gallery visits and a local broch

Last month I went to a wonderful exhibition opening at the Ingleby gallery in Edinbugh – on a Saturday morning – they had a specialist coffee maker, mounds of morning pastries, and bloody marys for those who felt it was near enough lunchtime – solo show of Glasgow painter Andrew Cranston’s work, more of that if you scroll down.

I met up with fellow painter Adrian Gardner, who I just missed teaching at Sunderland on Foundation, he was there a couple of years before I started, in 1991.

 

Then the next week I was back, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, to meet fellow We the Muse artist, Sufie Berger , over on a trip from the US. We enjoyed looking at parts of the collection and had a coffee. Sufie will be going back to Brazil where she was brought up, for a second leg of her trip, after visiting the Highlands.

Last week I popped over to Edinburgh again, I can get away for about four hours if this one has had a good run –

First stop an in-depth stare into the Andrew Cranstons at Ingleby gallery – I had the place to myself.

Walled Garden (after Paul Klee) oil on canvas, 200 x 230 cm.

one can wallow in the details of these big paintings

so freely painted – this  with oil.

Questions of travel, 2023, distemper and oil on canvas, 250 x  200 cm – distemper being pigment bound with animal or “rabbit-skin” glue. The glow of the glass case with the ship in the darkened room – the little boy tenderly painted –

but his legs disappear into the polished wooden floor.

A combination of memories and story-telling – for me Cranston seamlessly produces reverie from our unconscious and our desires.

This painting too seems to be about memory and childhood – Classroom, 2023, 210 x 180 cm, distemper on canvas. Here are jars of tadpoles – and the one on the far right glows an eerily luminous green –

all along the wide windowsill of a classroom that looks out onto a forested  landscape with hill or mountain in the distance.

Its floor a pattern of woodblock, and the tiny chairs arranged in a circle. I love all the details that are painted in such a loose and homely kind of way – the radiators …. not exact but with the inexactness of time passing.

Similarly with the objects in Aberdeen studio (my blue period), 2023, distemper on canvas, 210 x 260 cm. There is so much space in all these paintings. And time.

The door is open out into the cobbled night, a dog interrogates the invisible occupant as to whether to come in or out, a cat pursues its own business under the streetlamp … but the doormat is a sparkle of colour or autumn leaves. The studio itself a place for dreaming –

there is evidence  of activity, a painting of a large reclining nude who threatens to jump off the canvas with her waving legs, a pot of baked beans orange against the muted blues and greys, but all seems stopped, as though without the artist nothing happens in here … or as though the eye of the beholder has stilled whatever was going on in here before they looked at it. Did someone just leave through that door? Has the artist gone out? Is that a huge mirror on the far left, or another painting?

The sink with the plughole is painted like a small abstract within the larger canvas, but when you look deeper into the paint there are two brushes, and the silver chain and plug. I noticed a lot of outline happening, done very softly in white, some as if with an oil pastel, some with paint and brush.

Then there is this enormous and hypnotic painting of koi in a shallow pool lined with tiny square tiles.

Why have you stopped here? 2023, distemper on canvas, 200 x 260 cm.

The fish hover, the water reflects and distorts them and the pattern of the tiles. There are coins … wishes thrown in …

it is beautifully done and totally mesmerising.

His small works on hardback book covers do the same thing. In fact their small scale pulls you in tighter.

On the stairs of the gallery a particularly creepy smallish painting – A snake came to my coffee table on a hot, hot night, 2023, distemper and oil on canvas, 99 x 68.7 cm. Its inspiration is a poem by D H Lawrence, Snake. – A snake came to my water-trough. / On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, /To drink there … ( you can find it here). Laurence seems to have had an instinctive understanding of animals, and his poem is very honest, the fear of the snake and the human wish to do violence to what you are afraid of. So that, once you know, gives the painting an extra dimension. But even before knowing, the snake is a curiously carefully painted creature, more like the tadpole jars and the fish than other animals inhabiting Cranston’s paintings. There is a respect for its creatureliness.

Quilted, 2023, 24.9 x 19.9 cm on paper

Upstairs at Ingleby there were three small works on paper by Lorna Robertson, another Scottish painter (who just happens to be Cranston’s partner). I bought the book about her work and look forward to seeing an exhibition before too long. She is a painter using images and colour in a different way, very painterly, reminding me a little of Sonia Delaunay.

Then on, very quickly, to other galleries – And Gallery had these super-sleek satiny encaustic seascapes by Anke Roder

some, like this one, reminded me of North Norfolk saltmarsh coasts at very high tide.

More seascapes at the Scottish gallery  – I found an overwhelm of thick thick oil paint with repetitive strokes of brush/knife all the same thing, rather colourful, about twelve or so of them. I won’t mention the painter’s name.

Here’s a sneaky selfie taken in the Arusha gallery (these are all in Dundas street so easy to take in before running out of car parking)

I quite liked this, When awake I’m just drifting, 2023, oil on linen,120 x 90cm by Danny Leyland. I quite liked the whole mixed show. This is my usual reaction to Arusha, interested but not always convinced.

I retrieved the car and drove to Details Framing to see their new show, Incremental, squeezing into a tiny parking space on the street opposite. These  paintings by Rhonda Taylor, acrylic on cradled plywood, show the plywood’s pattern through the paint. They are meticulous gradings/stripings of colour – I liked a couple with this spacey glow like a planetary atmosphere’s horizon.

Then I dashed home. Edinburgh is really quite easy to get in and out of, especially on a week day.

Quiet countrified Cupar is really quite handy for everything.

We get up to Dunkeld and beyond quite easily and are surrounded by coastlines, rivers and hills. So my paintings are beginning to look more deeply into that reverie of landscape, how we find ourselves in it.

I am working on several at the moment, allowing myself to dream a little and make watercolour sketches

and take some of that softness and melting quality further into the bigger canvases.

As with Cranston, the inexactness of time passing.

It’s quite hard to get this right – every photo has its charm and one has to resist that.

the special quality of watercolours make that possible

and I am learning how to apply that to acrylic on the larger scale

A friend – my old art teacher from school – suggested turning everything upside down.

I used this to make the abstract qualities more important

this week, working on this 100 x 100 canvas.

I may employ some other methods, like having some areas of the canvas almost blank with another piece of fine linen laid on top.

Meanwhile this one is waiting (80 x 70 cm) to see what may happen to it

I am sticking text onto all of them and using these patterned papers too …

And thinking about film – Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and others of that ilk

My poems are really about this sort of psychoanalytical way into the relationship between landscape/nature and human.

Yesterday I climbed up to Drumcarrow Craig, a landmark hill near here where there was once an iron age broch, a sort of fort and living place, a tower constructed with a double wall, inhabited no doubt by Picts. Maybe they watched the Roman legions march into Fife from here. (The Romans didn’t stay long, although they built a temporary fort above the Tay.)

You can see the Firth of Tay, and Edenmouth and the bay of St Andrews clearly from it, but not the Firth of Forth.

And the Fife pilgrim route runs beside it,

under its black cliffs.

today it has TV and phone masts, horses and sheep grazing, an electric fence we had to crawl under.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2 Comments

  1. Love your appreciation of each painting from the gallery and your own lovely watercolours, along with the descriptions of your corner of the world. xx

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