KG Gazette volume 6

A Sense of Place Introducing: Madeline Mackay, Christine Woodside and Patricia Cain Welcome back: Sarah Carrington and Ingebjorg Smith

gallery director Tony Davidson

gallery manager Ruth Tauber

the old kilmorack church by beauly, inverness-shire iv4 7al +44 (0) 1463 783 230 art@kilmorackgallery.co.uk www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk

Editor’s letter Winter is upon us. ‘Whoopie,’ I say. Do I care if the car has to be scraped and the drive dug out? Cold and darkness are a minor price to pay on a journey that that takes us somewhere rejuvenating. It gives us paintings like the one

by Allan MacDonald on the cover. I find hope and energy in this work. The snow and the trees give us ‘energy max.’

It says life always springs back in the New Year, but with renewed vigour.

Other artists love the Scottish winter too. The studio, even if it’s physically cold, can be a warm place. I know an artist who frequently starts painting at lunch time in the winter and will not stop until the next morning. It can be an ecstatic place where time stops.

A gallery also takes on special qualities in the winter, especially a rural one like Kilmorack. A good gallery is always full of spiritual light and warmth, even on the warmest most sunny day, it should glow, but in the winter this becomes tangible… the gallery literally becomes warmer and lighter than anything around it.

Tony Davidson Gallery Director November 2012

Yggdrasill ceramic - 133cm high

Gallery News Round Up - November 2012 These are interesting times for the art world, or maybe I should say art worlds. There is the world of Freize, the world of hyped art and celebrity, the world of accepted masters, the world of young talent. There is something worthy in the middle of all this. Here is a bit of the world of Kilmorack Gallery this November.

Come Draw With Me at the National Museum of Scotland with Helen Denerley, Kate Downie and Alan McGowan.

21 Nov 6pm - 8.30pm Share inspriration with two of Kilmorack Gallery’s artists at this event, organised by the Campaign for Drawing For more information

www.campaignfordrawing.org

Hip - mixed media - 50cm x 40cm

Kilmorack Gallery in Belgravia Many thanks to the members of the Caledonian Club in London for the opportunity to bring a bit of Scottish art to the center of the city in your wonderful buliding. show ends 27th November 2012

Gerald Laing at Sims Reed Gallery, London Gerald Laing’s show of prints dating from from the early 1960s all the way through to his death last year has just finished at Sims Reed Gallery in St James’s London. His status has once again be proven.

Time for a major retrospective at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art.

Gethsemane - screenprint - 91cm x 111cm

New work by Vronskaya: from sink to street All of Vronskaya’s work is autobiographical, or it has been since painting icons in communist Russia as a thirteen-year-old girl. She’s now moved onto painting the street scenes of Inverness and Edinburgh.

Could any artist do it better?

Some of this work is available for our Christmas exhibition.

Cockburn Street - oil on canvas - 50cm x 60cm

Dates set for Helen Denerley solo show at Kilmorack Dates are set, paper is being drawn on and scrap metal is being transformed. Next year’s big August show is of new work by Helen Denerley. This is one not to miss.

More information will be given soon. preview 9th August 2013

introducing...

Madeline Mackay Madeline MacKay is the youngest artist to have shown at Kilmorack Gallery. There is something that pulls one towards her work. It’s not just the marks created by etchings and prints, which I love, for etchings have a timeless quality. There is something else too. There is another form of maturity in her work, which I think it comes from her Caithness upbringing. Animals and archaeology are everywhere there – and there is the great skill and determination of the artist too.

Caol - etching

It is only this year that Madeline MacKay graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (Dundee), and she has already won nine significant prizes. Her future looks bright, and we greatly look forward to hanging her work here during the Christmas exhibition.

Christine Woodside The tangible world and memory come together in a Woodside painting. They remind me in part of a tapestry where motifs – birds, dogs and other bits of everyday life – are woven into the landscape or room she is painting… and the result is emotional depth and warmth.

Woodside graduated from Grays School of Art (Aberdeen) in 1963 and has exhibited professionally ever since. She has also been a resident at the wonderful Hospitalfield (1968) and is an elected member of the RSW (1993) and RGI (1999).

September Moon - mixed media - 71cm x 74cm

welcome back...

Sarah Carrington

Evening Light, towards Mull from Kilchoan - mixed media - 29cm x 59cm

It is six years since we last showed Sarah Carrington’s work and it is wonderful to have it back.

Carrington now lives in Ireland but her passion for the Scottish coast still remains, especially around Mull and Iona. This area was of

course the subject matter of artists like Cadell, but Carrington brings freshness and lightness of touch to it. It is the sketched nakedness of Carrington’s work that always fascinates me.

We see the marks but it is still

complete.

Sarah Carrington graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1999 and has been exhibiting professionally since then.

Ingebjorg Smith Few artists’ paintings are as joyful and life-affirming as those of Ingebjorg Smith. They capture the aliveness of the natural world; the flight of birds and their environment, the fox in the wood or a bathing lady in a way that at first seems simple. Do not be fooled. These are sophisticated collages. Yes, they are playful, but this is hard to achieve. There are many layers in them and hours of minute, intuitive adjustments and thirty years exhibiting since graduating f Glasgow School of Art. We have a small selection of her finest collages for the Christmas exhibition.

Frosty River Fieldfares (detail) - mixed media - 30cm x 25cm

Helen Denerley negative space August 2013

Sam Cartman solo exhibition

16th March - 27 April 2013

Standing stones i oil on board - 34cm x 42cm

Standing stones ii - oil on board - 61cm x 74cm

Patricia Cain Winner of both the Threadneedle and Aspect prizes in 2010, Patricia Cain is another new face in the Kilmorack stable. Here she shares her artistic motivations.

The main reason I’m an artist, is because I have a very strong compulsion to make things.

The way in which I do this has changed over the years but the overriding thing is to be involved in a process of making and for this reason, I am more motivated by the use of skill than I am by concept.

Working in a way where the making leads the process very often means ‘not knowing what you’re doing’, and I’ve been using drawing, painting and writing as a means of exploring the explicit and implicit aspects of my own thinking process. I’ve written about how it’s possible to examine one’s own ways of thinking through making drawings as part of my research.

My own particular process begins by allowing my eye to chose my subject matter for me, and very often I’m drawn to complex structures which through making and observing, I find myself having to make sense of. I have latterly looked to my urban environment in Glasgow where I live for my subject matter.

The more I make things, the more familiar I become with my working processes and understand how through an interaction of the known and the unknown, my thinking process evolves. I once heard James Spence say that an artist should consider himself lucky if through making art he came to know himself better, and I very much agree with his sentiment.

Trish Cain, July 2012

Seen in a different light: A Sense of Place.

In the last KG Gazette Tony suggested that the next themed show at Kilmorack might be ‘A Sense of Place’. In some ways the work of many of our artists is based on this says Ruth Tauber

Most of our artists see the world from a single place, or have a favourite area they revisit. When this changes it can be exciting for the artist and their work, the gallery and the collector too. For this year’s Christmas exhibition, Eugenia Vronskaya has produced some wonderful paintings of Inverness. This marks a change from the domestic scenes, pieces of lego, and the River Beauly which have previously been recurring in her work.

Whilst she has always painted travel pieces, the new paintings have a stronger sense of a place. There is something about the special light coming from a specific angle that makes her

painting ‘Inverness Light’ a rich depiction of a place we all know.

When she was delivering them, Vronskaya was telling me about an old photograph somebody had shown her, of the bridge that crossed the Ness at the end of the High Street which was replaced in the 60s. The paintings are instilled with this sense of history.

The longer one stays in a place, the more heavily infused certain things become with meaning, little bits of fact and history that embellish the scene before you. Like the light that pushes through the gaps in the buildings in Eugenia’s painting, it is these little details that give one a sense of place.

Sam Cartman’s work also has a strong sense of place, though in his case this is not a particular place, but a composite of memories. Through looking at his painting technique, we can understand how this comes about.

Cartman often begins by looking at photographs and selects some elements from which to build up his composition. Once this has been mapped out, he begins working with paint. When asked if he would try other mediums, Cartman’s response was, ‘I’m not finished with paint yet, I have not found out all the things it can do.’

Indeed it is the handling of paint that makes Cartman’s work so interesting. It becomes more than

mountain can be painted three times, yet each painting can bring a new detail to light.

Michel Faber once said of his work ‘Let me try to show you the amazing things I have just seen, they seem to say.’ Allan is always out in the landscape, in all weathers, paint and canvas in hand, making a record of the place on that particular day. We should be grateful that it is he and not us that is out in the rain, and we get to see the results.

An artist cannot paint without having some roots in a place, and we are lucky to have artists whose connection to their home runs deeper. a landscape when we realise the sky is laid on thickly with a palette knife, stopping just shy of the horizon line.

Perspective is very important in his work. Perhaps it comes from beginning by looking at photographs, but the sense of perspective – which can be a sweep of road or the angle of a building – is the lead in to the place. Like all good paintings, there is some element you can’t quite put your finger on that brings a sense of a particular place.

Allan MacDonald has been revisiting the same places for years, yet each new body of work he produces sees these mountains and trees in a different light. It is no secret that the low light of winter is more inspiring to him, but that the same mountain can be painted so many times without any repetition, is testament to his skill in capturing the intransient aspects of landscape. The components he pulls out are different to those of Cartman, but equally arresting.

MacDonald is more drawn to the intangible. The splashes from the surf, a passing cloud or the

impending storm are treated with reverent sensitivity.

MacDonald’s work always holds a balance of darkness and light which, to anyone who has ever visited or lived in the Highlands, is very important. The seasons here are more extreme, the weather changes faster. It is these divine elements, and their changing nature, that inspire Allan’s work.

It is for this reason that the same

Strollilng Helen Fay etching 21cm x 17cm

the old kilmorack church by beauly, inverness-shire iv4 7al +44 (0) 1463 783 230 art@kilmorackgallery.co.uk www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk