Royal College of Art, London. In 1968, she was invited by Sir Robin Philipson to teach at Edinburgh College of Art. Victoria was awarded an OBE for Services to Art in 2004 and from 2004-2007, she was appointed Senior Visiting Scholar at St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge. In 2009 she received an Honorary Degree from The University of Aberdeen and in 2010 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2013, Dovecot Studios wove a large-scale tapestry of Victoria’s painting Large Tree Group. This collaborative tapestry was acquired for the National Museums Scotland. Victoria was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers’ in 2014, to design a forty-metre tapestry for their new hall in the city of London, which took over three years to weave and was installed in January 2017.

Born in North Carolina, Kate Downie studied at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen before travel and residencies took her to the United States, England, Amsterdam and Paris. Downie is one of the most subtle and persuasive colourists of her generation and she will only add to her palette from real experience.

This gives her work a truth and authority, a right to transport us to the unfamiliar or provide an urgent reminder of where we have also been. She is known rightly as a supreme draughtswoman. Her recent studies in China, visited in 2011 and 2013, have added to her repertoire, and the purchase of hand-made Chinese paper has required an approach informed by traditional oriental painting. Kate’s constant search for new challenges and inspirations has seen her set up studios in such diverse places as a brewery, an oil rig, and an abandoned Hydroponicum.

OBE, DHC, FRSE, MA(RCA), RSA, RSW (b.1945)

Victoria Crowe’s first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery was in 1970. Her next major exhibition of paintings at The Gallery will be held during the Edinburgh Festival in August 2018 and will coincide with The Scottish National Portrait Gallery which is holding a retrospective of Victoria Crowe’s portraits Beyond Likeness which runs from 12 May – 18 November 2018.

Her work is held in numerous public and private collections worldwide including the National Galleries of Scotland and National Museums Scotland.

RSA (b.1958)

I am inspired by the ingenious and the ubiquitous acts of engineering amidst the seas, mountains and the envelope of air: concrete, asphalt, steel, glass and plastic, the modern stuff which humans have constructed.

Public Collections include: Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums British Broadcasting Corporation, London City of Edinburgh Council Edinburgh City Art Centre Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow Kirkcaldy Galleries Rietveld Kunst Academie, Amsterdam The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh

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DAVID EUSTACE

RONALD FORBES

David Eustace studied photography as a mature student at Edinburgh Napier University from 1987-1990 graduating with a first class honours degree.

Ronald Forbes studied at Edinburgh College of Art and, as well as exhibiting internationally, has had a significant career in art education as both head of Painting at Cork School of Art, Ireland and Head of Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee.

(Hon) Dr of Arts (b.1961)

Eustace is an international photographer and creative director.

Collections include: The National Portrait Gallery, London The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow Deutsche Bank Aberdeen Asset Management

RSA, RGI (b.1947)

I am an artist who is primarily a painter, but I have also made films throughout my career. I am a figurative painter, but the term “imagist� may be more appropriate, since the human figure in my work is usually de-constructed and re-assembled, synthesised from a range of fragments of images which carry traces of recognition from their source, but which have gained a new identity in their new juxtaposition. These fragments are painted illusionistically as if they are collaged, even including the effect of the torn edge of the paper. The term imagist is also appropriate since I exhibited in Chicago for many years, counting many of the renowned Chicago Imagists as friends. My work, both paintings and films, is about belief, illusion and reality, and the fuzzy edges between these. The viewer is a necessary participant in this imaginative dialogue.

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MARTIN GREENLAND

DR JOHN HEWITT

Martin Greenland was born in Yorkshire and studied at Exeter College of Art. He has lived and worked in Cumbria since 1985. In 2006, Greenland was awarded first prize at the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize, the UK’s largest contemporary painting exhibition held at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Martin Greenland is primarily a realist painter; his subject is embedded in the North British Landscape, at first familiar yet entirely imagined – in Greenland’s work, a subtle narrative about contemporary Britain quietly emerges.

John Hewitt is currently a senior lecturer in illustration with animation at Manchester Metropolitan University. He completed a PhD in 2008, on the subject of contemporary English courtroom sketches. Hewitt’s creative practice switches between the media of drawing and printmaking and subject matter centres around observed events, people, animals, objects and locations – notions of memory are addressed in his detailed work.

(b.1962)

I rarely come to start any work with the structure or concept fully formed. My paintings can best be described as improvisations. Sometimes strong images which exist somewhere in my head at the beginning form the resulting work. More often these starting forms radically change; the painting finding its own course. This is when I can describe painting itself and watching the landscape come into being and evolving, as exploring, going into new territory. I often find the reason for the painting or its concept, as I am part or often well on the way through. Very often I begin paintings with just pure paint, pretty abstract. I put paint down in fairly spontaneous ways to give me the unexpected which is always there ‘in nature’.

HonF (RCA) (b.1955)

His illustrations have been published in books, magazines and newspapers including The Sunday Times, Radio Times, The Guardian, New Statesman, Time Out and Amit. John Hewitt posts a daily drawing on Instagram under the name of w_john_hewitt. In 2005, the Righton Press published a series of drawings and written account of the London bombings of July 7, 2005. Twenty-four of these drawings are on permanent display in the Museum of London. He won the Hugh Casson Prize for drawing at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2016.

Public Collections include: Victoria & Albert Museum, London Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Museum of London British Council Government Art Collection

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CALUM MCCLURE

JOCK MCFADYEN

Calum McClure graduated in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art in 2010. In 2011, he won the Jolomo Bank of Scotland Painting award.

McClure’s drawings, prints and paintings depict country estates, cemeteries, national parks and botanical gardens – places created for man’s solace and pleasure. He thinks about these places as a modern Arcadia; into which people can escape for a few hours every week. Through painting, monotype and etching McClure explores the complexity of images taken from nature that at first look simple.

His work evokes atmospheres, especially through the representation of light, shadow and reflections. Some of his images are almost abstract, others quite clearly representational, produced from intense scrutiny of details of grounds and vistas, views from particular places all with their possibility for further imaginative exploration. Recent work has taken inspiration from various source images, including film stills and other photographs taken whilst walking. Calum McClure will enjoy a third solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in October 2018.

McFadyen was born in Paisley in 1950 and brought up in Renfrew. He attended Chelsea School of Art from 1973-77 and has lived and worked in London over the last forty years. He has had over forty solo exhibitions and his paintings are in thirty public collections including the Tate, British Museum, V&A and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art as well as corporate and private collections in the UK, Europe and the USA. In 1981 he was appointed Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London and in 1991 he made a solo exhibition on the Berlin Wall at the Imperial War Museum, London which toured to Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow. The following year he designed sets and costumes for Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s final ballet ‘The Judas Tree’ at the Royal Opera House in London. McFadyen has had a long association with The Scottish Gallery and in 2020, The Gallery will host a major exhibition following his exhibition in 2019 at the Royal Academy, London which will be produced in conjunction with the publication of a new monograph.

(b.1987)

RA (b.1950)

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DAWNNE MCGEACHY

HANNAH MOONEY

Dawnne McGeachy was born in Campbeltown, Argyll. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1991 and attended the University of Ohio. In 2013, Dawnne won the Jolomo Bank of Scotland award for landscape painting in 2013. McGeachy’s dramatic paintings of the sea are inspired by her father’s career as a fisherman on the west coast of Scotland.

Hannah Mooney was born in Ramelton, Co. Donegal, Ireland and graduated in 2017 from Glasgow School of Art. She has won several awards as a student and since graduating, in recognition of her compelling talent as a painter most recently at the New Contemporaries Exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy where she won the major Fleming Wyfold Bursary. She currently works in two distinct subjects; still life and the landscape and in both she is an instinctive, natural painter deeply concerned with the matière and traditional composition.

Her work has already been acquired for the James Nichol McBroom Archive and the Hottinger Group. Hannah Mooney will be the subject of a solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in October 2019.

(b.1969)

Growing up on the peninsula of Kintyre (Campbeltown) I was obsessed by the scale of the ocean, its physicality, poetry and my father’s voyages on it to catch fish. I loved his tales of the stars on a clear night and their use in navigation. However, the flip side of this was being awoken as a child by terrifying wind and rain, knowing that my dad was on the Firth of Clyde on a 45ft skiff. As the child of a fisherman I was aware of what the sea gave but also acutely aware of the cruelty of what it was capable of taking away. I go to the coast as often as I can, largely to build a bank of experiences and photographic reference material for the studio. I often take short films so I can study the movement when I get back to the studio. I love watching the wind drag across the surface, pulling and agitating, making slants and troughs, noticing the troughs get deeper and steeper as they collect the wind and realising this long, rolling swell originated in an ocean storm prior to breaking away from the disturbances of the unsettled sea miles away from the shore and me.

(b.1995)

Selected Awards: RSA John-Kinross Scholarship 2017 RSA Landscape Drawing Prize 2017 James Nicol McBroom Memorial Prize 2017 Armour Prize 2017 Selected for Royal Scottish Watercolours Society Exhibition 2018, RSA Galleries, Edinburgh Selected for New Contemporaries Exhibition 2018, RSA Galleries, Edinburgh Hottinger Prize for Excellence 2018 House for an Art Lover Award 2018 Art in Healthcare Prize 2018 Fleming-Wyfold Bursary 2018

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JAMES MORRISON

PAUL REID

Born in Glasgow in 1932. Morrison studied at Glasgow School of Art 1950-54. James Morrison joined the staff at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, in 1965 after settling in Montrose.

He left teaching in 1987 to devote his career to full time painting. Wholeheartedly a landscape painter, his main working areas are the rich, highly-managed farmland around his home in Angus and the rugged wildness of west coast in Assynt and Sutherland while he has also painted in Africa, The Alps, Southern France, the High Arctic and Canadian Prairies. James Morrison has been associated with The Scottish Gallery since 1959 and is considered one of Scotland’s finest living landscape painters.

Paul Reid graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in 1998 after which he was awarded a Carnegie Trust Vacation Scholarship and a John Kinross Scholarship. In 2004, he accompanied HRH The Prince of Wales on a trip to Turkey and Jordan, completing a series of paintings and drawings based on the landscape and people they visited; a further visit to Canada with HRH followed in 2009. Paul Reid has immersed himself in the techniques of the Renaissance masters and has found his subjects in the potent imagery of the Greek Myths as recorded in Ovid. The brutality and amorality of the original stories are fecund ground for the artist to make dramatic and enigmatic images from which we are invited to derive our own, personal conclusions in witness of the hubris and nemesis, clash of cultures and wild and civilizing influences still at play in our 21st Century lives.

RSA, RSW, D.Univ. (b.1932)

His work is held in numerous public and private collections.

(b.1975)

Public Collections include: His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh Perth Museum and Art Gallery, Perth and Kinross Council University of Dundee Museum Services Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art Collection, Dundee The Fleming-Wyfold Collection, London

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ALAN ROBB

PAUL SCOTT

Alan Robb was born in Glasgow and brought up in Aberdeen; he graduated from Gray’s School of Art in 1969. Robb has had a significant career in Art Education, initially as assistant art master at Oundle School Northants, and as a lecturer in Painting at the Crawford School of Art, Cork. In 1983 he was appointed Head of School of Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, and was awarded a personal chair in 1989. Alan Robb’s current interests include reference to diverse religious iconography and symbolism drawn from his travels in Europe, India and South America. The works in From the Sublime to the Concrete are what he describes as his summer practice – the pleasure of working in the open air using all his objective experience to explore the combination of landscape and architecture.

Paul Scott lives and works in rural Cumbria. He has been a professional artist for over thirty years and is best known for his research into ceramics and print. He creates individual pieces that are exacting and critical, blurring the boundaries between fine art and design. A leading proponent of ceramics and print, he has been instrumental in demonstrating the contemporary creative potential of a combination used in industry for hundreds of years to mass-produce decorative wares and tiles. In 2010, he designed thirty linear metres of the record breaking Hanoi Mosaic Mural in Vietnam. Confected, Borrowed and Blue… an Installation by Paul Scott toured throughout 2015 – 2016 at various locations throughout the UK.

RSA, RSW (b.1946)

Public Collections include: The McManus, Dundee Royal College of Art, London Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen The Fleming Wyfold Collection, London The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums HRH, The Duke of Edinburgh Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow The Arts Council of Ireland

(b.1953)

Public Collections include: Victoria & Albert Museum, London National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh Government Art Collection, UK National Museum of Wales, Cardiff National Museum Northern Ireland, Belfast The National Museum Stockholm, Sweden The National Decorative Arts Museum, Norway Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA Tullie House Carlisle Museum and Art Gallery The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway

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GRAEME TODD

MICHAEL VISOCCHI

Graeme Todd was born in Glasgow and lives in Dunbar. He studied painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee from 1979 to 1985. He is an artist, curator and lecturer in Painting at Edinburgh College of Art. Todd employs a multi-layered approach to landscape using an additive process to build up images of landscape that are layered, congested and culturally dense. He is influenced by Oriental art and by nineteenth century romantic paintings of the sublime. In his paintings Todd works in a direct and intuitive manner to build up varnished layers of marks painted in a variety of materials. He has been the subject of several significant solo exhibitions including Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland; and Leeds Metropolitan University.

Michael Visocchi studied sculpture at Glasgow School of Art and was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy of Art at a relatively young age in 2005 and has completed a number of significant public and private commissions. He currently lives and works in Angus and the sculpture Michael creates from the surrounding landscape is a subtle reflection on this natural and man-made countryside. He works in wood, metal, card, thread, paint, rope and resin to make evocative objects. His subjects reflect nature, landscape, the built environment and the human race and he continues to explore the world of science, the character of geology and ‘place’, and the sense of human impact on habitat. In 2009, he won the coveted Jerwood Sculpture Prize.

(b.1962)

Public Collections include: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh Kunsthaus Zurich Migros Museum, Zurich Arts Council England

RSA (b.1977)

Public commissions include: The Gilt Of Cain, The City Of London West Lothian Council BBC4 World Cinema Awards, Award Design Clackmannanshire Council Merchants House of Glasgow

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ARTHUR WATSON PRSA, HRA, HRHA (b.1951)

Arthur Watson is an artist, printmaker, curator and senior lecturer at Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee.

He is currently President of the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh and is a significant figure in Scottish art. He has been described as a ‘poetic conceptualist’; his work draws on Scottish literature, music and predominately the landscape of the North East of Scotland. Born and raised in Aberdeen, he graduated from Gray’s School of Art in 1974.

An engagement with ephemeral elements within Scottish culture continues to inform my work as an artist.

Language and song, orally transmitted, landscape constantly changing in light and weather or processes, described but rarely seen, all have relevance. I am consistently challenged in embedding this content within contemporary artworks whether in print, installation or performance. This internal debate is conducted within the pages of an extended series of sketchbooks, which also guide seemingly endless reworkings, as new elements are added while original parts are modified or discarded. Each work building its own history.

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Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE CONCRETE 6-30 June 2018 The exhibition and current available works can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/landscape ISBN: 978-1-910267-80-6 Designed by www.kennethgray.co.uk Printed by Pureprint, East Sussex All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without the permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers.

Cover: Martin Greenland, Eternal, 2018, oil on canvas, 90.5 x 122 cms (cat. 21) (detail)