Amongst The Trees

Amongst the Trees

Andrea Geile at ArcelorMittal, 2022

Photograph: Sandra Beckefeldt

Amongst the Trees

Amongst the Trees is a celebration of creativity and the diverse ways in which artists engage with their natural and man-made surroundings. Trees have played a multifaceted role in art history, serving as symbols, subjects, and vehicles for emotional expression across different artistic movements and styles. Their enduring presence in art reflects humanity’s deep-rooted connection to nature and the everevolving relationship between humans and their environment.

Scottish-based sculptor Andrea Geile was the subject of a major retrospective in her hometown of Bremen, Germany in 2023, and we wanted to commemorate this milestone in The Gallery. Geile is a trailblazing sculptor, renowned for her innovative work in Corten steel, a material now synonymous with her distinctive style. Geile also brings her expertise in landscape gardening to her practice evident in numerous public commissions throughout the UK. Geile’s work will be displayed throughout The Gallery and outdoor spaces, creating a sculptural garden.

Amidst the sculptures, we have carefully selected and curated contemporary and modern paintings and objects which include established artists and introduce new talents less familiar, such as Sheila Anderson Hardy from the Scottish Borders, the Behrens family from Pittenweem, David Rae from Edinburgh and Pascale Rentsch from East Lothian. As we anticipate Victoria Crowe’s 80th birthday in 2025, we have assembled a capsule collection

featuring her early and mid-career paintings and prints. These offer insight into Crowe’s early years in Scotland and her evolving relationship with the landscape. Among the modern artists is Adam Bruce Thomson (1885-1976), a former war veteran and lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art. Currently, a retrospective of Thomson’s work is on display at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh. Regarded as a prominent figure within the Edinburgh School, Thomson was a painter of great integrity whose long, productive life tells the story of Scottish painting for the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Within the heart of the exhibition, we are delighted to present a significant new body of work by the creative duo Ash & Plumb. Crafted from oak and ash, their vessels serve to complement and enhance the overarching theme of our exhibition.

Amongst the Trees also pays tribute to Hugo Burge (1972-2023) the British entrepreneur, philanthropist, and art lover, who together with his father renovated Marchmont House in the Scottish Borders and made a significant home for artists and creators. The exhibition includes rush seating from the Marchmont Studios and pots from the Redbraes Pottery. The Hugo Burge Foundation is introduced on the following pages, which is set to become a significant independent charity, supporting creativity across the United Kingdom.

We are grateful to all the artists who have contributed to Amongst the Trees

Christina

Jansen | The Scottish Gallery

Hugo Burge Foundation

Hugo Burge (1972-2023) was a British entrepreneur, philanthropist and art lover who spent the last ten years of his life turning Marchmont House, his beautiful home in the heart of the Scottish Borders into a haven for makers and creators.

Hugo hosted events and concerts, built workshops and studios, established artists’ and writers’ residencies, supported local community groups, and became an important local patron of the arts. In just a few short years, Hugo transformed the cultural life of the Scottish Borders.

The Hugo Burge Foundation exists to continue what he started. Established in 2024, the Hugo Burge Foundation is dedicated to inspiring creativity. The Foundation believes that creativity has the power to transform the lives of individuals and communities.

The Foundation runs courses, hosts events, offers awards and provides opportunities to anyone wanting to enrich their lives and surroundings with art, beauty and the magic of making. The Foundation provides affordable workspaces for artists, makers and creative professionals in the Scottish Borders, and offers funded and self-funded residencies throughout the year.

The Foundation welcomes art-lovers, schools and community groups to visit the beautiful walled garden and restored glasshouses on the Marchmont Estate.

The impressive residency programme has grown from three residencies per year in 2021 to eighteen residencies in 2024. They welcome poets, writers, performers, visual artists, craftspeople and musicians to our campus. These residencies are fully funded and provide artists with accommodation and studio space for four weeks plus a living stipend. Collaboration and curiosity are key to these multi-disciplinary residencies.

At the centre of the main campus is a historic courtyard on the estate, around which most of the creative spaces are situated. This is also the location of the beautifully furnished, art-filled Common Room, open to all members of the Hugo Burge Foundation community for coffee and conversation. These spaces are regularly used for private and public events.

Next to the courtyard lies Hugo Burge’s pride and joy. He began a transformation of the once-neglected walled garden and its historic glasshouses into a paradise of flowerrich borders, fruit and vegetable patches, colonnades and sculptures. The gardens

Redbraes Pottery, Greenlaw

Sculpture Courtyard and creative spaces, Marchmont

and the glasshouses are designed to delight and inspire all who visit, hosting events and creative workshops throughout the year. On the southern side of the courtyard is a striking building, designed by Robert Lorimer in 1917, which originally served as Marchmont House’s garage. It currently houses the Marchmont Workshop, led by craftsmen Richard Platt and Sam Cooper. They make traditional furniture inspired by Arts & Crafts luminaries such as Ernest Gimson and Phillip Clissett. Everything is made by hand, using techniques, tools and patterns passed through six generations of chairmakers since 1890.

In 2023, a state-of-the-art silversmithing workshop was opened on the Marchmont campus supported by a generous donation of tools, machinery and books by the late Master silversmith Graham Stewart. The workshop supports three early career silversmiths to help develop their businesses over a two-year tenancy, with guidance from an experienced

mentor. The workshop also provides shorter residencies for British and international silversmiths to develop new work and participate in a broader cultural exchange. Based in a former garage in the small town of Greenlaw, a few miles from Marchmont, Redbraes Pottery is a production-based pottery studio and creative clay space. It is run by Nicholas Stenhouse, from Manchester, and Heather Wilson, from Stow. Both are recent graduates from Cardiff School of Art and Design. Nick and Heather make a wide range of ceramic items and offer ceramic workshops and courses throughout the year.

Derelict buildings around Marchmont’s former stable block have been completely renovated to become studio spaces. Six studios are set around the courtyard: Upper Powerhouse, Lower Powerhouse (currently the office), North and South Studios, the Tower and the Old Squash Court. There are two ‘Open Studio’ events every year, when the public can enjoy the outstanding work created in these spaces by our resident and visiting artists.

www.hugoburgefoundation.org

Photography: Angus Bremner, Sam Cooper and Heather Wilson

Rush Seated Chair Workshop, Marchmont

Silversmith Studio, Marchmont

Redbraes Pottery, Greenlaw

Andrea Geile

Andrea Geile at Gerhard-Marcks-Haus, Bremen, 2023

Photograph: Sandra Beckefeldt, © Gerhard-Marcks-Stiftung, Bremen

Andrea Geile b.1961

Thoughts on the sculptor Andrea Geile by Mirjam Verhey-Focke, curator at the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus:

Andrea Geile creates trees, plants and leaves from Corten steel. Nature from steel – in the first instance, is an oxymoron. However, the combination of material and motif gives rise to polarities such as constancy and transience, heaviness and lightness, rigidness and vitality.

Geile’s working method has more to do with the technique of paper-cutting or drawing than with the more familiar tradition of steel sculpture, which focuses either on making the connection of material and industry overt or on appearing to overcome the material’s intrinsic weight. Geile cuts precise forms out of sheets of steel and then welds them together into something new.

Geile’s concentration on contour lines gives her sculptures a reduced, planar appearance such that they might be likened to natural shadows. They are not trying to create the illusion that they are biological trees and plants, yet anyone can immediately identify what they represent, namely plants, trees and leaves. Botanical accuracy is not the ambition of Geile’s art;

she is far more concerned with the bigger picture, growth as a natural process, ecological abundance and the impact of climate change.

The main sites for Geile’s sculptures are usually found in nature – the countryside, parks or private gardens. In this context, the artworks enter into a symbiosis. Real plant shadows meld with the rusty patina or green coating of the steel, or with the shadows of the artworks. Areas of ground muddy the transitions, and sunlight at certain times of the day almost dissolves the contours of the sculptures. Depending on the site, the sculptures are deliberately arranged with plants so as to amplify these perceptions even further.

For Geile’s retrospective exhibition hinauswachsen | fertile ground at the GerhardMarcks-Haus, Andrea Geile spent two working residencies at ArcelorMittal in Bremen in 2022, during which she made two voluminous hedges and five large trees out of Corten steel: a hawthorn tree, a fir (Tanne Tree), a holly (Ilex Tree), a topiary-style cloud tree and Scotland’s national tree, the Scots pine tree. Steely trees in the landscape, like the works from the Reef group, raise issues surrounding climate change and environmental destruction. While the Reef plants on their tidal crag subtly draw attention to sea-level rise, ocean warming and marine acidification, the trees and hedges pick up on another aspect of the crisis. As soon as trees made of steel are planted in nature, their very

Andrea Geile retrospective at Gerhard-Marcks-Haus, Bremen, 2023

Wonder Wander, Aberlady, 2021

presence emphasises the absence of a real tree. What Geile means by fertile ground is a place, but also a situation, which is productive and nurtures the expansive growth of good ideas – which all have to do with growth and life. At the same time, fertile ground links Geile’s city of birth, Bremen, with her chosen hometown, Edinburgh, both of which are important for her development as a sculptor. Like the landscape, nature in the form of one’s own garden is an equally important aspect of home.

Edinburgh based sculptor Andrea Geile originally studied as a printmaker and sculptor in Bremen and Hanover, Germany. Geile is an award-winning sculptor who has been working from her studio since 1996.

She is recognised for her monumental work in Corten steel, which includes over fifteen public commissions. Geile has been a regular gallery artist since the 2000s and has also helped shape our current garden spaces. She creates sculpture for internal and external spaces. Her outdoor sculptures are made from Corten steel, often grouped with real plants and relating directly to the site environment. They are subtle interventions, merging into the landscape and are often only visible on closer inspection. Each work is first drawn onto sheet metal then hand-cut, assembled like a three-dimensional puzzle and finally welded together. Geile has worked on several large-scale public commissions including Culzean Castle and a sculpture commission titled The Chlorophylles at the FANK Arts & Heritage site in Lettermore Forest on the Isle of Mull; celebrating the community effort bringing this site back to life. In 2023, she was the subject of a major retrospective fertile ground in her hometown of Bremen at the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus.

Public Collections include:

Aquarell H Collection, Vienna, Austria City of Edinburgh Council Comar, Isle of Mull

Culzean Castle, National Trust for Scotland Fridhems Musik Folkhogskola, Sweden

Gerhard-Marcks-Haus, Bremen University of Edinburgh University of Stirling

Tumbling, Caol Ruadh Sculpture Park, 2012

Andrea Geile at ArcelorMittal, 2022 Photograph: Sandra Beckefeldt

1 Haste ye Back, 2024

Corten and industrial steel, cast iron, H143 x W41 x D41 cm

2 Child, 2020

Corten steel, H65 x W55 x D55 cm

3 Ferro Shrub, 2023

Corten steel, H115 x W85 x D85 cm

4 In the Gloaming, 2021

Corten and industrial steel, H302 x W82 x D82 cm

5 Far Away, 2022

Corten steel, H226 x W50 x D15 cm

Andrea Geile, Amongst the Trees installation in The Scottish Gallery Garden

Sheila Anderson-Hardy b.1956

I studied at Glasgow School of Art in the late seventies and I subsequently moved to London and lived there for thirty-four years. I began my career as a textile designer, illustrator and art tutor before going on to practice full time as a painter.

My husband and I moved, after much searching, to our idyllic home in the Scottish Borders ten years ago. We are surrounded by rolling farmland and woods three miles south of Jedburgh and we settled into a Borders farmhouse with stable buildings within an acre of land. Somewhat dilapidated, we set about to renovate the house. Part of the old stable buildings were converted into my studio which has stunning views across the Jed Valley towards the Waterloo Monument on Peniel Heugh. It’s a view I never tire of!

Over the last ten years, we have created a haven for wildlife in our garden. What was a lawn is now left to nature and prairie planted with ox-eye daisy, cranesbill, marjoram and mint, buttercups, and dandelions. In the summer, our garden hums with life. What was a small paddock is busily rewilding with the addition of a few native trees. I often sit there with sketchbook and my iPhone recording the insect life, and occasional goldfinch going from one seedhead to another. There is a small woodland area where I regularly watch and listen to the woodland birds, treecreepers, nuthatches, long-tailed tits, goldfinches, thrushes and blackbirds, rarities like goldcrests and firecrests... the list goes on. The bramble and briar are allowed to flourish in areas rendering them impenetrable to all but nesting birds and small mammals. I also love to grow garden flowers but with the minimum of intervention, so they need to be tough!

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All summerlong, we wake to the noisy quarrelling of house sparrows nesting in the eaves of the house. The swallows in summer nest in the open outbuildings. They wheel over the field occasionally taking a wrong turn and swoop through the open door of my studio, skilfully turning on a sixpence and exiting. Every season brings endless inspiration to my practice. I have grown familiar with hares, stoats and visiting foxes. Partridges in family groups forage the stubble in the field outside my studio window. Corvids patrol the farmland.

The garden is my creative arena. This is where I draw and collect material for my paintings. For as long as I can remember I have been a lover of wildflowers. Entranced as a child by the sight of a bank of snowdrops or a swathe of bluebells under the trees on my walks through Dunskey Glen close to Portpatrick, where I was brought up. Their detailed forms and colours inspire my textile designs, illustrations, and paintings. Umbellifers are a favourite form, evident in the hedgerows, Cow Parsley and Sweet Cicely in early spring, followed by Hogweeds in mid and late summer. I champion the elegant forms of bramble and briar and their transitions through the year. The varieties of grasses found in hedgerow are as impressive and varied as any cultivars.

Understory, Birdsong and Dawn Golds are all inspired by the birdsong that emanates from the spinney of larches, sycamore, maple, and wild cherry trees next to my house. The briar and bramble in the foreground form a lattice of dense cover for wildlife.

Sheila Anderson-Hardy

6 Understory, 2024 ink, watercolour and collage on Khadi paper, 75 x 56 cm

7 Dawn Golds, 2024 ink, watercolour and collage on Khadi paper, 75 x 56 cm U

8 Birdsong, 2024 ink, watercolour and collage on paper, 152 x 122 cm

Ash & Plumb b.1988 & 1987

Ash & Plumb is the creative partnership of Barnaby Ash & Dru Plumb, who work in their shared workshop in the South Downs. They specialise in making distinctive and individual sculptural artworks and vessels. Using responsibly sourced green (unseasoned) Oak for their sculptural creations, they collaborate in a way which celebrates the natural beauty of the tree, embracing every aspect of its character.

Their practice draws inspiration from ancient and archetypal forms. This allows them to bring a sense of timelessness and rootedness to their creations. The pair’s expertise lies not only in their technical skills but also in their ability to capture the essence of tradition and ancient craftsmanship and infuse these skills into their contemporary work

Echoes draws on historical forms which are translated into a contemporary visual language of their own, a practice they had begun to develop during their first solo exhibition with The Gallery in 2021. Their practice has significantly evolved in the last few years, both in terms of increased complexity of the vessels but also the breadth of their historical references.

This latest series has a diverse variety of forms which play with proportion and scale from a set of miniature vessels through

to a series of monumental vessels. Included are a series of turned and carved vessels with fully integral handles, all hewn from a single piece of Oak which was made possible through Barnaby’s QEST scholarship training that he completed last year, which adds a completely new facet to their studio practice.

Each vessel is finished in a variety of smoky patinas and unique finishes that Barnaby and Dru have developed alongside Dru’s signature stitchwork repair work which both celebrates and supports the natural fissures within the Oak.

Their Annulus Vessel was recently acquired by National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh.

Dru Plumb working on the Amphora Vessel

Barnaby Ash working on the Amphora Vessel

Barnaby Ash and Dru Plumb in their workshop in the South Downs

9 A Playful History Smaller Vessels, 2024

lightning-struck English Oak from Heathfield, Sussex with waxed cotton stitching, H12-24 x Ø19-30 cm

T10 Spire Vessel, 2024

lightning-struck

English Oak from Heathfield, Sussex with waxed cotton stitching, H80 x Ø30 cm

11 Etruscan Urn II

H23 x D19 cm

12 Amphora II

H16 x D15 cm

13 Winged Ouse II H35 x D44 cm

14 Flared Annulus II

H19 x D36 cm

all 2024, lightning-struck English Oak from Heathfield, Sussex with waxed cotton stitching

Kirstie Behrens b.1991

Kirstie Behrens is an award-winning artist and printmaker, based in Pittenweem in Fife. She graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 2019 and in 2021 she won the Roy Wood Prize for Printmaking, the Art in Healthcare Award and the W Gordon Smith & Jay Gordon Smith Award from the Royal Scottish Academy. Behrens practice revolves around time-based projects where natural elements are actively incorporated as tools in her practice, creating marks which leave traces of evidence of the passage of time. Traditional etching is a printmaking technique that involves using acid to bite into a metal plate (usually copper, zinc, or steel) to create an image. Using a sharp etching needle or other pointed tool, Behrens then draws directly onto the surface of the plate, exposing the metal beneath the ground. The lines

and marks will later be etched into the plate. Traditional etching allows for a wide range of mark-making and tonal effects, making it a versatile and expressive medium for artists. While the process can be time-consuming and requires careful handling of hazardous materials, it offers unique opportunities for artistic experimentation and exploration. Trees are central to Behrens printmaking practice. She often depicts trees in landscapes, or as standalone subjects, or as part of more complex compositions which feel more like intimate portraits. Her etched trees can evoke a range of emotions, from the isolated, serene beauty of nature to reflections on the passage of time and the cycle of life. Behrens will be the subject of a solo exhibition in 2025 alongside her family, who are all practicing artists.

T15 Loch Assynt Blue etching, 39 x 93 cm

I quite often start with a drawn or painted sketch on location. This is backed up with photos, and the combination of both is useful when I come to draw the image onto the metal plate. As each plate is inked up by hand, the

prints can vary slightly. I sometimes enjoy leaving an early proof of the print in the environment for some time near the subject matter, allowing nature and the elements to create their marks. Kirstie Behrens

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16 Winter Trees etching, 17 x 48 cm

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17 Windswept Trees etching and drypoint, 24 x 64 cm

18 Winter Wood 1 etching, 89 x 47 cm

19 Winter Wood 2 etching, 89 x 47 cm

Margaret Smyth (Behrens) b.1961

Margaret Smyth (Behrens) graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1983. She is a regular exhibitor at the Royal Scottish Academy, Society of Scottish Artists and the Royal Society of Scottish Painters in Watercolour. Margaret is married to fellow artist Reinhard Behrens and they are parents to Kirstie Behrens and David Behrens. Margaret will be the subject of a solo exhibition at The Gallery alongside her artist family in 2025.

My interest in toy theatres goes back to the early 1990s. Prior to this, my subject matter had been inspired by travels to the Alpujarras in Southern Spain and to Nepal. I discovered sketches and slides from a visit Reinhard and I had made to Pollocks Toy Museum in London en route to Vienna for our honeymoon in 1986 and I started to play around with compositional ideas and new techniques. Other influences in my practice have come from a range of sources, including Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes and Commedia del Arte to the films of Tarkovsky, Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, specifically Fanny and Alexander with the opening scene of the little boy looking into the toy theatre and the beautifully evocative sound of the Schumann piano quintet. The pathos of Fellini’s La Strada with the travelling show setting up in desolate locations but taking the viewers through performance and imagination to another world probably also influenced my ideas.

My earlier paintings began with studies of individual pieces and led to compositions often with the pieces on a shelf or windowsill. Coppelia’s Holiday was the first time I experimented with setting the warm, rich intimacy of the theatre against a much wider, airy expanse of sea and I liked the contrast this allowed. The imagery then started to move beyond the windowsill and has become part of the landscape. For a previous exhibition with Bohun Gallery in Henley on Thames, I called the exhibition Travelling South because I had in mind that all my cast of characters were trying to make their way to the Venice carnival, employing all sorts of unorthodox modes of transport including rafts and hot air balloons. My practice continues to follow these compositions, where I introduce new elements in each new work. I hope that my paintings illicit curiosity, allowing the viewer to fill them with their own narratives, with their own memories real or imagined, like fairy tales. My aim is to try to evoke that moment of anticipation in a theatre, when the curtain lifts on the stage and reality is suspended. Margaret Smyth (Behrens)

20 After the Storm, 2023 mixed media, 87 x 116 cm

Reinhard Behrens b.1951

In Shadow Seekers (opposite) the submarine joins some locals for much needed shade, only to learn that this emblematic African tree which can live up to 2000 years is increasingly threatened by climate change and a diminishing habitat. The Ewe people of Togo have a proverb: Wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it.

For nearly fifty years now I have developed my artistic practice around the concept of Naboland. I came across the word ‘Naboland’ when I was working as an archaeological draughtsman in Pergamon, West Turkey, in 1975. A Turkish newspaper reported a collision between a Turkish submarine and a Swedish cargo ship called Naboland. This submarine reminded me of a little toy submarine I had found on the German North Sea coast the previous year. The combination of this found object and

the word Naboland inspired me to imagine the toy torpedo boat exploring and to create a vast creative world. Over the last five decades Naboland has materialised in paintings, drawings, etchings and installations and my ideas continue to be generated by found objects, images of real and imagined travels with visual references to art history. Reinhard Behrens

Reinhard Behrens was born in Germany and studied fine art at Hamburg College of Art. In 1979 he was awarded an academic exchange grant which allowed him to complete a Postgraduate course at Edinburgh College of Art before going on to establish his home and studio in Pittenweem, Fife. Behrens practice inhabits a fictional world called Naboland. For nearly fifty years, the artist has examined this world through the lens of a real history of discovery, with the artist adopting the role as explorer to create an archive of drawings, paintings, prints and installations which record the found objects and landscapes of Naboland. 2025 will mark the 50th anniversary of Naboland and will be the subject of a major solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery.

Public collections include:

City Art Centre, Edinburgh

Fife Collections Centre

Grampians Hospital Art Trust

Inverness Museum and Art Gallery

McLean Museum and Art Gallery, Inverclyde

The McManus Art Gallery & Museum, Dundee

Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

21 Shadow Seekers, 2024

acrylic and oil on canvas board, 100 x 122 cm

Stephen Bird b.1964

I work with both paint and clay to make multidimensional imagery which reflects on the global, transcultural nature of myths and ceramic archetypes. I create narratives which explore hybrid identities and transgressive themes such as taboos, cruelty, war, natural disasters, unnatural affections and violent deaths. My works are located in the extremes of the tragicomic tradition. I reinterpret old stories both remembered and imagined and appropriate iconography from established pottery traditions; a decorative Royal Doulton tile, or the cabbage leaf from a Wedgwood Whieldon teapot. I am particularly interested in Staffordshire ceramic figure groups from the eighteeth century which contain implicit meanings and I often try to decipher their hidden meanings and reimagine these in explicit ways. Stephen Bird

Stephen Bird was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1964 and has lived in Australia since 1999 after graduating from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee. Making his home and a significant international reputation from Sydney, he works with both paint and clay. His work is exhibited both nationally and internationally and he has won both The Gold Coast International Ceramic Award and the Deacon University Small Sculpture Award.

Public collections include:

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

The McManus Art Gallery & Museum, Dundee

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

National Museums, Northern Ireland

National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh

Stephen Bird in his studio with Head Plate, Sydney, 2017

22 Trees, 2022 glazed earthenware, D35 cm

Philip Braham b.1959

In the early summer of 2020, I walked to the top of Torlum Hill, on the outskirts of Crieff in Perthshire, to watch the sun rising over the valley of Strathearn. We had endured the isolation of lockdown for several months, but restrictions were being lifted and a semblance of normality was returning. In this spirit of optimism, I watched as the sun broke through the dark clouds and began to light the land. Feeling intoxicated with relief from the months of foreboding that preceded this new dawn, I made my way back down through Torlum Wood, alive to the gentle swaying of the trees and the lush greenery at the edge of the woods, the bright landscape beyond and the radiant sky now cleared of darkness. I stopped to savour the moment and took photographs that would later come to inform the painting Dawn in Torlum Wood (cat.23). However, the urgency to paint the experience came some three years later, as a memorial to the woods I once loved. For in November of 2021, most of Torlum Wood was shattered by Storm Arwen, and in the aftermath, the logging machinery arrived, and the hillside was cleared of the once vibrant wood. Dawn in Torlum Wood is a celebration of the woods at its finest moment.

Mirrorpool in a Birchwood (cat.24) also celebrates a fleeting moment remembered. On a foggy winter morning, I was walking in the woods close to my home and the wan sunlight made everything appear milky and diffused. I came upon a pool whose otherworldly stillness gave the surface its perfectly mirrored sheen, inverting the tall and slender birches with their crowns stripped of leaves, and their graceful limbs stretching downward. The strip of land across the top section arcs like a bridge,

connecting what is above with its reflection below. We see little of the contours of the actual woods, but only know it through its inversion, as a world turned upside down. Revelation comes through reflection yet reaches us as something unfamiliar and perhaps a little disquieting: we have the urge to turn the painting on its head, and that is the intended jolt to our perception: it forces us to see the familiar from a different perspective. The painting seeks to capture the serenity of the landscape as it coalesced and was revealed in that moment.

Philip Braham

Philip Braham is an artist based in Perthshire, whose paintings and photographs recall the Northern Romantic tradition in which the landscape reflects aspects the human condition. Fidelity to experience is fundamental to his practice, developing from a phenomenological immersion in landscape that discloses nature as timeless and our mortal existence as preciously short.

Philip Braham graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 1980 and completed a Postgraduate at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Holland the following year. He then undertook a year of research as visiting artist at the University of California at Los Angeles before returning to his native Scotland. Among the awards he has received are the prestigious Royal Scottish Academy Guthrie Award for painting and the Royal Scottish Academy Morton Award for lens-based work. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Perth Museum & Art Gallery, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, Raab Gallery Berlin, and at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. In 2021, Braham was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy.

A longstanding interest in continental aesthetics informs his pedagogical role as Programme Director for Art & Philosophy at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee.

Public collections include:

Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum

City Art Centre, Edinburgh

Contemporary Art Society, London

Lillie Art Gallery, Glasgow

The McManus Art Gallery & Museum, Dundee

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

Perth Museum & Art Gallery

Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh

Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh

Sunderland Art Gallery

Selected Philip Braham, The Scottish Gallery publications

23 Dawn in Torlum Wood, 2023 oil on linen, 81 x 116 cm

24 Mirrorpool in a Birch Wood, 2023 oil on linen, 89 x 130 cm

Colin Brown b.1962

Colin Brown is a fine artist based in the northeast of Scotland. His practice draws upon a range of media, including painting with mixed with collage. Brown explores human histories, random and specific mark-making, urban imagery, and a mix of handwriting and printed script which explores and reflects the spirit of modern society. Brown graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee and has lived and exhibited in Europe for several years. He is now based in Stonehaven in northeast Scotland. Colin Brown exhibits in the UK and internationally, including Hanover, London and Singapore.

I employ a variety of mixed media to explore human histories, random and specific mark making, urban imagery, and handwritten and printed script. My paintings implement urban tones and are normally created on wood panel. Through my use of collaged materials, I celebrate the reusable and the found. I approach each work by marking a series of ‘reference points’, which develop as I build up the surface in layers. Gradually a dialogue between the painting and myself is established, and a definite direction is formed. I allow the work to develop

naturally year upon year, sometimes revisiting locations or conducting additional research. By infusing direct reference with memory, narrative and allegory, each picture assumes a significance that is at once deeply personal and open to interpretation. Ultimately, my work aims to capture the spirit of modern society.

For Amongst the Trees, the composition of Rattlesnake (opposite) pays homage to Audubon with a scene of intense action. Two pairs of northern mockingbirds mob a timber rattlesnake which is deep in their nest. Elsewhere a poster fragment with tree motifs is added to the lower area. The use of circles and extensive paintwork throughout the piece bring an overall balance to the finished work. For Bullfinch (overleaf) I turned to my recent studies of Japanese woodblock printing. The image of a bullfinch on a branch of weeping cherry tree is borrowed from Hokusai. Other elements in this work include a poster for a yoga class which I collected during a recent trip to Berlin. I also include my painted interpretation of a Hiroshige tree surrounded by orange blossom. Colin Brown

25 Rattlesnake, 2024 mixed media painting, 60 x 60 cm

26 Brown Iris, 2021 mixed media painting on paper, 28 x 20 cm

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27 Bullfinch, 2024 mixed media painting, 60 x 60 cm

Doug Cocker b.1945

Cocker succeeds in fusing the oftenoppositional languages of sculpture and painting, creating imagery which stands in the compelling middle ground between abstract form and poetic analogy.

Neil Cameron

Doug Cocker is one of Scotland’s foremost sculptors. Brought up in rural Perthshire, Cocker 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.

Public commissions include: Ayr, Bristol, Cardiff, Dundee, Glasgow, Oldbury, Perth.

Public collections include:

Aberdeen Art Gallery

Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre

City Art Centre, Edinburgh

Glasgow Museums

The McManus Art Gallery & Museum, Dundee

Northampton Museum & Art Gallery

Perth Museum & Art Gallery

Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh

University of St Andrews

University of South Wales

University of Stirling

Doug Cocker in his Angus studio, 2024. Photograph: Jack Cocker

28 Figure in a Landscape 1 lime waxed elm, H61 x W74 x D30cm

Victoria Crowe b.1945

Victoria Crowe studied at Kingston School of Art from 1961–65 and at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1965–68. At her postgraduate show, she was invited by Sir Robin Philipson to teach at Edinburgh College of Art. For thirty years she worked as a parttime lecturer in the School of Drawing and Painting while developing her own artistic practice. She lives and works in West Linton, Edinburgh, and Venice. Her first one-person exhibition, after leaving the Royal College of Art, was in London and she has subsequently gone on to have over fifty solo shows. Her first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery was in 1970. In August 2018, The Scottish National Portrait Gallery held a retrospective exhibition of Crowe’s portraits, Beyond Likeness. In 2019, the City Art Centre, Edinburgh, honoured Crowe’s career with a four-floor retrospective, 50 Years of Painting. Her retrospective enjoyed a record number of visitors and embraced every aspect of Crowe’s practice and featured

over 150 artworks. The Scottish Gallery hosted a complementary exhibition in September 2019, 50 Years: Drawing & Thinking. Victoria Crowe is a member of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours. In 2000, her exhibition A Shepherd’s Life, consisting of work selected from the 1970s and 80s, was one of the National Galleries of Scotland’s Millennium exhibitions. The exhibition toured Scotland and was re-gathered in 2009 for a three-month exhibition at the Fleming Collection, London. Crowe was awarded an OBE for Services to Art in 2004 and, from 2004–07, she was a Senior Visiting Scholar at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. The resulting work, Plant Memory, was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2007 and subsequently toured Scotland. 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 Crowe’s painting Large Tree Group. This collaborative tapestry was acquired for the National Museums Scotland. In 2015, Crowe was an invited artist in residence at Dumfries House and, in 2016, a group of work by the artist was acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland. Crowe was commissioned in 2014 by the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers to design a forty metre tapestry for their new hall in the city of London; it took

Victoria Crowe, 1980. Photograph: Jessie Ann Matthew

Victoria Crowe, A Shepherd’s Life, 2000

over three years to weave and was installed in January 2017. In collaboration with singer Matthew Rose, Crowe produced a 70-minute video of her work, Winterreise: a Parallel Journey. The film was shown in Snape Maltings; Wigmore Hall, London; in 2018 at the Weesp Chamber Music Festival in the Netherlands; and in South Korea in 2023.

Victoria Cowe will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Pier Art Centre, Stromness in August 2024. Scottish Gallery celebrates Victoria Crowe’s 80th birthday in 2025.

Victoria Crowe, 2012. Photograph: Kenneth Gray

Selected Victoria Crowe, The Scottish Gallery publications

In my work as a painter, the iconography of trees and botanical structures has been a constant inspiration and interest. It started as an identification with the natural world and its importance to our lives. As an art student in London, Richmond Park was the nearest bit of wild landscape and provided the source material for many early works. The observation of nature, its seasonal shifts and patterns of growth, has continued to be a recurring and important theme in my artistic practice. After time as a student, the real force of nature was all around us when my husband and I moved to Scotland and settled in a remote hamlet at the foot of the Pentlands. That hill and moorland landscape with its tree forms, articulated in the snow of long winters, became one of the subjects that I pursued. The wonderfully complex arboreal structure was challenging to study, and I was aware of how these trees showed a permanent record of the prevailing wind; how they gave punctuation to a landscape and could establish scale and mood. I enjoyed the abstract elements

of the negative spaces between the branches and the way that distance and foreground could be linked within their form. The early landscape paintings were about understanding and responding to my new environment; a way of observing the changing, repetitive cycle of the seasons. I became more aware of and interested in the juxtaposition of the enduring land and the fragility of shorter life cycles. I don’t think of trees anthropomorphically, but I am aware of their symbolic and healing role in myth, religion, literature, poetry and the arts. They have been given deep and sacred meaning throughout the ages as symbols of birth, life, death and renewal. They can be seen as archetypes for subconscious, shadow aspects of the mind. Humanity has a need for meaning and metaphor within the lived experience and the natural world is a rich, shared source. Many of my recent paintings continue to deal with an awareness of the precariousness of the natural world.

Victoria Crowe, By Leaves We Live Autumn Issue, 2024

29 Corner of the Garden (Summer), c.1972 oil on board, 71 x 91 cm

30 Line of Trees, Kittleyknowe, c.1980 chalk and charcoal on canvas board, 13 x 32 cm

31 Trees and Gold Sky, 1985 oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cm

32 Pines, Sunset, 2010 mixed media drawing, chine collé, intaglio, gold leaf, ink wash, 26.5 x 35 cm

T33

The Approach of Winter, 2012 oil on board, 51 x 66 cm

34 Trees with Farmland, 2015 ink wash, double screenprint, 15.5 x 62 cm

T35 Against the Light, Clarity, 2015 monoprint, 47 x 66 cm

Kate Downie b.1958

Kate Downie was born in North Carolina but raised from the age of 7 in Scotland. She studied at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen before travel and residencies took her to the United States, The Netherlands, France, Japan and Norway.

As a Landscape painter/printmaker she studies the relationship of the human co-existence/ dissonance within nature, often defined by good draughtsmanship and a sense of movement. Downie has established studios in places as diverse as a brewery, a maternity hospital, an oil rig and an island underneath the Forth Rail Bridge. She has taught both in art colleges and universities and has directed major public and community art projects since 1987.

As President to the Society of Scottish Artist from 2004 to 2006, Downie co-curated contemporary visual art projects of international standing, including an exchange exhibition with Indian artists and the Bodyparts live art Festival at the RSA in Edinburgh. Her work appears in many public and corporate collections including the BBC; Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art; Gracefield Art Gallery, Dumfries; Aberdeen Art Gallery; Rietveld Kunst Academie, Amsterdam; City of Edinburgh Council; HM The King; Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow & New Hall College Art Collection in

Cambridge. In 2005, the artist was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize, and in 2008 became a member of the Royal Scottish Academy.

Like the Scottish Artists Joan Eardley and D.Y. Cameron in the last century, Downie has spent the past thirty years exploring an artistic vision for both the extremes of a Scottish urban/ industrial landscape as well as Scotland’s coastal ‘edge-scapes’ beyond the cities. Downie re-located to Fife in 2018, establishing Birchtree Studios in 2019, which has since become a hub for creative collaborations both locally and internationally.

Kate Downie in her studio, March 2024. Photograph: Michael Wolchover

One of my passions as a child was tree climbing and I was often happiest off the ground into the swaying upper branches, looking out upon the rest of the world. This intimate relationship with trees has developed through my life, surfacing regularly in my work. Although my climbing agility is now diminished, I am still able to express arboreal wonder through my art. The Between Seasons trees I painted from 2020 to 2021 were sentinels that kept me company in troubled times and changing seasons, but for this exhibition there is more odd-ball narrative, a happy affection and as with the toddler tree hugger, they are my everinventive friends. Kate Downie

36 Toddler Tree-Hugger, 2024 monotype, 44 x 33 cm

37 Red Crabapple, Early Snow, 2024 monotype, 44 x 33 cm

38 Old Castle Woods, 2024 ink on Chinese paper, 35 x 27 cm

39 Field Corner, Ceres I, 2024 monoprint, 33 x 44 cm

40 Golden Crabapple, 2024 monotype, 44 x 33 cm

41 Red Crabapples, 2024 monotype and chine collé, 4 4 x 33 cm

42 The Glow Tree, 2024 monotype, 44 x 33 cm

43 The Moss Forest, 2024 monotype, 44 x 33 cm

Martin Greenland b.1962

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 hyperrealism 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. 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. Guy Peploe

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.

44 Retreat (Knipe Moor Variations), 2020 oil on canvas, 60.5 x 90.5 cm

My painting has always stemmed from memory and imagination. 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 my painting practice 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 realisation, 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

45 Little Alpine, 2021 oil on canvas, 76 x 91.5 cm

Derrick Guild b.1963

Originally from Perth, Derrick Guild has been the recipient of many awards for his unique practice. Guild’s paintings and objects reference European still life of the 15th to 19th centuries. The drama, allegory and naturalism inherent in this period of painting speak to Guild of ever-present dilemmas of the human condition. His works are classical, formal and at the same time contemporary in their sense of dislocation and ambiguity.

In my work I am trying to create fluidity between the past and present. I make still life paintings using oil on canvas and objects that use a wide range of materials including cast resin, oil paint and miscellaneous materials. In the paintings, I am trying to harness the look and feel of the great European still life tradition. I want to hijack the high drama and emotional integrity that resonates in the work of that era. I aim to marry that look and feel to contemporary ideas and thoughts that include religion, colonialism, genetic modification, sexuality, commodification of nature, fecundity, humour, appropriation, addiction, beauty,

absurdity, surrealism, and realism. This list is always growing and is never closed. I feel the still life format easily allows narrative and metaphor, complexity, and simplicity to be conveyed. Whilst every painting can be read alone, I feel that they are each a single sentence in a much longer and ongoing dialogue. The objects are in a sense three-dimensional versions of my still life paintings. They have developed from the realisation that an object resonates differently when it interacts in a space as a real object. I am aiming for a more heightened sense of realism so that the experience of the object is not filtered through the two-dimensional canvas. Derrick Guild

Public collections include:

The Fleming Collection, London Hospitalfield, Arbroath

The McManus Art Gallery & Museum, Dundee Perth Museum & Art Gallery Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA University of Dundee

Selected Derrick Guild, The Scottish Gallery publications

Derrick Guild in his studio, 2017

Photograph: Jed Gordon

Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s Cassowary, painted for the Royal Court of Louis XV in 1745, depicts an exotic exhibit in the royal menagerie, a fierce bird believed to be a real phoenix, fed hot coals by courtiers. Derrick Guild takes the hyperrealism of the progenitor, there is no mistaking the wild ferocity of the bird’s gimlet eye, but paints his canvas as parchment with dark, painted holes as trompe l’oeil. Euan McArthur commented:

Oudry’s painting engenders a chain of associations of which historical fact and painted artefact are simply links, fused again in the artist’s imagination: bird, myth, life-force, and coals burning back into the ideal space of the painting.

Guild grew up in the countryside outside Perth, out in the fields on his own, making little discoveries

in the hedgerows and pathways of an archaic landscape, isolation feeding his imagination. He visited the local museum as often as he could and loved the odd juxtaposition of the exhibits: Victorian taxidermy, ethnography and paintings from the eighteenth century, objects redolent with history, exotic and immutable. At art school his extraordinary facility combined with a necessary measure of obsession allowed him to use painting as his chosen path of discovery. The rich thematic potential of Cassowary: the fiery future of global warming explicit each summer in the destruction of habitat by fire, the resistance to science in the persistence of myth, the illusion of illusion in artworks, all remain enigmatic in Guild’s art, which seeks not to inform but to beguile. Guy Peploe

T46 Burnt Cassowary, after Oudry, 2013-15 oil on linen, 198 x 153 cm

47 Charm, 2006-15 oil on cast resin with costume jewellery, 23 x 26 x 3 cm

T

48 Monday 1st January 1500 linoprint on paper, 38 x 27 cm

Claire Harkess b.1970

Claire Harkess’s painting practice has taken her to fragile lands to study and interpret life on the edge. Antarctica, Outback Australia and St Kilda are all places where, in such extreme environments, survival is difficult, and the balance of life is delicate. The balance present in nature is poetically communicated through her paintings with a delicate sensibility which amplifies their sense of fragility. Painting in watercolour offers a unique directness; the essential qualities of light and energy present in the natural world are the very essence of the medium itself. The delicacy of her palette and oriental economy of her mark-making creates a subtle tension representing a world that is holding still, giving a sense of freedom, spirit, time and place. Harkess engages with the ecology of the animal’s histories, once inextricably linked to our own, ritually recorded by our Neolithic ancestors on cave walls, brilliantly realised in her Regeneration Series which directly relates to rewilding projects in the UK.

Harkess continues to study the natural world continuously with a keen and curious eye, the hours spent observing are just the starting point as she goes beyond conventional representation; every brushstroke is loaded with movement, colour, light and emotion. It is how Harkess makes us feel, bringing us closer to nature rather than looking from a distance. Woodland birds, wolves and stags are represented in delicate watercolour, and her virtuoso technique, drawing on Eastern and Western painting traditions, captures the magic of life amongst the trees.

Claire Harkess was born in Ayr, Scotland, and graduated from Glasgow School of Art in the early 1990s. She lives and works in her studio in Perth.

I return again and again to wildlife and the natural world. It surprises and inspires. No two encounters are the same. Being present in something greater gives perspective. There is always something new to learn. It is an anchor that holds all of us and it must be protected. Claire Harkess

Claire Harkess in the Perthshire hills, 2018

49 Regeneration - Caledonian Forest, 2018 watercolour, 74 x 54 cm

50 Cry Wolf, 2018 watercolour, 54 x 74 cm

51 Regeneration - Rowan, 2018 watercolour, 76 x 56 cm

52 Resting Stag, 2018 watercolour, 54 x 74 cm

T

53 Morning Song, 2023

watercolour, 68 x 103 cm

54 Summer Song, 2023 watercolour, 76 x 106 cm

Euan Heng b.1945

Euan Heng was born in Oban in 1945 and moved with his family to Australia in 1977. He lives and works in Melbourne. Between 1960 and 1970 Euan was employed in various occupations, including four years as a merchant seaman travelling worldwide. He completed undergraduate and post graduate studies at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee in 1975 and was awarded a research MA from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in 1995.

Euan Heng explores the role of abstraction in figuration through his practice. Much of his work derives from something seen, heard or remembered, but Heng also plays with artifice and the imaginary. His fascination with flatness, expressed with immediacy and economy is influenced by his interest in Italian iconography, medieval frescoes, Chinese portraits and sixteenth century Mughal art. His elegant meditations on line and shape incorporate recurring motifs from the artist’s career, including the portrait, stripped of many

features; the tree, sharp and geometric; and the sea, which figured so strongly in the artist’s early life as a sailor. Heng has exhibited extensively in Australia and abroad and his work is represented in major public and university museum collections in all states of Australia and in Scotland.

My studio practice originates, not from an idea, but an imaginative engagement with reality. The paper-cut collages and paintings, selected from a current body of works, exhibit the characteristics and the trajectory of an evolving artistic production. Geometric limitations magnify pictorial immediacy and economy, and this economy, is informed by flatness. Euan Heng

Euan Heng’s Melbourne Studio. Photograph: Anu Kumar

Euan Heng, 2023. Photograph: Anu Kumar

55 Argentina, 2017 oil on linen, 122 x 56 cm

56 Landmark, 2021 paper-cut collage, 20 x 14 cm

57 Landmark, 2020 oil on linen, 102 x 92 cm

Michael McVeigh b.1957

McVeigh frequently draws inspiration from the overlooked and concealed corners of Edinburgh, his home since the 1980s. Towards the Secret Garden reveals itself hidden behind the Georgian façade of Elm Row at the summit of Leith Walk, offering an intimate portrayal of a garden concealed from the city’s hustle and bustle. Using his signature folk style, McVeigh has skilfully captured the essence of the Horse Chestnut and Goat Willow trees, the lush overgrowth of grass and cowslips, and the intriguing architectural intricacies that define this tranquil and reflective urban oasis.

Michael McVeigh was born in 1957 in the post-war council estate of Lochee, Dundee located on the northwest of the city, one of five children. He left school with no formal qualifications; however, he wanted to be an artist and so began, unannounced, going to classes at Duncan of Jordanstone Art College,

his presence being challenged eventually, James Morrison (1932-2020), then one of the lecturers, formalised his position and accepted him as a full-time student based only on his drawings and painting. Since moving to Edinburgh in 1982, McVeigh has become a familiar figure seen regularly working in the city and until recently, had a stall on Rose Street selling his ‘lizard’ prints. His works are held in both public and private collections including town halls, pubs, fishmongers and a number of municipal and national institutions.

Public Collections include:

City Art Centre, Edinburgh Fife Collections Centre

Glasgow Caledonian University

NHS Lothian Charity, Tonic Collection

St Andrews University

58 Towards the Secret Garden (Elm Row), 2017 pencil and crayon on paper, 52 x 66.5 cm

David Rae b.1995

David Rae, like any good modernist, will not provide a key to interpret his work. He chooses a subject which can be described as landscape, but which owes as much to Magritte as to Claude or Constable. The gift to the modernist is to be allowed to work unconstrained by academic expectations. The history of landscape is not distinguished before the nineteenth century when Turner and Caspar David Friedrich saw it as a vehicle to address ideas of the sublime and Impressionism elevated the infinite variety of water and air as subjects fit for a painter. Furthermore, the Ruskinian idea of truth in painting is subject to Nietzsche’s dismissal, Truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour.

In the last century artists sought new means of expression to come to terms with political turmoil and the endless legacy of war. Landscape has been the jump-off point for expressionism or has provided new monuments for our age: Hockney’s Canyons or Michael Andrew’s Uluru. Rae’s landscapes are peculiar, personal platforms, both what is and what might have been, lit

as at dusk when the ordinary become other. But landscape is also a psychological space, the recalled places of childhood, incomplete or even partially false memories. And the landscape is imbued with cultural history: battle sites, cleared villages, failed industry and deforestation. Its trappings today can be in surreal conjunction, easily misread or coincidentally beautiful. The distant forest in The Original Racecourse could be the silhouette of Camelot, incongruously presiding over a post-industrial landscape redolent of human striving. Today as our success as a species threatens to make earth uninhabitable his work could predict a world still vital, still full of strange histories and beauty, but shorn of the human species that shaped it. Guy Peploe

Raised in southwest Scotland, David Rae studied Painting at Grays School of Art in Aberdeen from 2013 and 2017. Following his degree show he was selected for the 2018 Royal Scottish Academies New Contemporaries where he won both the Walter Scott and the David and June Gordon memorial trust awards. In 2024 he was shortlisted for the Gilchrist Fisher Award for artists exploring the theme of landscape.

59 The Original Racecourse, 2023 oil on canvas, 150 x 100 cm

60 Shooting Target 6, 2024 oil on canvas, 40.5 x 65 cm

61 Pine Valley 2, 2024 oil on canvas, 50 x 75 cm

Paul Reid b.1975

For Reid, drawing is vital to his process. Elaborate preparatory drawings, some squared up and transferred to canvas, are made; individual poses are explored and even drapery studies undertaken. His technical repertoire is faithful to Renaissance studio practice, except the painter has no studio assistants and carries out the work himself in his studio situated outside Edinburgh. This discrepancy between the all-embracing aesthetic of his imagined world and the mundane surroundings of his workplace is stark. The explanation is that Reid is not isolated because he has embraced digital media and devices which give him access to imagery, ideas, sounds and communities which feed his imagination. Graphic novels, metal music, literature of weird, the work of Odd Nerdrum, video games and Spanish Masters can be accessed at the touch of a button. The trees take us back to studies made in Argyll. Ancient, gnarled, clad in moss, festooned with ivy, they are the sinister guardians of the forest’s secrets wherein pantheism will see conducted its violent rites and sacrifices. The very absence of action in the tree studies, the perfect stillness of the leafy forest floor and dappled light filtering through the canopy acts like the pause before violence in Theseus and the Minotaur to create a dramatic tension.

Much of the narrative content in my own work has thus far been directly inspired by Greco-Roman mythology. This may incite accusations of an empathy towards nineteenth century academicism. Nothing could be further from the truth, however, and historical dogma such as that espoused by the likes of David and his followers is as abhorrent to me as it is to the most ardent modernists. To my mind there is no right or wrong way to interpret classical

myth, and it is this openness to new artistic interpretation which has no doubt contributed to its continued relevance throughout the history of art. My interest in trees stems from their use in backdrops for my Mythological pieces which are usually set in imagined landscapes. I often go out wandering in local forests and pockets of wilder terrain in search of gnarled, interesting trees that look fantastical and mythical enough for my paintings. Topographical accuracy is not as important as lighting, modelling etc and I tend to move elements around to suite my aesthetic whims. I particularly enjoy trees with large roots and branches which can be drawn and painted in much the same way as human limbs with character and movement.

Paul Reid

Paul Reid, Mythologies, The Scottish Gallery publication

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 twentyfirst century lives.

Public collections include:

The Fleming Collection, London

HRH, The King

Perth Museum & Art Gallery

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh University of Dundee

Paul Reid, Cernunnos, 2014, oil on canvas, 61 x 45 cm. Private collection.

Paul Reid, The Great Tree, Island of Circe , oil on canvas, 71 x 91 cm. Private collection.

62 Tree Study, Crichton Castle, 2024 ink, charcoal and acrylic on board, 59 x 42 cm

63 Tree Study, Coulter, 2024 ink, charcoal and acrylic on board, 57 x 41.5 cm

Pascale Rentsch

Pascale Rentsch b.1975

Pascale Rentsch is an award-winning Swiss born artist who has made a home and studio in East Lothian, where the surrounding countryside, hills and coastlines has become an integral aspect of her painting practice. Rentsch draws and paints entirely en plein air, directly from nature in all weather conditions. Pascale works instinctively, following her feelings, spontaneously capturing nature and the elements. Her language is paint and she enjoys working outside with her materials, exploring mark-making, connecting with her surroundings, reacting to what she sees, feels and hears. In 2021, she won the Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award to part fund her film project This is My Voice. She has exhibited extensively since graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 1999 and has participated in multiple conservation projects across the UK and Europe. Pascale Rentsch will hold her first solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery in June 2025.

I am always moved when painting in nature because wherever I look, I feel hope; the Skylarks singing high up in the sky despite the stormy weather and the light sparkling like gold dust on the shoreline. I carry my art materials in my trusty trolley. It has been weathered by big hills, rocks, sand and even snow. It keeps all my materials together in one place and saves my back from a heavy rucksack. My set up can look rather messy when painting en plein air, to such an extent that I have been mistaken for fly-tipping many times! However, I always lay the materials out in the same way so that when working fast and spontaneously they are quick to hand. For me it is important not to follow a rigid plan but to enjoy the freedom of painting by not overthinking, just trusting in the feel of the moment. I never know what will happen or what image will finally appear on my piece of paper. It is a flow of feelings. When painting in all weathers there can be many practical challenges: the wind blowing my paintings across the Lammermuir Hills, low temperatures freezing my paints, and the frequent appearance of the rain in Scotland. But I am not overcoming these challenges to create the perfect image. All of these aspects are incorporated into my journey and channelled into the responsive marks and brushstrokes that I place. It all comes together as an expression of my experience and feelings in that moment.

Pascale Rentsch

64 Colours threaded with Shades I, Islay, 2023 mixed media on canvas , 61 x 81 cm

65 Colours threaded with Shades, Islay II, 2023 mixed media on canvas board, diptych, 20 x 60 cm

66 Colours threaded with Shades, Islay III, 2023 mixed media on canvas board, diptych, 18 x 48 cm

67 Struggle is the Source of Power II, 2024 mixed media on paper, 58 x 58 cm

T68 Struggle is the Source of Power I, 2024 mixed media on paper, 75 x 106 cm

69 East Lothian Field, 2023 mixed media on canvas, 61 x 70cm

A70 When I look closer, 2023 mixed media on paper, 58 x 58 cm

O71 Hawthorn and Gorse by the Sea, 2023 mixed media on paper, 35.5 x 41 cm

72 Spring Light , 2023 mixed media on paper, 75 x 106 cm

73 Spring Hedgerow, 2023 mixed media on paper, 28 x 38 cm

74 Wild Grasses and Brambles, 2023 mixed media on paper, 38 x 56 cm

75 I Listen to the Bird Sing, 2023 mixed media on paper, 47.5 x 57.5 cm

VINTAGE | amongst the trees

Adam Bruce Thomson (1885-1976)

Adam Bruce Thomson (1885-1976) was one of the most quietly impactful artists of his generation. He was born in Edinburgh and studied at the Royal Institution School of Art and he was among the earliest intake of students to train at Edinburgh College of Art, following its establishment in 1908. Thomson graduated with Diplomas in Drawing and Painting, and Architecture before travelling to Spain, Holland and Paris on various scholarships during 1910. One of his earliest surviving oils, from 1910, depicts St. Martin’s Bridge in Toledo, Spain. In 1912, Thomson took up employment at the Edinburgh College of Art.

During World War I, Thomson served in the Royal Engineers as a Second Lieutenant. Following the Battle of Arras he produced some poignant works on-the-spot and was able to record troops moving near Arras by the

shattered façade of the Abbey of Mont St Eloi. In 1919, Thomson resumed his staff position at the Edinburgh College of Art and would remain there until 1950. During this career, Thomson taught etching, composition and still life to the painting school and colour theory to the art and architecture students. Regular visitors to the Thomson family home included his student and protégé William Wilson and also William Crozier. Other close colleagues from the Edinburgh College of Art and the Royal Scottish Academy included Stanley Cursiter and David Macbeth Sutherland.

The early 1930s saw his series of monumental paintings of his hometown including North Bridge and Salisbury Crags, from the North West, now in the Edinburgh City Art Centre, and The Old Dean Bridge exhibited at the RSA in 1932. Throughout his life, Thomson painted extensively using watercolours and oils in and around Edinburgh, the Berwickshire coast, South West of Scotland, the Scottish Borders as well as extensively in the Highlands and Islands.

The Quiet Path

RSA Selection Committee, 1955: D.M. Sutherland, W.O. Hutchison, A.B. Thomson, William Gillies and Mr Moncrieff

Adam Bruce Thomson, Lismore, c.1937

Thomson exhibited widely and was wellrespected by his peers, receiving an OBE in 1963. However, as a naturally modest individual, his understated approach often denied him the spotlight. To date, his contribution to twentieth century Scottish art remains largely unexplored.

The forthcoming exhibition Adam Bruce Thomson: The Quiet Path aims to bring this talented artist back to public attention. Arranged over two floors of the City Art Centre in Edinburgh, the display will chart Thomson’s extensive career, from his early student compositions to the evocative Scottish landscapes of his maturity. It will trace his stylistic development, and examine his important role as a teacher, mentor and friend to other artists. Featuring key artworks on loan from public and private collections, this will be the first ever major retrospective on Thomson to be held in a public gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by the new book Adam Bruce Thomson: The Quiet Path (Sansom & Company).

My Great Uncle by Liz Hall,

My great uncle Adam Bruce Thomson or ‘Adam B’ as he was affectionately known at Edinburgh College of Art was a keen observer of the environment, a naturalist and was an active hill walker well into his old age. His wiry frame could often be seen sketching en plein air on Blackford Hill close to his family home in Cluny Gardens, or on a brisk walk in Colinton where his in-laws lived.

He drew and painted trees throughout his life, sometimes as a primary subject but also when they enhanced the composition and form of the landscape. He was skilled at depicting all the elements of trees and the dappled light through the canopy and he painted in a wide variety of media including oil, watercolour, pastel, pen and wash, and etchings. He often revisited locations several times, including Arthur’s Seat at different times of day, contrasting lights and seasons.

Although Adam B never drove himself, he travelled extensively with his fellow artists David Macbeth Sutherland (a friendship strengthened by service in WWI) and his wife Dorothy Johnstone. He maintained a lively correspondence with them and with many other colleagues from ECA throughout his life.

The selected works in Amongst the Trees are from a collection of some of my great uncle’s paintings where trees are present and demonstrate an enduring love for the landscape and environment.

Adam Bruce Thomson, Painting the Century, The Scottish Gallery, 2013 and book to accompany the exhibition Adam Bruce Thomson: The Quiet Path at City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 2024

76 Autumn Hills, Trees and Cows, c.1968 oil on canvas, 71 x 91.5 cm

77 Through the Wood, c.1950 oil on board, 61 x 51 cm

78 Avenue of Trees, Bonaly, c.1970 pen and ink wash on paper, 34 x 42 cm

79 Village Church with Trees, c.1950 watercolour on paper, 38 x 50.5 cm

ADAM BRUCE THOMSON

80 From Lowood Bridge, c.1930 pen and ink on paper, 38 x 52 cm

81 On the River, c.1950 watercolour on paper, 38 x 49.5 cm

T 82 Country Road in the Borders, c.1970 watercolour on paper, 27 x 37.5 cm

T 83 Plockton from Afar, c.1965r watercolour on paper, 34 x 50 cm

T 84 Rolling Hills in the Borders, c.1970 watercolour on paper, 27.5 x 37.5 cm

T 85 Hills with Distant House, c.1970 watercolour on paper, 26 x 36.5 cm

T 86 From Onich Hotel Garden, c.1940 pen and ink wash on paper, 29 x 38 cm

T 87 Forestry Hillside, c.1940 pen and ink wash on paper, 28.5 x 42 cm

Earl Haig (1918-2009)

Dawyck Haig was born in 1918 as the Great War drew to its finish, fourth child of the Field Marshall, by then fifty-seven, a birthright which would form his public life and blight his private world as the fashion for revisionist history saw his father’s reputation traduced. At the top of the list of fourteen godparents at his baptism were the King and Queen.

His early life at Bemersyde in the Scottish Borders was happy. After studying at Christ Church, Oxford he signed up with the Greys and Royals at Redford Barracks. In July 1942 he was captured by the Germans and incarcerated during the remainder of The War as one of the prominente in Colditz. During this dark period in his life, being saved provided the opportunity to recognise and practice his talent as a painter and draughtsman.

He would never look back and painting was to be the driving passion of his life, but rather than return to the Borders, the young Earl

enrolled at Camberwell School of Art in 1945. His tutors included William Johnstone, Victor Pasmore, Lawrence Gowing and William Coldstream. He recognised that inspiration from senior figures in the avant-garde would allow him to grow rapidly as a serious artist.

In all his work on paper and some of his best work in oils, there is a happy tension between the immediacy of the act of painting (and urgency of what was before him) and his desire to capture the essential, abstract qualities of his subject. Tree on the Tweed (opposite) is from a series of paintings made from his home and surrounding landscape in the Borders, which was a constant source of inspiration. The winter trees and branches in the foreground reveal the River Tweed and hills in the background.

Haig held his first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in 1945 and continued to exhibit until 2008. He presented one of his exhibitions at The Gallery to the Duke of Edinburgh in 1981. Haig’s place in history is assured as one of the most committed and vivid painters of his generation whose longevity and consistency of vision eventually earned him the plaudits he deserved.

Earl Haig released from Konigstein, 1945

Earl Haig in Bemersyde, c.1979

88 Tree on the Tweed, c.1970 oil on canvas, 49 x 75 cm

Julia Heseltine (1938-2023)

Julia Katrina Heseltine was born at St Pancras, London in 1933, daughter of Guy Robert Nelson Heseltine (1897-1967) and his wife, Anna Katrina née Zinkeisen (1901–1976), who married at Marylebone, London on 25 July 1928. Heseltine came from a family whose history has been strongly associated with painting, with her mother Anna and aunt Doris Clare Zinkeisen, both well-known painters in the mid-twentieth century. Assisted by

her mother, Julia started painting at an early age, with her first commission at the age of 16, being a portrait of Jonathon Porritt (aged four), who went on to become a key figure with Friends of the Earth. She studied at the Chelsea School of Art, the Byam Shaw School of Art and at the Royal Academy Schools. Her portraits are varied and powerful, particularly her civic commissions, and she developed an exciting technique for compositional vignettes that add mystery and animation to her portraits. The artist also painted animals and houses in the landscape, either as a picture or as part of a portrait. She exhibited at the Royal Academy, London and was a former member of the Royal Academy Schools East Anglia Group. She held numerous exhibitions throughout her career and fulfilled commissions from Sir Lawrence Olivier, Alan Clark MP, Bamber Gascoigne, Joan Plowright and Ted Hughes and many others.

Her paintings developed an increasingly surreal, often dreamlike, intensity. Over time, they also developed a significant connection to Suffolk and its people, exploring the county’s life with a penetrating humour. Extract from The Guardian, Julia Heseltine Obituary by Brian Guthrie, 2023

Julia Heseltine by the artist’s mother, Anna Zinkeisen, 1957, Exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters

89 The Road to Siena oil on canvas board, 27 x 21 cm

James Morrison (1932-2020)

James Morrison (1932-2020) exhibited with The Scottish Gallery from the late 1950s and was represented by The Gallery exclusively from 1987. His relationship with The Gallery and its succession of Directors and colleagues, was one of mutual respect and friendship, his twenty-six solo exhibitions waypoints on his journey as a painter. He thought of himself as a landscape artist, happy to argue for the relevance of his chosen subject in an atomised art world. But his subject was far from narrow nor his approach predictable. He painted in The Alps, Saskatoon, Botswana, Greece, The Pyrenees and made three painting expeditions to the High Arctic.

In 1958, James and Dorothy Morrison moved from Glasgow to Catterline on the east coast. They had first visited the village on honeymoon in 1955 and returned on holiday in 1957 before making the move permanent. This painting dates from that holiday in late 1957. It is likely painted at Catterline Farm, just outside the village on the way up the hill to the main coast road. At this early stage in his career the paintings that had garnered any attention were images of Glasgow terraces and tenements and initially the switch to painting landscapes, particularly the largely flat landscape around Catterline was difficult.

It is no surprise therefore that in this foray into a different subject he sought out something with elements of familiarity -

buildings and strong verticals. Winter trees had appeared regularly in the paintings of Glasgow streets and their treatment here is the same as in these urban works. The focus on the trees as the central subject however is new, and something that was to gradually become a central focus of his painting over the next 30 years and beyond. He moved to Angus in 1965. That landscape is much more heavily wooded and copses become frequent elements in the open landscapes painted there. In addition, however, trees became central features both as subject and as carrier of meaning. The often stark vision seen in the Glasgow tenement paintings metamorphosed into winter tree paintings. They were never uncompromisingly bleak but they carried a sombre, reflective and often melancholic mood. There are joyous paintings of Montreathmont forest with the complex play of light in broken glades but more commonly there are large paintings of single giant beech trees with a presence as solemn as any Realist Glasgow painting.

Trees and paintings of trees held an important place in his oeuvre and he felt strongly about their significance and importance. The comment from the early 1980s that he enjoyed the company of a particular beech tree more than that of most people he knew indicates his world view. That emotional investment in trees as a subject began with paintings such as this. John Morrison

T

90 A Copse, 1957 oil on canvas, 82 x 91.5 cm

Ula Paine (1909-2001)

It remains a truism to observe that in seeking to make discoveries of largely unrecognised talent amongst British painters the place to look is amongst the women. Even for those whose reputations are established and work sought after, like Laura Knight, Gwen John, Prunella Clough or Mary Fedden, the monetary value of women artists still lags well behind their male contemporaries. But amongst the exhibitors at the NEAC, or the RA Annual Exhibition, and the myriad of regular, annual exhibitions where amateur and professional practice intermingled, woman artists of real distinction remained unnoticed while noisier, flashier male egos took all the oxygen out of the salon. This has much to do with subject matter: women think differently and paint differently – not worse than, not better than - just different.

Ula Paine is an excellent example; a painter of rare talents and originality whose work remains largely in the dark. Her early precocity was nurtured within a liberated, artistic household: her grandfather was the Victorian painter George Hilditch, but art school and the hard realities of professional necessity crushed her vitality and she had to wait until after the War for her métier to be allowed to flourish. London’s leafy suburbs and parks, its quiet corners, gardens and canals, peopled by a reemergent middleclass gave her her subject and a pitch perfect atmosphere of ‘other’. The

optimism of The Festival of Britain in 1951, the expansion of art publishing, magazines, the homemaking impulse, aspirational interior design, television and advertising all created a milieu in which her beautifully composed urban landscape and poised, enigmatic still life found their place. For Paine, trees are as much the landmarks of the urban as the architecture; trees judiciously planted, listed and looked after made a resurgent London a place of calm, as much survivors of The Blitz as the people walking their dogs and wheeling their kids in prams in the sunshine and shade. She lived a long and productive life and her show at London’s Grosvenor Gallery in 1991 at eightyone earned her an interview with Micheal Parkinson: a character; feisty, a survivor. But we must look at Paine’s work to recognise her talent.

91 A Stroll in the Park, 1957 oil on canvas, 63.5 x 76 cm

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree. I shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow; I shall sing when night’s decay Ushers in a drearier day.

Fall, leaves, fall by Emily Brontë (1818-1848)

92 Falling Leaves, 1972 oil on canvas, 51 x 40.5 cm

Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition:

Amongst the Trees

6 June - 27 July 2024

Exhibition can be viewed online at: scottish-gallery.co.uk/amongstthetrees

ISBN: 978 1 912900 84 8

Printed by PurePrint Group

Designed and produced by The Scottish Gallery

The Scottish Gallery would like to thank the artists and their families for their contribution to this exhibition and publication.

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 copyrightholders and of the publishers.

Front cover: Sheila Anderson-Hardy, Birdsong, 2024, ink, watercolour and collage on paper, 152 x 122 cm (Cat.8)

Inside front cover: Victoria Crowe, Corner of the Garden (Summer), c.1972, oil on board, 71 x 91 cm (Cat.29)

Inside back cover: Derrick Guild, Burnt Cassowary, after Oudry, 2013-15, oil on linen, 198 x 153 cm (Cat.46)

Back cover: Andrea Geile, Ferro Shrub, 2023, Corten steel, H115 x W85 x D85 cm.

Photograph: Ruediger Lubricht, Worpswede, © Gerhard-Marcks-Stiftung, Bremen