Angie Lewin | Wild Garden

ANGIE LEWIN Wild Garden

FOREWORD Christina Jansen

Angie Lewin’s last solo exhibition Nature Assembled in 2020, was her first large-scale solo exhibition with The Gallery. I was reminded that this was during the pandemic, and despite a limited real audience, her exhibition attracted tens of thousands of online visitors, with hundreds attending our online events. Three years ago, the artist continued to find inspiration from a great variety of plants, particularly in her Edinburgh garden where like many of us, she took comfort in a different rhythm of life, able to nurture her auriculas and other garden plants, which resulted in an astonishing series of watercolour paintings.

Three years on, and Lewin hasn’t stood still. She has moved from her home and studio in Edinburgh and made a permanent move to Speyside in the northeast of Scotland. Together with her husband Simon Lewin, they built a polytunnel and expanded her studio. She has also journeyed to the Outer Hebrides, Orkney and Norfolk, making sketches and collections of samples gathered from the wild; Lewin is permanently at ground level observing the flora and fauna, walking in the woods, by fast rivers, hill lochs or beach and machair.

At her studio in Speyside, she gathers all this natural information, representing an infinite and intimate investigation of plant forms, colour variations and patterns. The polytunnel has amplified the potential of her watercolour subject; auricula, tulips, anemones, dahlias, and marigolds are elucidated in new spectacular arrangements intertwined with her ceramic collection and other found objects.

There is a growing confidence apparent in larger, denser compositions, her instinctive eye for picture-making editing the chaos and the passing seasons into the order of significant form. Angie Lewin shares much with the late Elizabeth Blackadder: joy in nature, a close observation of the subject and a mutual sensitivity for printmaking and watercolour. She has quietly emerged as an artist whose work has a broad and enduring appeal, whose imagery is already deeply familiar but will not be easily categorised. An artist engaged with nature, culture and conservation, an artist for our times and all times.

Christina Jansen

The Scottish Gallery

Opposite: Spitalfields Mug with Tulips (detail)

WILD GARDEN Henry Noltie

I was flattered to be invited by Angie Lewin to write something for a catalogue of her recent watercolours. Having long been an admirer of her linocuts, with their complex patterns, subtle colours and echoes of a period of graphic art of which I’m particularly fond, I was thrilled when she told me that she often goes for inspiration to my books on Indian botanical drawings. An invitation to her Speyside home followed and the visit took place on a particularly bleak January day. After near blizzard conditions at Drumochter the weather in fact improved dramatically northwards, and Speyside was bathed in wintry sunshine.

A biting wind howled on the slope above the brim-full and powerfully surging Spey as we started with an inspection of the polytunnel, in which the subjects of many of Angie’s recent paintings are raised. A ‘Polycrub’, designed to withstand Shetland gales, its name taken from the stone-walled enclosures or planticrubs that protect northern vegetable gardens. Other than some overwintering greens, the beds were bare, the dahlia tubers mostly lifted for the winter from the powdery brown earth, but it was just about possible to imagine the spring pots of parrot tulips and the forest of roof-high dahlias that fill it in summer.

The next stop was Angie’s studio, in a wooden addition to the trim, granite Highland farmhouse that, with its steading, she and her husband Simon have meticulously restored. As much a museum as a studio, or perhaps a latter-day alchemist’s laboratory, the transformations that take place here on blank sheets of paper result in colourful beauty rather than a mere change from a base metal into gold. The view across the valley to Ben Rinnes is panoramic – pasture with bleached grass culms, dark conifer plantations, copses of purple-budded birch, a landscape fringed with wind turbines. The walls are lined with pictures: a large Curwen lithograph by Bawden, a wood engraving of dandelions by Monica Poole, paintings and prints by Angie and her friends. There’s a library of reference books and a guddle of the raw materials with which she populates her paintings: mugs sprouting feathers and cone-laden larch twigs, teasels, pebbles, magnolia fruits, boxes of pot shards, verdigris lichen tufts and a glazed cabinet filled with a collection of polychrome ceramics. Jugs of coppery lustre; Victorian teacups; blue-and-white Chinese export porcelain; Rye pottery; Wedgwood mugs and bowls with designs by Ravilious and Bawden, many of them from a favourite china shop in Holt.

We reached a grey metal plan chest from whose upper drawer Angie began to remove the paintings for my solitary delectation; stiff, deckle-edged rectangles of heavy Arches paper that requires no stretching. Some emerged face down, the revelation when flipped the more astonishing. A surface entirely covered in meticulous draughtsmanship, pulsating with colour of a positively Oriental splendour – the raw materials from Polycrub and museum transformed. Incredibly the paintings are all the result of a frenzy of post-Lockdown creativity. I was reminded of an occasion when a vendor of Kashmir shawls unfurled his exquisitely embroidered wares from a small craft onto the deck of a houseboat on Nigeen Lake near Srinagar.

Here were small portraits of auriculas in their glaucous dustiness set against rich backgrounds of geometrically printed papers and speckled washes achieved by using a resist resulting in a texture like imperial porphyry. Fountains of tulips exploded from mugs and jugs from which the designs – ‘Oriental Pheasant’; garlands from a Richard Guyatt Coronation mug – spool out into the picture plane; figurative elements come from ceramic sculptures, a Terry Shone greyhound, a Staffordshire zebra, all incorporated into the dazzling pattern – the results resemble tapestries as much as paintings. More and more were pulled from the drawer, larger and larger, until the grand finale: a pair, each the size of a small prayer rug.

To rest the eye somewhat was a series with unpainted backgrounds: chequered fritillary bells, fringed and veined saucers of parrot tulips, top-heavy dahlia mops on the ends of swaying stems, all sharply outlined, almost heraldically, against the white of the supporting paper. Interior landscapes with mugs of feathers, bare twigs and pebbles, with hints of distant woods and hedges in the background. And then suddenly we were on the North Uist machair in summer, with somewhat more botanical portraits of yellow rattle and red clover, and ecological assemblages – thrift, ribwort plantain and kidney vetch; a filigree entanglement of equisetum, forget-me-not and the just slightly sinister maroon stars of marsh cinquefoil.

I count myself fortunate to have seen these works not only in the place of their creation, their stories enthusiastically recounted by their creator, but in their unframed state. They are artefacts as well as bearers of glorious images, but will undergo a final transformation when mounted, framed and glazed. I eagerly await the thrill they are sure to evoke in the hearts and minds of visitors when arrayed on the walls of an Edinburgh New Town gallery, blazing in incandescent glory, following a long and particularly difficult winter.

Henry Noltie is an author and Honorary Research Associate of the Natural History Museum and of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew and Edinburgh. He has worked for the last 30 years as a taxonomist and curator, specialising in Himalayan monocots and the history of the RBGE Indian collections, especially the drawings made for East India Company surgeons by Indian artists.

Henry Noltie

1 / Yellow Pot with Tulips and Auriculas 2022, watercolour, 54.5 x 55 cm

2 / Sandler Mug with Tulips and Narcissi 2021, watercolour, 41 x 51.5 cm

3 / Parrot Tulips and Fritillaries 2022, watercolour, 57.5 x 76 cm

4 / Fritillaries and Auriculas 2022, watercolour, 57.5 x 76 cm

5 / Spitalfields Mug with Tulips 2021, watercolour, 46 x 60.5 cm

6 / Colin’s Jug with Tulips and Hellebores 2022, watercolour, 76 x 57.5 cm

7 / Tulips and Auricula Faliraki 2022, watercolour, 57.5 x 76 cm

/ Auricula Faliraki and Lustreware Landscape 2021, watercolour, 20 x 15 cm

9 / Yellow Auricula in Floral Cup 2022, watercolour, 37.5 x 26 cm

10 / Auricula, Night Sky 2022, watercolour, 17 x 15.5 cm

11 / Auricula and Forget-Me-Nots 2022, watercolour, 37.5 x 28 cm

12 / Auricula Pink and Gold 2022, watercolour, 22 x 13 cm

13 / Auricula Green Edge 2022, watercolour, 16.5 x 16 cm

14 / Plantain and Lady’s Mantle 2021, watercolour, 19.5 x 19.5 cm

Opposite: 15 / Campion, Astrantia and Clover 2022, watercolour, 67 x 50 cm

16 / Yellow Rattle, Knockintorran 2021, watercolour, 40 x 30 cm

17 / Machair Study, Knockintorran 2022, watercolour, 41 x 52 cm

18 / Machair Study with Kidney Vetch 2022, watercolour, 38 x 29 cm

19 / Machair Study with Plantains and Thrift 2022, watercolour, 38 x 29 cm

20 / Red Clover, Knockintorran 2021, watercolour, 27 x 18.5 cm

21 / Marsh Cinquefoil with Horsetail 2022, watercolour, 51 x 41 cm

22 / Red Dahlias, No.19 Jug 2021, watercolour, 59 x 44.5 cm

23 / Campbell’s Tea with Dahlias 2021, watercolour, 57.5 x 76 cm

24 / Zebra, Dahlias and Feathers 2022, watercolour, 75 x 106 cm

25 / Dahlias in a Striped Cup 2022, watercolour, 50 x 58.5 cm

/ November, Last of the Dahlias 2022, watercolour, 43.5 x 47.5 cm

/ ‘Flowers Of Literature’ with Dahlias 2022, watercolour, 54.5 x 58.5 cm

28 / Dahlias and Dogs 2022, watercolour, 75 x 106 cm

/ Marigolds and China Cup 2022, watercolour, 44 x 40.5 cm

30 /

November, Last of the Marigolds 2022, watercolour, 51 x 42 cm

31 / Anemones and Borage in Gaudy Welsh Jug 2021, watercolour, 46 x 49 cm

/ Anemones and Tam O’Shanter Tin 2022, watercolour, 51 x 44 cm

33 / Anemones, Late Snow 2022, watercolour, 55 x 59 cm

Fern Jug with Rosehips 2022, watercolour, pen and ink, 59.5 x 43.5 cm

Pheasant Cup with Magnolia Fruit 2022, watercolour, pen and ink, 29 x 39 cm

/ Capricorn, Lichen and Larch

2023, watercolour and pencil, 51.5 x 41.5 cm

37 / Aries, Lichen and Catkins 2023, watercolour and pencil, 41.5 x 38 cm

/ Stromness Blue 2022, watercolour, 23 x 31.5 cm

39 / Spey Larch and Feathers 2021, watercolour, 49.5 x 63.5 cm

41 / A Country Zodiac 2023, watercolour, 23.5 x 17.5 cm

42 / Guyatt Mug, February Snow 2021, watercolour, pen and ink, 46 x 53 cm

43 / Delft Blue with Sea Holly and Feathers 2022, watercolour, 57.5 x 76 cm

BIOGRAPHY

Angie Lewin RWS RE

Born 1963, Macclesfield, Cheshire

Education

2003-04 Postgraduate Glass and Fine Art - Central St. Martins

2002-03 Postgraduate Glass and Architecture - Central St. Martins

1997-98 City & Guilds Garden Design - Capel Manor

1996-97 RHS General Certificate in Horticulture - Capel Manor

1986-87 Postgraduate Printmaking - Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts

1983-86 BA (Hons) Fine Art Printmaking - Central School of Art & Design

1982-83 Art Foundation - Northwich College of Art

Selected Exhibitions

2023 Wild Garden, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh (solo exhibition)

2022 Bircham Gallery, Holt, Norfolk

2020 Nature Assembled, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh (solo exhibition)

2019 Cambridge Contemporary Art

2018 Speypath & Strandline, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh (solo exhibition)

2018 Nature Table, The Townhouse, Fournier Street, London

2017 A Fine Line, City Art Centre, Edinburgh (co-curator)

2017 Airs, Reels & Ballads, St Jude’s at The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh

2017 A Printmaker’s Journey, Hampshire (curator)

2016 Bluecoat Display Centre, Liverpool (solo exhibition)

2015 The Masters - Relief Printmaking, The Bankside Gallery, London (curator)

2015 A Natural Selection, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh (solo exhibition)

2014 Cambridge Contemporary Art

2014 Designing The Everyday, Towner, Eastbourne

2014 St Jude’s in the City, The Townhouse, Fournier Street, London

2013 A Natural Line, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (solo exhibition)

2012 Revealed: A Familiar Landscape, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh

2012 St Jude’s In The City, Bankside Gallery, London

2011 Summer Exhibition, The Royal Academy, London

Societies

The Royal Watercolour Society

The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers

The Society of Wood Engravers

The Art Workers’ Guild

Public Collections and Awards

Aberystwyth University

Ashmolean Museum

London Institute

Victoria & Albert Museum

Aberystwyth University, School of Art Purchase Prizes 2008 and 2011.

Commissions and Other Achievements

Co-founded textile design company St Jude’s in 2005.

Illustrations for publishers Penguin, Merrell and Conran Octopus including book jackets for Carol Ann Duffy for Picador, Shelley and Ted Hughes for Faber & Faber and Penelope Lively for Penguin.

In 2010 Merrell publish ‘Angie Lewin - Plants and Places’.

In 2010 the wood engraving ‘Alphabet and Feathers’ was included in the V&A Cherry On The Cake collection, and in 2015, a new screenprint, ‘Honesty Blue’, was also commissioned by the V&A. Limited edition prints have also been commissioned by Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne and Pallant House Gallery, Chichester.

Fabric designs for Liberty for their Autumn/Winter 2010 collection.

In 2019 Random Spectacular publish ‘The Book of Pebbles’, a collaboration with writer Christopher Stocks. Published as a paperback edition by Thames & Hudson in 2020.

Opposite: Marigolds and China Cup (detail)

Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition

ANGIE LEWIN

Wild Garden

30 March - 29 April 2023

The exhibition can be viewed online at scottish-gallery.co.uk/angielewin

ISBN: 978-1-912900-62-6

Designed by Simon Lewin

Portraits of Angie by Esme Saville www.esmesaville.com

Photography of watercolours by Rebecca Milling at Copystand www.copystand.co.uk

Printed by Swallowtail Print

Front cover: Parrot Tulips and Fritillaries (detail), 2022, watercolour, 57.5 x 76 cm (cat 3)

All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without the permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers.

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