Helen Glassford | The Phenomenal World by The Scottish Gallery

The Phenomenal World

Helen Glassford

Last night I watched a film, but I can’t remember the name. I rarely do. Yesterday, I had a conversation about pea green boats, magical carpets and blue baboons. A poem spoke to me of dancing and turning worlds and still points. I thought about the crystal-clear winter-night skies of the north and felt a thrill. Now it is September, and those nights are not far away. I wondered about the colour ultramarine blue, and if it had a smell, then of what would it remind me? I had a fleeting memory of a lost friend. Later I watched the pleasure of the wind. I also tried listening to the sound of a fading star as suggested by a poet. Sometime last month I read a book (mostly from back to front) about art that is unreadable: about art that evades the verbal, created from the non-verbal. The abstract paintings within the pages made me think about crags and gullies and trees and light.

I know grey rests more easily on my light eyes, as do tones that are close to each other. I think Sickert Red and Degas Red are the only reds I warm to. They are

both melancholic and vibrant. On the other hand, I do like the colour-saturated intensity of the light and the violet prowling shadows when they come here. I think they speak to me of other connections and the movement of time.

In the mountains I feel fear at the same time as happiness, alternating with each step. And I once thought, whilst sitting on a cold rock eating my cheese sandwiches, about how twilight can have greater illumination than a sunny day. I also wondered, on that same rock, why solitude remains a steady comfort and why isolation offers an overwhelming sense of connection, although perhaps not to people. Perhaps more to the wider natural world, out there.

I am reliably informed we are to have Autumn mists tomorrow. There is no sign of them today. I look forward to the silent presence of the soft, long and lingering light, like breath on glass. Where, like any relationship, the horizon between sky and land fluctuates accordingly.

Weather that makes one feel porous. It appears magically, and its departure is only ever noticed after it is gone. (Rather like the film on the TV last night when the black bars above and below silently arrived and then left.)

I do question those silent moments. Does silence have its own frequency? What does this look like? The unheard noises of energy exchanges. Earth to Air, Dark to Light. I think I made a note to remind myself, somewhere in a sketchbook, that I should research this further.

I noticed the cold seeping into my finger tips and thought of the sun. I imagined the next time I will head north. I remember winter coming early this time last year, the air thick with Atlantic darkness at 4pm. Stranded alone on an island for the night, and the next day swimming in silky waters out from a white beach.

I see the beauty of the vanishing glimmer on the river

only for it to reappear on another wave moving towards me. It all seemed unimaginable. I think I understand why Italo Calvino wrote about those Invisible Cities; why Howard Hodgkin waited for the memory which often took years to find, and why Malevich painted the white square.

I completed a painting, and wished I could have made a better attempt at something as simple as the meaning of dusk.

– This exhibition is a collection of thoughts, observations and experiences gathered over two years of sporadic roaming off the beaten track in some of the most remote and wild areas of Scotland. I naturally gravitate towards these mysterious edgelands. Simple, time and weather worn places where raw and wild beauty prevails. These places are not empty, but rich in natural dynamics. It is a phenomenal world we live in. A world to be cherished, celebrated and experienced.

Helen’s work is above all true to the north: observed fugacity, following a changing light, the storm-speed changes of weather, is vital to the depiction of northern realities.

The Capture of the Changing Moment

Peter Davidson

Memory and understanding in remote uplands; the painter’s present and past selves absorbed in the landscape; working in solitude through the infinite summer evenings, through winter chill and the dark closing down. What is so grave and fine in these paintings of the north is the consistent sense of presence and identification: they are records of being entirely in the landscape – the very marks of the hairs of the brush mirror the movement of the filaments of cold in the air.

We have to search a little to find a tradition for painting the landscape of the most northerly parts of Europe. These regions – Baltic Germany, Scotland, Scandinavia – did not generally find their own language in the visual arts until the turn of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, these northernmost landscapes (when depicted at all) were routinely lit by Italian light under imaginary Mediterranean skies. They had to wait until the opening years of the nineteenth century for their painters to be able to see truly their dark afternoons, slow evenings, lucent midnights. Danish painters of the early nineteenth century looked back to the early modern Dutch example, in their depictions of the realities of life in and around Copenhagen, of “the weather in the streets.” The seventeenth century Dutch painters offered an example of the depiction of streets and houses under the skies of the north: the lifting rainclouds and pewtery reflections in Vermeer’s celebrated View of Delft1, and of snowy fog and falling winter twilight in Avercamp. These are the paintings

which focus for the first time in Europe on the quotidian realities of a northern climate.

In Scotland, from the turn of the nineteenth century, Henry Raeburn in Edinburgh depicted the colours of northern landscapes as precisely as any Dutch master in the backgrounds of his portraits, although the landscapes themselves are (in one case at least) reconstructions from sketches by others of places which he had never seen. Despite this, the estuary and stormy mountains in his portrait of Lord Bute is the fruit of his own memory and observation of the north. It is one of the first real Scottish upland landscapes to be painted, sharing its fidelity (but in contrasting mood) with the exquisite hill-slopes and blowy grey-yellow autumn sky behind Zepherina Loughnan, Mrs Veitch of Eliock.

Helen Glassford writes compellingly about her own commitment to the remote uplands of Scotland, and to the remoteness to be found in landscapes nearer at hand:

It is the quieter moments that I seek. I go in search of the remote, often ‘up north.’ (I have become increasingly aware that the remote can also be found in the skies and light at home here on the Tay.) I do however find the sense of travel, the journey, the departure from one place and the arrival at another has a profound effect on the mind. The air seems clearer, the winds more visceral, the light holds more imagination. I notice the soul filled silences when

stepping through a boulder field on a high plateau or trudging through the peat bogs of Assynt.

This kind of emotional affinity with the remoteness of the north first manifested itself in the art of Scandinavia, and of the former Swedish territories in Baltic Germany. Uplands and very remote places make an early appearance with Caspar David Friedrich’s travels in the Great Mountains in Czechia (then called the Reisengebirge) and the resulting painting (which includes a troubled self-portrait turning its face away towards the mountain darkness) of about 1809, Mountain Landscape with a Rainbow. Or his lonely, extraordinary depiction of scrub bushes in chill mist and snow (From the Dresden Heath) a barelyshaped fragment of the life we know, but poignant in its belatedness, in the foggy late-afternoon light which dies even as the hand attempts to catch its likeness2. His fellow-painter in Dresden, Johan Christian Dahl’s 1821 Norwegian Landscape with a Rainbow3 resonates with Friedrich’s stormy hills and rainbow, its distances receding into the dimness of mountain passes and stormy sky.

In the 1830s the Norwegian painter Peder Balke (1804 -87) painted the far regions beyond the 70th parallel, as in his dark, glimmering North Cape or the seascape with the looming mass of Stetind in Fog. These paintings are stripped back in technique, restrained in palette but remarkable for their handling of gradations of the

muted colours of mist, stone and storm. Balke’s paintings have a quality of being about the journey as well as about the depicted place, which Helen’s work shares comprehensively. They are acts of placing the self in the landscape – the phenomenon of being in a chosen place on a particular day of unstill weather, bearing the experiences, thoughts and sensibility unique to that day in the artist’s life. Joseph Leo Koerner’s magnificent study of Friedrich, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, places great emphasis on placing,

on viewpoint, the positioning of the painter in time and in the landscape, in that the viewer will inevitably be positioned where the artist has been before. Helen herself writes:

Simply I come back to knowing that within landscape you feel a part of the whole and the remote feels like a slower, more considered place to be. I paint the remote and wish the viewer to feel included.

She is wholly aware of the particular sustenance which can be drawn from the very fugacity of northern light and northern weather, as well as from those aspects of the north which are sustaining of their nature, what Louis MacNeice called:

The necessity of the silence of the islands4

Which line resonates strongly with Helen’s painting titled At the Still Point (cat.17) – an autumnal depiction of moving things coming to rest: warmth of colour defines the season, cloud is thinning and slowing, land becomes visible over quiet water. What is so remarkable here is a depiction of stillness emerging from movement, from scurrying cloud and the sound of the wind, and the emerging silence is deepened by this precise placing of artist (and therefore viewer) at the instant of change.

Perhaps this was indeed the greatest discovery of northern European art, the appreciation of the value and beauty of that which is fugitive: of a constantly changing

light, of unstable and adverse seasons and weathers. All seasons of the north can be depicted if the response to them is a harmony of place and artist: as Helen writes:

The memory of place, the encounters I have with the landscape and how this can change according to different elements are a constant fascination. Light, atmosphere, time of day, location, the physicality of geography and geology and the physical self. All those influencing factors that alter perception.

Nor thern art comes to focus with precision on gradations of season infinitely more distinct than those of the south – there may only be four days in a year when birch trees are in pale-green leaf with a cloud of their pollen hanging above them in the air. There may only be three days either side of the spring or autumn equinox when a ray of light shoots through a notch in the hills from west to east. Only one week when black recentlythawed water flows between banks of still-frozen snow, only a few hours when fallen snow lies down to the tideline.

This all fosters a characteristically northern aesthetic of fugacity, of the capture of the changing moment. Perhaps the first real landscape painting in Britain which we would recognise as such, as opposed to depictions of estates and owned land, is Jan Siberechts’s 1690s Landscape with Rainbow, Henley on Thames5 with its clearing storm and short lived rainbow. It is a picture intensely about the self in the landscape at a

particular moment. It begins a tradition intermittently dormant until the nineteenth century, which Helen Glassford’s paintings continue in our own time: As she writes:

The sense of time passing is acute, the importance of the fugitive light in the northern climes. The sea winds from yesterday, the thresholds of tomorrow, hazy horizons with distant hope. The possibilities with the painting surface allow for these suggestions, allowing for an abstraction where observation is still present. Each element of an image having a close relationship with the next. Its structure both a suggestion and representation of experience.

Back in the early years of the nineteenth century, there is much in common between Friedrich’s From the Dresden Heath6 and John Sell Cotman’s studies of remote corners, of tangled undergrowth, of branches washed up on river-beaches, such as On the Greta near Rokeby7. Almost simultaneously, but unknown to each other, they pioneered an aesthetic which schools the eye and heart for the experience of living in the north: the offering of intense regard to things disregarded, apprehension of late summer light, apprehension of opalescent frozen twilights. Above all they observed, recorded and transformed the change of the seasons in unfrequented places. This is exactly what Helen does. For me one of her most haunting works is a precise

demonstration of these phenomena, those aspirations: Long Twilight, Assynt (cat.5) is a picture of the gradual movement of light in a remote place through the long hours of a summer evening. The foreground’s warm sunlight, moves away towards the dark mountain ramparts on the horizon. Colour in the painting enacts the length and progress of the infinitely slow summer twilight. But there is another dimension in the picture, one that is almost supernatural (like the apparitional hills of Sutherland seen on the rare, clearest summer nights from the north coast of Aberdeenshire). There is a region beyond the mountains: a place of white light and silver river waters – evoked and unexplained, it adds an extraordinary depth of feeling to the work.

Helen’s work is above all true to the north: observed fugacity, following a changing light, the storm-speed changes of weather, is vital to the depiction of northern realities. True depictions of northern landscapes themselves become one with the unstill process which drives successions of clouds, seasons and weathers across the flanks of the hills. To contemplate, appreciate and apprehend the aesthetic of the north, especially the remote north, is to celebrate, and participate in, its mutability. Nightfall overtakes the describing hand, and the walk home lies through the dark.

Professor Peter Davidson, Senior Research Fellow in Renaissance and Baroque Studies and Curator of the Campion Hall Collection

1. After the Equinox, 2024 oil on board, 40 x 30 cm

2. Anonymous Mountain, 2024 oil on board, 70 x 100 cm

3. On The Wane, 2024 oil on board, 20 x 20 cm

4. Light Hoarder, 2024 oil on board, 70 x 100 cm

5. Long Twilight, Assynt, 2024 oil on board, 100 x 100 cm

6. Dry Spell, 2023 oil on board, 32 x 40 cm

7. Island, 2023 oil on board, 32 x 40 cm

8. Estuary, 2024 oil on board, 32 x 40 cm

9. Yesterday Continued, 2023 oil on board, 32 x 40 cm

10. A Certain Silence, 2024 oil on board, 40 x 30 cm

11. Latent, 2024 oil on board, 100 x 100 cm

12. Slow Rotation, 2024 oil on board, 50 x 122 cm

13. Hill Shadow, 2023 oil on board, 30 x 30 cm

14. Every Spring, 2023 oil on board, 80 x 80 cm

15. Earth to Air, 2024 oil on board, 20 x 20 cm

16. Uprising, 2024 oil on board, 100 x 100 cm

17. At the Still Point, 2023 oil on board, 30 x 30 cm

18. Rain Light, Assynt, 2024 oil on board, 35.5 x 28 cm

19. The Last Light, 2024 oil on board, 20 x 20 cm

20. Honour Hour, 2024 oil on board, 29 x 33 cm

21. New Year’s Eve, 2024 oil on board, 30 x 30 cm

22. Reconciled, 2023 oil on board, 28 x 28 cm

23. Riptide, 2024 oil on board, 22 x 29 cm

24. Carried on the Wind, 2024 oil on board, 90 x 150 cm

25. Midnight Rain, 2023 oil on board, 30 x 25 cm

26. A Place Apart, 2023 oil on board, 20 x 20 cm

27. Gunmetal Grey Tay, 2024 oil on board, 40 x 30 cm

28. Soft Bite, 2024 oil on board, 100 x 100 cm

29. Essence of Birch I, 2024 oil on board, 21 x 25 cm

30. Essence of Birch II, 2024 oil on board, 21 x 25 cm

31. Pale January Sun, 2024 oil on board, 30 x 30 cm

32. Sound Frequency, 2024 oil on board, 40 x 35 cm

33. Clearing, 2023-2024 oil on board, 70 x 140 cm

34. On the Turn, Late August, 2024 oil on board, 90 x 150 cm

35. Pure White, 2024 oil on board, 25 x 17.5 cm

36. Mute, 2024 oil on board, 22 x 29 cm

37. Overlap, 2023-2024 oil on board, 60 x 60 cm

38. Foot Notes, 2024 oil on board, 30 x 30 cm

39. Halfway Point, 2024 oil on board, 50 x 122 cm

40. September Dawn, 2024 oil on board, 50 x 120 cm

41. Inner Sound, 2024 oil on board, 23.5 x 29.5 cm

42. The Hidden Loch, 2023-2024 oil on board, 60 x 60 cm

43. Bright Water, 2024 oil on board, 21.5 x 28.5 cm

44. Truce, 2024 oil on board, 22 x 29 cm

45. Game Changer, 2023 oil on board, 61 x 91 cm

46. A Soft Start, 2023 oil on board, 25 x 20 cm

47. Leaving, 2024 oil on board, 60 x 60 cm

48. Endless, 2024 oil on board, 30 x 30 cm

49. Mercurial, 2024 oil on board, 100 x 100 cm

50. Soft Bite Study, 2024 oil on board, 20 x 20 cm

51. Wind Song, 2023 oil on board, 60 x 60 cm

52. Two-way Conversation, 2024 oil on board, 120 x 150 cm

53. Touch of Winter, 2024 oil on board, 35.5 x 28 cm

54. Dusting, 2024 oil on board, 28 x 38 cm

Helen Glassford, Drawing on Stac Pollaidh, Assynt

Helen Glassford (b.1976)

Helen Glassford (b1976) is a painter living in North East Fife, Scotland. She studied painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee. She is a professional member of the Royal Scottish Society of Watercolour and Visual Arts Scotland. Her work is in many private collections world-wide and in the public collection of the McManus Art Gallery and Museum, Dundee.

Helen’s oil paintings draw on her memory, experience and observation of the remote areas of Scotland. She seeks out the atmosphere, the intangible and unseen through her expressive land and mindscapes. Constructing full environments, a visual echo of experience, connecting the wild with the past and present and connecting the intimate with the vast. Always touching upon human relationship with nature the multi layering of the senses is in constant flux within the surface of her work. Serenity, melancholy, the sublime, remoteness, absence, and belonging soak in through the surfaces. They are places without names, but often looking to the North. Shaping space with simple washes and minimal brushwork in places suggesting movement or at other times building layers slowly and surely with pigment

and glazes to reflect time passing. Overlapping folds and seams, paint poured wet into wet revealing marks and edges, lifted and reapplied with rags, brushes, large squeegees. An echo of the effects of weather and light in the North. Most are transitional spaces where reality is not demanded but also not ignored.

Her work is about these spaces, edges and borders in life, the thin line between visibility and obscurity, the sodden moorland fringes, the crystal clear, calm waters edge, where the sky rests upon the hazy horizon, the fudge between madness and sanity, between danger and safety.

Paint is explored and celebrated whilst making sense of her environments, both external and internal.

There are many underlying currents to Glassford’s work spanning areas such as climate concerns, poetry and writing, longing and belonging, complexity theory, natural systems, personal references and art history. All off which offer profound connections for the way she thinks about the world. The Phenomenal World is Helen Glassford’s second major exhibiton with The Scottish Gallery.

Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition

Helen Glassford

The Phenomenal World 28 November - 21 December 2024

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

ISBN: 978-1-912900-93-0

Designed and Produced by The Scottish Gallery

Printed by Pure Print Artist photographs by Stuart Hamilton With thanks to Peter Davidson

Front cover: Honour Hour, 2024, oil on board, 29 x 33 cm cat. 20 (detail)

Endnotes

1 1660-61, Mauritshuis, The Hague

2 See the superb discussion of belatedness in the art of Caspar David Friedrich in Koerner op.cit., investigating the way that Friedrich’s art, and particularly his use of the Ruckenfigur positions you the viewer as belated: “you are afterwards”pp.269, 291

3 Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

4 Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. E.R. Dodds (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p.62

5 Tate Britain

6 (1828, Dresden) For a virtuoso discussion of this painting see Joseph Leo Keorner, Caspar David Friedrich and the subject of landscape (London: Reaktion, 2009) pp.9-12, 291-2

7 (1805, Tate Britain), see David Hill, Cotman in the North (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005) pp.108-9

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