Frederic Church & Tait + Tait

'Niagara Falls, from the American Side', 1867, by Frederic Church

THIS FEATURE APPEARED IN THE HERALD'S ARTS SUPPLEMENT ON 11/05/13

THROUGH AMERICAN EYES: FREDERIC CHURCH AND THE LANDSCAPE OIL SKETCH

Scottish National Gallery

The Mound, Edinburgh
0131 624 6200
www.nationalgalleries.org

Until 8 September 2013

Admission free

Niagara Falls, from the American Side, painted in 1867, by the great American landscape artist, Frederic Church, is a real show stopper of a painting.

As an adult, I’ve stood in front of this gigantic painting at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, just as I did as a wee girl of nine-years-old looking at the real thing from the Canadian side, and marvelled at its sheer scale and power.

Church was a member of the Hudson River School, a group of American painters who started the country’s great tradition of landscape painting. For artists of Church calibre, a highly finished painting was the one thing which would guarantee critical and well as commercial acclaim. This one did, with knobs on.

Church was 40 and at the peak of his powers when he received a commission to paint a large work for the Exposition Universelle in Paris of 1867.

Ever the showman (described as Barnumesque by one critic of the day), Church decided to return to a theme, the Niagara Falls, for which he was already well-known, having painted it several times to great acclaim in the late 1850s.

A compulsive sketcher in oil paint, many on-the-spot studies made from 1856 to 1859 from both the American and Canadian sides of the Falls, are on show in this unique, quieter view, of the man often referred to as ‘the American Turner’.

These sketches include a hybrid study made in August 1858 called Niagara from the American Side, which shows how Church was using the relatively new science of photography to help him in his work.

Almost in the same way that artists now use Apps as a tool, Church painted over a small (32.7cm by 29.5cm) albumen print which he may have bought as a souvenir during his 1856 visit. 

He is clearly exploring the possibilities of tonal values, perspective and experimenting with a vivid turquoise which would find its way – a decade later, into the much-loved painting which is in the collection of the Scottish National Gallery.

This gigantic painting, now temporarily situated at the bottom of a stairwell leading up to the gallery known as the Impressionist room, having arrived home after being on loan as part of the same exhibition at The National Gallery in London, provides a grand opening welcome to the 25 smaller oil sketches by Church on show in Edinburgh from today.

The sketches talk out Church’s roving painting expeditions throughout his own country and on to the Arctic Circle, Ecuador, Jordan, Jamaica and Europe.

This large finished painting of Niagara was never shown in Paris, but when it was exhibited in London in 1868, it created a sensation. It was duly acquired by a Scots-American businessman, John S. Kennedy, who gifted it to the gallery in Edinburgh in 1868.

Astonishingly (but perhaps the reason Church is not so well known on this side of the Atlantic), it remains the only major work by Church in a European public collection.

Young Frederic Church, born to a wealthy jeweller father in Hartford, Connecticut, was a precocious talent from an early age.

His mentor, the great American landscape artist, Thomas Cole, said of him; ‘he had the finest eye for drawing in the world’ and in keeping for the great 19th century passion for the plein-air oil sketch, Church was a prolific and accomplished exponent of this art.

He told his teacher at one point, of all employments, I think it is the most delightful.’

His output was constant from the late 1840s until his death in 1900.

Michael Clarke, director of the National Gallery of Scotland, likens Church’s place in the art firmament of his day as being a bit like the way we view Sir David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries today.
“His large paintings were intended to knock you out,” he states. “It was a bit like him saying, ‘you wanna see the Arctic – I'm your man!’

“America was very bound up with its own landscape at the time. There were moral overtones to it and of course there was a desire within Church’s land to be free from Europe.”

One of the most enduring images of the Civil War was his 1861 oil sketch, Our Banner in the Sky. Depicting a blood-orange night scene in which the Union Flag is embodied by a flash of greenish star-spangled sky against a livid yellow striped sunset, this natural-born stars and stripes is attached to a lone spindly tree. The sketch affirmed his support for the Northern cause and also re-enforced Church’s deeply held religious beliefs.

A print of this image sold in its thousands and this exhibition offers the opportunity to view the original in all its glory.

Clarke also alludes to the private sorrow of Church, the family man, who escaped to Jamaica in 1865 with his wife Isabel, following the death from diphtheria of their two eldest children. “He came to Jamaica to grieve,” he explains, “and the four sketches from Jamaica on show are stunning.”

Seeing Church within the historical context of an era when America was asserting its independence amidst a background of a rapidly changing world in which old orders were being challenged, is key to viewing this vital body of work with a fresh pair of eyes.

'Mother', a collaborative work by husband & wife
Erlend & Pamela Tait

Erlend & Pamela Tait: Duologue
Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts Kelly Gallery
118 Douglas Street, Glasgow
0141 248 6386
www.royalglasgowinstitute.org
Until May 25

The idea of working with your other half is an anathema to many of us; especially when the individuals concerned are artists. Surely the clash would be seismic?

Although they work in different rooms of the house they share in the Black Isle, Erlend and Pamela Tait, have only just begun to combine their respective talents.
Duologue is the result; a two-person exhibition of new paintings by Tait and Tait.

They describe it as ‘a visual conversation between two artists who work alongside each other’, and there is a real sense of what can only be described as togetherness in a new body of work now on show at the RGI Kelly Gallery, just off Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow.

The aim when they started preparing the work was to have ten paintings by Pamela, ten by Erlend and ten by ‘Pamela Erlend’. In the end, they produced almost 40 works.

While working, the two would pass the work to and fro. “Sometimes one of us would get stuck,” says Pamela, “and then the other would take up the brush and ‘fix’ it.

“Then in was easier for the other to carry on.”

There are common themes and style. Less portraiture than images of detached heads, sometimes set in expansive landscapes or cloudy skies, these new works allude to themes of alienation and transcendence.

Erlend Tait’s drawings and paintings combine images of the human head with symbolism and pattern. 

The product of what he calls ‘a healthy diet of heavy metal, comics, science fiction and horror films, references are made to mythology, religion and the occult.

His works in this show are painted in acrylic on watercolour paper, and combine a love of anatomical representation with techniques developed over years of working in the tradition of stained glass painting and staining.

In recent years, Pamela Tait has concentrated on drawing out the state of ‘being a woman’ in her kooky but cool depiction of females heads.

This new body of work sees a change in medium and a development in theme and style, where pattern and a sense of place and purpose are of more significance than before.

Each says that working with the other has led to a different place in their own work and interestingly, it is easy to tell at a glance which one is an Erlend, which is a Pamela and which is a Pamela Erlend.

The art of looking, not seeing...

Autumn Journey by Sandra Moffat, 48cmx48cm, £595

Brand New Day by Sandra Moffat, mixed media, 42cmX43cm, £595

Every day, I walk my dog in the woods around my home. Occasionally, we stray further from home. These walks give me time to reflect.

Last year, on 366 consecutive days, I wrote a haiku, a short three line poem consisting of 5/7/5 syllables per line. One of the principles of this Japanese art form is to muse on the changing seasons, so my walks on the same beaten path gave me ample opportunity to do this.

I used to walk along counting out syllables on my fingers and talking to myself. Just as well it’s only me, the dog, a few deer, loads of burds, and odd wily fox in the woods.

Recently, I read that the great 19th century American philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, said that to observe change in nature, you should repeat the same journey every day.

This year, in early March, missing the daily creative discipline of the haiku, I subscribed to Edinburgh-based online daily photo journal site, Blipfoto as http://www.blipfoto.com/JournoJan

The woods are yet again providing a source of inspiration and I’ve found myself fascinated by the patterns and shapes which the bare tree trunks and branches make, set against the ploughed fields beyond the wood.

Sometimes my job writing and finding out about art exhibitions and artists collides with the things I am looking at in these ‘blips’ in my day.

This week, I have been looking at the work of Glasgow-based artist, Sandra Moffat, the featured artist in The Green Gallery at Buchlyvie’s summer exhibition.

The exhibition opens this Sunday and runs until June 23.

Sandra’s new work is rooted in nature and covers all the seasons. It almost mirrors what I have been looking at and thinking about when I’m out and about in the woods and further afield.

Evening Light by Sandra Moffat, 45cmx38cm,  £495

Armies of trees standing to attention with the sun throwing a new day’s light through their ranks, reflections of branches and leaves in water, neatly ploughed fields set against a raggedy bunch of trees, or the end of a day in which tree shapes are mirrored in livid blue as the night sky encroaches.

Her paintings have titles such as Brand New Day, Autumn Journey and Evening Light.

Sandra’s work has a very tactile feel. She paints on surfaces which are heavily textured. Layering different papers on one another and then making that her prepared surface for painting and drawing on.

Her early influences, she says, were her mother and her art teacher at secondary school. Her mum was a primary school teacher and used to do crafts with her her at home, cutting out and sticking on layers to build collage-style paintings

Later, at Glasgow School of Art, despite wanting to pursue pure painting as an option, she ended up in the Embroidered and Woven Textile Department and this shift in expectation led Sandra to the point where she is in her art right now. 

Always looking. Not just seeing. 

She views as a happy default and I’m inclined to agree. It’s beautiful work. 

Green Gallery owner, Becky Walker, has a keen eye for artists working away quietly on work which deserves to be seen by a wider audience. She's also celebrating 21 years in business with this exhibition. Her mum, Ann Johnston, set up the Green Gallery in nearby Aberfoyle  and Becky has since transposed it to her family home in Buchlyve,

It's a gorgeous setting for a gallery (and a home) overlooking Ben Lomond. 

For this summer exhibition, she has also lined up work by gallery favourites, old and new, including; Marion Drummond, Gordon Wilson, Pam Glennie, Nikki Monaghan, Kelly-Anne Cairns and Amaryliss Johnston.

AND, I've got Becky 'blipping' too as http://www.blipfoto.com/gallerygirl1

The eyes have it..

Summer Exhibition

Featuring Sandra Moffat, Marion Drummond and gallery artists

The Green Gallery

The Coachhouse, Ballamenoch, Buchlyvie, Stirlingshire, FK8 3NX

01360 850180

www.greengallery.com

Opens Sunday May 12, 2pm-5pm 

Early bird viewing 11-5pm on Saturday 11th May

My own upside down trees... 

Annette Edgar at The Union Gallery

Where Are We Going To by Annette Edgar
(Oil on linen 26X26cm)

Annette Edgar: Life Times

Union Gallery

45 Broughton Street, Edinburgh

www.uniongallery.co.uk

Until June 3

I WROTE THIS AS A FOREWORD TO THE CATALOGUE WHICH ACCOMPANIES ANNETTE EDGAR'S NEW EXHIBITION

IN Annette Edgar’s house in Glasgow, there is a huge (and hugely impressive) painting of a figure; a runner. 

This runner pulses with energy, bursting out of the canvas like an Olympic athlete escaping from a starting block.

The work dates back to the early 1990s, when Annette – a tiny figure who admits that the very thought of jogging is an anathema to her – was exploring the power of the human spirit in a series of paintings of runners.

Although Annette has an innate feeling for the figure, she moved away from them for several years. Instead, she used colour (and occasionally monochrome) to translate her unique painterly version of the world around her onto the four sides of a canvas.

Her paintings in this interim figure-free period reveal a tightly composed dreamscape which often breaks with the convention of what should and shouldn’t work. She seemed to solve the problem – posed by one of her painting heroes, Picasso – of how a grown-up artist retains the natural artistic flair of a child.

I am lucky enough to own a couple of Annette’s paintings. They have titles which shouldn’t work. Yet work they do. There’s Pink Tree River and Winter Meadow. 

Both throb with energy and colour, yet at the same time, I find myself losing myself in them. It’s almost as though the paintings are sheltering me.

If my house was on fire, after I’d made sure that my children were safe, I’d probably try to rescue these paintings.

Annette uses elements on collage in her artworks, which contain layers of meaning and concealed treasures. Annette is a wordsmith as well as a fine artist and if you seek, you will find nuggets of poetry in among the paint.

Recently, the figure has crept back into her work. 

In contrast to the restless, energetic figures which once peopled her paintings, the new figures are quieter and more contemplative.

Couples coory in, or laze in the sun; conscious of one another, yet comfortable in each other’s company. There are lone figures too but they have a casual sense of repose. Annette is a master of suggesting a feeling, not to mention a sense of place, with a stroke of vivid colour.

All her figures nestle in a sea of saturated colour. It is the Edgar trademark. One of the many aspects of her work which I love is the fact that if you isolate sections of her paintings, it looks abstract. No mean feat – yet she makes it look effortless.

Annette Edgar is one of these artists who should be better known than she is in her native land. Her work packs a punch and holds your hand at the same time.

Therein lies its strength.

Carol Bove & Sue Biazotti

Carol Bove during the installation of her
exhibition, The Foamy Saliva of a Horse,
at The Common Guild in Glasgow (Pic © Jan Patience)

THIS FEATURE APPEARED IN THE HERALD'S SATURDAY ARTS SUPPLEMENT ON 20/4/13

Carol Bove: The Foamy Saliva of a Horse

The Common Guild

21 Woodlands Terrace, Glasgow

0141 574 6740

www.thecommonguild.org.uk

Until June 29 (Tue-Sat)

When I meet Carol Bove, she is crouched over a small sea of peacock feathers.

The feathers are being re-assembled on the wooden floor boards of a large airy room at The Common Guild, the townhouse turned gallery in Glasgow's Park district owned by artist Douglas Gordon.

Brooklyn-based Bove is in Glasgow to instal The Foamy Saliva of a Horse, a critically acclaimed exhibition which was first seen two years ago at the 54th Venice Biennale. This is the first time Bove’s work has been seen in Scotland.

Foamy Saliva consists of a private museum of objects; made, found and rescued, which Bove has placed together in a harmonious blend of classical meets conceptual art.

Bove observes that putting this show on in a Victorian Glasgow townhouse is a very different experience from installing it in a medieval rope factory in Venice.

“In Venice, I was literally at the furthest flung end of the building, which was once used for making endless lengths if cord for the shipbuilding industry,” she explains. “You had to see a lot of art before you got to me!”

Bove is a refreshing mix of upfront Californian easiness (she was brought up in Berkeley, California) and complex intellectual. 

The exhibition title is taken from ancient Greek folklore and describes an incident which saw the painter Apelles trying to paint... the foamy saliva if a horse. It is said he was so enraged at his failure to do so that he threw the sponge he was cleaning his brushes with at his picture, thus producing the desired effect.

Bove takes the element of chance, marries it up with a love of the ancient arts and a cool intelligent eye, then brings it to bear on this exhibition.

When you enter the building, with its elegant spiral staircase and high ceilings, your gaze turns to a chipped and browny-white ageing polystyrene, hovering in the stairwell from a large rusty I-beam on the floor above. 

I-beams are generally used to support the first floor of a house, and this one gives the split-level exhibition a gentle sense of equilibrium.

In the downstairs room, with all but one of the shutters closed, Bove has placed several objects; including a piece of driftwood suspended in a polished bronze frame, a curvaceous rusty oil drum, found, like many of the objects, on the banks of the Hudson near her home in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a delicate 'curtain' woven by Bove using thousands of tiny silver links and an upright piece of driftwood with rusting handles reeking deliciously of bitumen.  A small sculpture, like a bonsai tree with various exotic shells for 'leaves', sits on the mantelpiece.

Upstairs in a large airy room with a giant bay window overlooking Glasgow and the hills beyond, there are more assemblages, including the peacock feathers on the floor and metallic zig-zag fretted screen, through which the work in this room, including the peacock feathers arranged on the floor and another shell sculpture can be viewed. And reviewed.

The curious thing about all the objects here is that they seem to change with the weather outside, or as you look through patterned frets, or even if you just walk to a different part of the room.

Though disparate, they gel together and stay in your mind long after you have left the building. This acid test of whether an exhibition ‘hangs together’ makes it a richly satisfying experience to view. And to experience.

Sue Biazotti always brings the light... hanging her one-day
show at The Lighthouse in Glasgow

Sue Biazotti: Hope Street

The Lighthouse

Mitchell St, Glasgow

07909 504276 www.suebiazotti.com

www.citydarkandlight.com 

Now available to view by appointment by emailing Sue on suelbb@aol.com

Perhaps it the ghost of her grandfather, Scotch Whisky industry pioneer James Barclay, channelling its way into her art, but for a new series of paintings of Glasgow city centre in the 21st century, Sue Biazotti has conjured up a vision of what could almost be smoggy Glasgow in the 1930s and 40s.

In a series of 22 paintings called Hope Street, Biazotti, who won the Aspect Prize in 2005, has tried to find a way to paint ‘how she feels about Glasgow’. The paintings are going on show for one day only a week today at The Lighthouse in Glasgow.
When they come down, she is planning to hang them in her house in Glasgow’s west end, where people can make an appointment to come and view them.

Biazotti was born in Glasgow, but grew up in Gartocharn in Stirlingshire. She then went on to train at Edinburgh College of Art and lived in London for a decade, where she met her Brazillian husband, Jaime, a film-maker.

“We came to live in Glasgow when our children were young,” she explains, “and it only struck me in the last year or so that I have a strange relationship with this city in which I was born, which is why I set out to paint it. 

“I’ve found that I’ve thought about my grandpa a lot as I’ve been working on this series. Strangely, he had his offices near to Hope Street. I used to see Glasgow as quite a dark and foreboding place when I was a child. I think this is all coming out in the work.”

There may be darkness in these paintings, but it is balanced out by a lightness of being, which those who know Biazotti’s work will recognise as her signature touch. 

June Carey, Garry Fabian Miller & Liz Knox

June Carey Animo Affictus pastel, 102cmx137cm

THIS FEATURE APPEARED IN THE HERALD'S SATURDAY ARTS SUPPLEMENT ON 27/04/13

June Carey: A Traveller’s Dreams

The Meffan Museum and Art Gallery

20 West High Street, Forfar

01307 476 482

www.angus.gov.uk & www.junecarey.com

Until May 25

It’s always fascinating to see early work by artists whose work you think you know. Recently, I was lucky enough to take a walk through June Carey’s life’s work when she was collating it in the compact and perjinct garage meets studio from which she works from in the back garden of her home in Stirling.

Carey has been working like a demon in this space in the last few months ahead of a major exhibition of her work at The Meffan Museum and Art Gallery in Forfar.

More than 70 works, including drawings, etchings, paintings and three dimensional works by Carey, dating from the 1960s onwards, go on show from today in the Angus town.

Seeing Carey’s early work; self-portraits and figurative work dating back to the days when she attended Glasgow School of Art (GSA) in the early 1960s alongside the likes of life-long friend, John Byrne, gives an indication of Carey’s talent as a draughtswoman.

Her early figures reveal a sure hand and eye. Looking at them after more than 50 years, and with the benefit of hindsight, she claims now that she was lacking direction for many years.

“It has been quite an experience looking out my old work,” she says. “Some of it is very dark. I see it now and I realise I was always putting down my fears on paper.”

Darkness does loom. But there is always light beside shade. There are monochrome works of figures hiding behind curtains, doll’s heads looming out of shadows, female figures with water creeping up past their heads – fishes swimming around their ears. 

Imagery with which we can associate ourselves.

Carey left GSA without graduating but she went on the study at Edinburgh College of Art from 1978-1982.

It was during this period (a time when she was also busy bringing up a young family) that she discovered etching. It was this discovery which, she says, finally set her free as an artist.

"Because I couldn't see what I was doing, I wasn't so inhibited," she explains. "I was able to sort out things I couldn't speak about. 

“I always did a lot of figurative work; drawing and painting. But I wasn't satisfied. I started etching and the flood gates opened. Most people wear a mask. I know I do and making etchings somehow showed me that I had to get behind the mask.”

The act of travelling, be it through her own imagination or in reality, to countries as diverse as Malta, Mexico, Indonesia, Spain, Cyprus, Italy, Singapore, India, Bali, Quebec and Poland, sparks off in Carey a need to communicate through her art.

Recently, she has started a new series of work inspired by her own Scottish culture.

The many diverse cultures she has encountered not only feed her imagination, but have proved pivotal to the development of her work. 

Constantly rooting around in her psyche to get to the truth of what has shaped her as a human being has taken this restless creative soul on a phantasmagorical voyage of discovery.

Carey’s work is direct yet complex. Full of motifs and hidden depths. 

Figures lie at the heart of her art, but they are never alone. Recurring motifs include; masks, heads (sometimes double-heads), fishes , birds, paper hats, icons , tattoos, masks, keys, moons, hearts, wings and even the belching towers of Grangemouth, which sit just a stone's throw from her Stirling home.

Recently Scottish heraldry has begun to creep into her etchings and paintings. With the magnificently refurbished Stirling Castle on her doorstep and a Referendum on Independence looming, perhaps this is no surprise. Stained glass windows in the nearby Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum have also caught her attention.

No subject-matter is safe from her watchful eye. This is a woman who is as energised by Polish pylons as she is by lines of Latin verse. 

No-one else could mimic the freshness she brings to her creations, which manifest themselves in a dizzying mix of mediums, from pastel to, paint, etching, digital print or 3d. Sometimes all the mediums fuse brilliantly in one glorious creation.

As with all Carey’s work, her initial ideas work their way into a very different outcome from the one she envisaged.

Looking through June's work over several decades, it's clear there has been a voyage around herself taking place.

It’s a constant process. She will sit and watch TV and create a pair of Wishing Shoes just to keep her hands busy. These sparkly beaded shoes have found their way to Forfar and your shoes should do the same thing. It will be worth the journey...

  

Garry Fabian Miller: The Middle Place

Ingleby Gallery

15 Calton Road, Edinburgh

0131 556 4441

www.inglebygallery.com

Until July 13

In 1984, Garry Fabian Miller, stopped trying to capture life on the edge through the medium of a camera. From that point on, he has been one of the leading artists on the world stage working in camera-less photography.

In many ways, he had been moving towards this for years. At the age of just 16, in 1973, the Bristol-born artist was commissioned by housing charity, Shelter, to photograph the homeless in Bristol and throughout Gloucestershire.

The following summer, he set off with his camera on a journey by foot across the Shetland Islands just as the old ways were about to change forever with the coming of the oil industry. 

As a ‘veteran’ of 19, he started taking photographs from a fixed point on the roof of his house in Cleveden, near Bristol. In this body of work, which became Sections of England: The Sea Horizon, his camera remained at a fixed point looking out over the Severn Estuary, with lens, film and exposure remaining constant.

It was his first major body of work and was shown at London’s Serpentine Gallery as well as the Arnolfini in Bristol.
In the intervening years, Miller’s work has been about trying to capture life at the edge of existence or points in a real or imagined landscape on the verge of disappearing altogether.

He explains: “What my work is about is to try and create a thinking space and also a kind of space one can slide into and disappear into and perhaps not come back from.

“I want the thing which appears to come with a grace and a simplicity as if it’s always been there and for me that should be an aspiration as if it’s just emerged into the world.”

Miller’s camera-less images which veer into luminous, glowing abstraction, are all about chasing the light.

In an era in which almost everyone has a camera in the palm of their hand in the form of a mobile phone, Miller strips back the art of photography to capture the excitement and possibilities presented when it was an art-form in its infancy. His experiments with nature and light positively pulsate with vigour and pull the viewer in by stealth.

In this new exhibition at Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery, where he last showed two years ago, a complete sequence of forty works from Sections of England: The Sea Horizon, will be shown for the first time.
There is a timeless, spiritual quality to these early images which continues to resonate in Miller’s more contemporary work, the largest collection of which is held by the V&A Museum in London. There is a timeless, spiritual quality to these early images which continues to resonate in Miller’s more contemporary work, the largest collection of which is held by the V&A Museum in London.

Liz Knox
The Edinburgh Gallery
20A Dundas Street, Edinburgh
0131 557 5002
www.art-edinburgh.com
Until May 25

As anyone who saw her major retrospective exhibition at the Maclaurin Galleries in Ayr last year can confirm, Liz Knox is a singular artist whose rigorous approach to her art mixes intelligence with an in-built feeling for form and composition.

Knox is known for her subtle still lifes, but she is also a master of landscape and her figurative work is sublime.

Early figures shown at her retrospective – some dating back to her student days at Edinburgh College of Art in the late 60s and early 70s where she studied under painting giants such as Sir Robin Philipson and David Michie – reveal a bravura approach to getting under the surface of her chosen subject.

Fans of Knox’s work are in for a treat when she presents her first solo show with the Edinburgh Gallery in the capital’s art quarter of Dundas Street from today.
This exhibition has 18 paintings and according to owner, Catherine Grilli, the four still lifes on show here are true Knox ‘statement’ pieces.

“Three Times Table, Windows and Sunflowers Canal Venice and Canal really are statement pieces. Everything is placed so exactly and beautifully, drawing you into the painting while the subtle tones in the back drop are full of surprises

“I admire the wonderful colours, and the composition in Liz Knox's work and I see the way that once people look at the work, they keep going back to discover more gems within. 

“In this exhibition, there is so much beautifully executed detail. Each painting is totally individual and captivating.”

Stephen Sutcliffe: Outwork

THIS INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN SUTCLIFFE APPEARED IN THE HERALD'S SATURDAY ARTS SUPPLEMENT ON 4/05/13

Stephen Sutcliffe: Outwork

Tramway 2

25 Albert Drive, Glasgow

0845 330 3501
www.tramway.org
Tramway 2
Until June 30

Meeting Stephen Sutcliffe in his top floor tenement flat overlooking Alexandra Park in Glasgow’s east end on a fresh spring morning feels like I have stepped into one of his film collages. In fact, I expect to see excerpts from our interview – perhaps a grainy scan of these words you are reading now – cut into a future project.

He has form in this respect. For years, Sutcliffe has been collecting the ‘Tell us what you think’ cards from galleries. 

In his collage-based film, Outwork, which he has reconfigured as a three-screen installation for a new exhibition at Glasgow's Tramway which opens today, Sutcliffe has placed out-takes from 1981 comedy, The Cannonball Run, starring Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett, Sammy Davis Junior and Roger Moore, within the frame of a selection of said ‘Tell us’ cards.

It gives a knockabout feel to Outwork, which by his own admission is a mix of high and low culture; like much of his work to date. Harrogate-born Sutcliffe, who studied drawing and painting at Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (DoJCA) as a mature student before moving to Glasgow where he gained an MFA from Glasgow school of Art, is now a major figure in the world of contemporary art films. 

His work has been shown at Tate Britain and the Whitechapel Gallery in London and he was even invited in 2010, in partnership with the Serpentine Gallery, to design for luxury knitwear brand, Pringle, along with the likes of Turner prize nominee, David Shrigley, celebrated Scots polymath Alasdair Gray and actress, Tilda Swinton.

Outwork, winner of the third Margaret Tait Award, takes its name from an essay by French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, in which he questions the necessity of literary prefaces.

This is classic Sutcliffe territory. He brings a geekish fascination with high culture, in the shape of high priest-types such as Derrida, English poet Christopher Logue, German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and influential sociologist Erving Hoffman, and blends it with his own cultural reference points gleaned from a 70s and 80s childhood spent watching too much television.

Sutcliffe, who worked as a cashier in a bank until the age of 25, claims he didn’t read at all until he left school. For someone whose flat is awash with books, as well as videos, this is quite a statement

“Jaws was one of one of first books I read,” he explains. “After I’d left school, my granny got a box of books from the library and it was in there. I don’t think I realised that it was a book before it was a film, even though I’d watched it several times by then.”

Reading Jaws, quite literally, opened the floodgates for Sutcliffe. “A friend of mine says he got into high culture through pop music, but I always think I got into it through television,” he explains.

While Sutcliffe worked in the bank by day, he was reading voraciously by night. He also started painting with a school friend who had gone to art school in Hull. “He was so cool,” he recalls. “It made me want to go to art school too.”
He applied to do a foundation course at Batley School of Art in West Yorkshire and from there, applied to study in Dundee, because he says he had read that outside London, the Scottish art colleges were the best.

“I think my enthusiasm got in,” he laughs. “I talked and talked. I’m not the most technically adept. I always felt I was running to catch up.”

Sutcliffe is perhaps being falsely modest as he received a first class honours degree from DoJCA. He stayed in Dundee for a few years after graduating, working with the artist-led group, Generator Projects, before moving to Glasgow in 2000 to study on the prestigious Master of Fine Arts course at GSA.

For this new exhibition at Tramway, Sutcliffe Outwork is an installation for multiple screens, including new animated sequences and exerts from previous films as a form of subtle notation to the film.

As he admits, you don’t really have to know about the background to a Sutcliffe film for it to ‘work’ as a viewer. I would say – having now talked to him at length about his high/low culture magpie approach to making his work – that it helps.

Sutcliffe is like the guy you meet in the pub with whom you have a laugh over some old Monty Python sketch, or the merits of Charlie’s Angels versus Starsky and Hutch, before moving on to him telling you about a seemingly intellectual book which sounds – for all its academic weight – like it should be your next book at bedtime.

“I like stuff that is problematic,” he says. “Perfect works are really boring. Stuff which is universally accepted as being great, I find quite annoying. I always describe myself as a collage artist, not a filmmaker because there are different films in same frame.

“The essence of collage is that things sit together with shocking dissonance. When it is too complimentary, it doesn't work. I like the mix of low and high culture. I stand up for both high and low culture!”

Joan Eardley

Nets and Salmon Cart, by Joan Eardley,1962

THIS FEATURE APPEARED IN THE HERALD ARTS SUPPLEMENT GALLERIES SECTION, WHICH I CURRENTLY WRITE EVERY WEEK, ON MARCH 30.

Joan Eardley

The Scottish Gallery

16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh

0131 558 1200

www.scottishgallery.co.uk

April 3-27

“I always identify Joan with the sea, and it is a valid identification. There is the gentle sunlit sea one delights in, in the summer. And even in bad weather it is still a summer sea. This was the Joan that I think everyone knew. This is the sea most people know. But there is the magnificent winter sea, in all its indomitable grandeur and the wild, turbulent and terrifying splendour. This was Joan too.”

These words were written about the painter Joan Eardley by her friend Audrey Walker, not long after she died in 1963, at the age of just 42.

As recently revealed in The Herald, Walker – a sheriff's wife and also a talented musician who gave up her career to raise her family – was also Eardley’s lover. 

This fact is not dealt with salaciously in a new book about Eardley, written by Christopher Andreae. It is in there as part of a bigger picture painted of a remarkable Scottish artist, along with Walker’s tribute which has never been published before. 

Most moving of all are letters written to Walker by Eardley on a daily basis when she was living and working in the north east coastal village of Catterline.

The letters are gentle and loving. (‘Dear dear you,’ she writes to Walker at one point, ‘I love you so much. It is often almost too painful to be away from you for so long.’

For my part, as a fan – and there are legions of us guarding her memory fiercely – reading them made me love Eardley more as an artist and as a human being.

Today, 50 years after her death, the passion which lies within Eardley’s paintings continues to fascinate viewers. 

Born in Sussex to a Scots mother and an English father, who was gassed in the first world war and who committed suicide when Joan was eight and her sister, Pat, was six, the all-female Eardley family moved to Bearsden following the outbreak of war in 1939.

She went on to be a star pupil at Glasgow School of Art. By the time of her death in 1963, her work was heading towards abstract expressionism and her work was being recognised outside Scotland.

In 2007, a major exhibition of her work at the National Gallery of Scotland (NGoS) wowed a new generation who came to her work for the first time.

In the large gallery space on The Mound, Eardley’s Catterline seascapes possessed a power which was almost bewitching. Viewers familiar with Joan Eardley’s portraits of Glasgow street kids from the 1950s and early 1960s suddenly saw this artist through fresh eyes.

This Wednesday (April 3), a new exhibition of Eardley’s work, the first major display of her paintings since the retrospective, opens in The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. 

This exhibition coincides with the publication of Andreae’s new illustrated monograph on Eardley and already, almost half the work has been sold.

This exhibition spans the full gamut of Eardley’s output, and features rare early works from her travels to France and Italy on travelling scholarships, studies of children in inner city Glasgow and on-the-spot paintings made in Catterline.

The late works in this exhibition hint at the artist she may have been had she lived.

The last year of her life was, in her own words, propelling her art towards the place which ‘hangs between reality and abstraction’.

Some of the work has not been seen in public since the 1964 memorial exhibition held by the Scottish Gallery, which had a close association with Eardley during her lifetime.

According to Christina Jansen, director of The Scottish Gallery, there are works on show which have never been seen in public before.

“These are really paintings which need to be seen on the walls,” she says. “Looking at Joan Eardley’s work online doesn’t compare to seeing it in front of you. She was not painting for anyone else; she was painting for herself. She could also do it on any scale – working with what she had in front of her.

“One of the wonderful things about the new book about Joan is hearing her voice. The way she writes is so unpretentious. There’s a bit in the book in which she talks about standing rooted to the spot, painting. Not moving; returning to it day after day, so that she made her own mark on the land, leaving her painting paraphernalia all around her. The way she describes it is almost cinematic. It’s almost as though she is going back to pre-history – just like the landscape around Catterline.”

This new book will delight her fans. The fact she has been ‘outed’ half a century after her death is incidental. What is important about this aspect of the book, is the way in which it paints a more rounded picture of her as a human being and as an artist who painted intense emotion into her artworks.

This exhibition, alongside a second exhibition of Eardley’s work at The Portland Gallery in London which opens on May 1, presents buyers and admirers alike with the opportunity to see Eardley’s work up close.

One of the additional highlights is a 22 minute colour film featuring Eardley called Three Scottish Painters made in 1964, which will be showing in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. The gallery website also has a wealth of material which will delight fans.