ART
VICTORIA CROWE
IMAGES: ©VICTORIA CROWE, COURTESY OF THE SCOTTISH GALLERY.
E LEFT: Still Point of The Turning Year, screenprint. ABOVE: Victoria Crowe. BELOW: City Evening, monotype.
Winter blues Victoria Crowe has always been drawn to northern landscapes and the liminal effects of fading light, but a residency in Orkney last year presented her with new challenges, says Mary Miers
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ver since Victoria Crowe captivated audiences with her exhibition A Shepherd’s Life at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2000, it has been impossible not to think of her work when contemplating a frosty Borders hillside. The Royal Scottish Academician is a highly regarded portraitist and painter of meditative still lifes and interiors, but it’s her poetic studies of landscape and the natural world that are among her best known works. Particularly memorable are her winter trees – all ‘contortions, twists, frizzles of twigs’, as the Shetland poet Christine de Luca describes them in Garden Full of Snow – their elegantly patterned forms assuming an almost spiritual symbolism in her quiet, luminous compositions.
One particularly beautiful oil painting, Considered Silence, views a stand of limes or beeches through a window at dusk, bare branches traceried against a snowfield suffused in a blueish glow. What better image for the front cover of Peter Davidson’s literary study of twilight, The Last of the Light (2015)? The artist and writer admire each other’s work and the theme of Victoria’s new exhibition reflects their mutual interests. Low Winter Light, which opens at The Scottish Gallery on 30 November, includes some of her tree paintings made during the bitter days of last December and January. She views the landscape through sunlight refracted from a frost splintered window or through a tangle of branches against an orange glow. A screenprint, Border Hill, brilliantly captures the broken textures and marled blues and whites of snowpatched fields in fading light. An ancient sycamore seen against a rising moon is depicted using the combined techniques of woodblock, screenprint and lithograph. Last year, Victoria returned to another of Peter’s books, The Idea of North (2015), when she took up an artist’s residency far from her familiar territory of the Pentlands and Venice and travelled to the far northwest of Orkney. No trees on the salt-bitten grasslands of Birsay. ‘Just line, line, line and the unfolding drama of the sky... everything was on this horizontal plane. The contrast was just what I’d hoped for,’ she says, explaining how, usually, her compositions are vertical, with trees and other objects in front of the space and the sky ‘never the main event’. In this ancient, layered landscape, with its flattened planes and vast seas and skies, she relished the challenge of conveying the atmosphere and ‘sense of elemental timelessness’. She stayed in a small studio hut overlooking the sea, 97
ART
VICTORIA CROWE
RIGHT: December 12th, mixed media. FAR RIGHT: Above Stromness, oil on panel. BOTTOM: Border Hill, screenprint.
A snapshot of life 1945: Crowe was born on VE Day in Kingston upon Thames. 1961-68: Studied at Kingston School of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. 1968-98: Worked as a part-time lecturer in the School of Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art. 1970-85: Lived with her artist husband Michael Walton in a cottage in the Pentland hills, where she got to know the shepherdess Jenny Armstrong. She won some major awards for her work. 1990: Moved to her present home/studio in West Linton. 2003: Acquired a studio in Giudecca, Venice. The art and landscape of Italy are an important theme in her work. 2011-12: Dovecot Studios wove a large-scale tapestry of her painting Large Tree Group, now in the National Museum of Scotland. 2016: National Galleries of Scotland acquired a body of her work. 2018: Exhibited a retrospective of her portraits at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Her subjects have included Kathleen Raine, R D Laing, Thea Musgrave and King Charles. 2019: The City Art Centre in Edinburgh exhibited her big retrospective, ’50 Years of Painting’.
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making the first of two visits in June to ‘explore the light on the land and its margins during the long twilights of the Orkney summer solstice’. Often, she would sketch from her bedroom window at 1 and 2am, mesmerised by the lenticular clouds and ethereal, strangely moving light over the Brough of Birsay. Substance and form were clearly visible but it was like looking at a pointillist painting, she says. ‘Once the pinkish afterglow of the sunset had disappeared, you could still see everything, but in a paler, colder light. And then you realised it was the next day’. She returned in November to experience ‘the short days, long darkness and luminous skies of winter’. While there, she made some tiny oils that she later worked up into a series of sensational full-moon paintings, rich but delicate in their tonality. She captured the fragmented, glowing skies using a pointillist technique on paper primed with pumice powder to create a granular surface.
Realising how well the subtle flecks of colour would replicate on a large scale through the medium of gun tufting, she took the paintings to Dovecot Studios. The result is Above Stromness, a magnificent rug made by Louise Trotter that will be
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one of the highlights of the forthcoming show. Discussing her work recently, Victoria observed that she has always found green difficult, which reminded me of another artist whose paintings have shaped our impressions of a particular British landscape: Ravilious, whose work she has long admired, also avoided green. ‘One of the first things I wrote in my Orkney notebook was that I didn’t think I could do anything with that strange kind of milky green,’ she tells me when I mention the rolling Orcadian pastures. Instead, she looked outwards to the ‘thunder-bruised Atlantic,’ as the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown described it, silhouetting land against sea and sky. She returned repeatedly to the stark cliffs of Yesnaby, where skuas circle over shell-strewn ledges embedded with fossils. In Near Yesnaby Shining Winter Sea, she depicts the flecks of foam blown up from the sea, recalling a passage in Mackay Brown’s novel Magnus in which the saint performs his first miracle in Birsay, where his martyred body was brought to rest in 1117. ‘The smallest spume-drop is not lost – it is here, there, nowhere, everywhere, a frail blown cluster of salt bubbles; but also an emerald, an opal.’ Sea and sun, the small deeds of grace and mortal life all come together in the image of the spume scottishfield.co.uk
‘She would sketch from her bedroom window at 1 and 2am, mesmerised by the lenticular clouds’ bubble, which captures light and becomes jewellike in the eye of eternity. In contrast to the poet, whose Orkney is richly populated with Norse earls and saints, tinkers and fishermen, the artist reveals little hint of human occupation. Yet both share an interest in the mystical and the spirit of the past. In a recorded conversation last year, Victoria discussed with Sir John Leighton the absence of figures or buildings in her landscapes and the way this plays with our sense of scale. As in paintings by Munch and the other Scandinavian artists whose work fascinates her, there’s often uncertainty as to where sky ends and sea begins; they merge into each other in the half-light, allowing imagination and memory to take over from the purely topographical. Many of the Orkney works were painted on pre-primed paper using fluid media such as watercolour and ink to enable her to work quickly and capture the changing light. Sketchbooks were 99
VICTORIA CROWE
TOP: Lights in a Mysterious Landscape, monotype. ABOVE: Resilient Tree, Rising Moon, woodblock, screenprint, lithograph, depicting a sycamore at Birkhall, Deeside that is over 350 years old.
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the artist’s essential tools, enabling her to channel her initial response, hold onto an image with a few pencil lines, scribble notes – ‘last night there was a silver line on the horizon’ – and express a stream of thoughts and ideas. ‘I begin with acute observation,’ she wrote of her approach. ‘Then imagination and association transform objective reality into a complex personal dialogue, evolve layers of meaning elaborated by personal memories, set against the vastness of historical time.’ Earlier this year, she produced a series of monotypes that return to the theme of winter and evening light through the image of a birch, reprinted in varying tones and definitions. We see it mottled and silvery against an umber glow, illuminated against an inky ground and fading into a ghost tree. She found the experimental nature of the printing comparable to her Orkney experience of the ‘possibilities and potentials of image making during the process of working towards an as yet unknown solution’. The idea runs through her latest exhibition, linking a selection of works that are perfectly pitched for the season.
See it yourself ‘Victoria Crowe Low Winter Sun’. The Scottish Gallery, 16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ. 30 November 22 December. www.scottishgallery.co.uk T: 0131 558 1200
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