OPEN EYE GALLERY
THE CURIOUS EYE: DRAWING FROM NATURE ****
IAN McCULLOCH: RECYCLED LIVES ****
BOTH SHOWS AT ROYAL SCOTTISH ACADEMY
JOHN HOUSTON: NEW PAINTINGS ****
SCOTTISH GALLERY
JOCK McFADYEN: PICTURES OF SCOT
LAND ****
GREY GALLERY
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE PRINTS: PUBLISHED BY DAVID KRUT, NEW YORK ****
EDINBURGH PRINTMAKERS
DRAWING from nature is not fashionable. So you might imagine that, following fashion, it is something artists no longer do. There are plenty who do follow fashion, certainly, and many who probably could not draw usefully from nature if they tried. Nevertheless there are also plenty who still do look hard at the world and try to draw what they see. It is an activity that will outlive any fashion. The wonderful exhibition at the Queen's Gallery, Amazing Rare Things, is a reminder, too, of how fundamental to the birth of modern science the artist's eye and hand were when joined in investigation and record of the world around us, and the results are often of quite startling beauty. There still are artists who study the natural world as these artists did and, as they do, communicate to us the same sense of wonder that shines through every image in that exhibition.
The Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) has put together a show named The Curious Eye, comprising artists for whom that kind of study is an essential part of what they do. They are mostly contemporary and the show is curated by the academician John Busby. His own work here includes a naturalist's study of kittiwakes, but also a painting made from a microscopic study of a piece of granite. The first is obviously the natural world. The second looks quite abstract and so shows how even straightforward observation can have unexpected results. Elizabeth Blackadder's flower studies, too, are almost scientific in their accuracy. They lose nothing in popularity because of that, but when we admire them, are we simply responding to her skill at appropriating nature for her own purposes?
Keith Brockie, a brilliant naturalist for whom painting is his principal tool, suggests the answer. His study of a hare watched through a telescope is as beautiful as the hare itself, but it is not just a borrowed beauty, something appropriated, that we admire in his work, any more than it is with Elizabeth Blackadder's flowers. Brockie's great predecessor, the painter-ornithologist Archibald Thorburn, is here too. His ibis, like Brockie's hare, is a record of something seen, certainly, but also of otherness understood and wondered at, of empathy, of seeing informed by feeling. This may be art in the service of science, but it is also the record of an emotional response.
Long ago David Hume observed that objectivity is actually impossible, and the truth of his observation informs much of the way art has evolved since then. No matter how far we strive to be objective, what we see is still coloured by what we feel. Thus the quest to paint what you see, but at the same time what you feel about seeing it, was at the very heart of romantic landscape. Indeed Constable once said that, for him, painting was just another word for feeling. We still know what he meant, but if you want to make art, you cannot just go on painting Constables. To record and transmit real feeling, it can't be borrowed. It has to be your own, and if it is counterfeit, we soon spot the deception.
That has been one of the problems faced by modern art: the need constantly to find new ways of saying things so that the feeling is true, and that is why we are so preoccupied with originality. We are still romantics, and it gets more difficult as time goes by. The easy ways get used up. Many artists give up altogether as a result, but not all.
There is of course a sliding scale in this. At one end is the endeavour to control feeling while observing the outside world as objectively as possible. At the other, the artist turns inwards to study feeling itself, to try to give it expression in paint. That is expressionism in fact. Seeking to describe that inner landscape, Ian McCulloch, in a separate show at the RSA, takes his cue from primitive art and from Picasso to try to find forms that will externalise feelings. He gives them force by personifying them in human form and then distorting it, or he gives them a physical presence by using found objects, or by harnessing the earthy power of ceramic in fired and glazed blocks.
John Houston stops short of that kind of inward-turning expressionism, though he comes close. He is included in The Curious Eye and he paints what he sees, but as he does so he also paints emphatically what he feels. In Dark Sea, for instance, a square canvas is divided into horizontal bands of dark colour, shot through with sombre blues and reds to climax at the top in a band of jagged red and yellow against black with a red and black sun. It is intense, but it is also controlled. Its coherence is its strength. It is like the difference between music and simple noise. In Morning Sea North Berwick this is really telling. Again the picture is square. In curling brushstrokes of gold, silver and palest blue, the light in the sky and the light on the pellucid sea are divided only by the line of the horizon, high up, and the shimmering outline of the Bass Rock. It is all apparently put down in one sitting, and yet there is not a single mark that is out of place.
Jock McFadyen is a painter one associates with an almost deadpan record of the actual. He usually paints unprepossessing urban landscapes. Even then, however, his paintings of Scotland, on view in the Grey Gallery, suggest that although it is not obvious, it was his feeling for what he saw that drove him. These recent paintings are about light and space almost as John Houston's are. He sees the rotting hulk of a ship as a passing incident in the huge continuum of sky and sea. He looks across Leith to Fife from Calton Hill and sees the light dissolve the solid mass of the nearby houses and the distant coast into a single enveloping luminous grandeur just as Whistler might have done; and Whistler's paintings of the Thames represent marvellously the critical balance between seeing and feeling that these painters also seek.
There are other ways of making art that bears upon the world we know, however. John Bellany has for a long time used a poetic language of dreams, fishermen and the sea, and strange creatures of the subconscious, drawn from his own experience. Once nightmares externalised, they have become more benign. In his show at the Open Eye, in his early painting Ominous Presence there is a bedstead in the background. It is literally a nightmare. There are powerful works from the 1980s here too, as well as more recent paintings that include still lifes and sunny landscapes of Italy along with his more familiar imagery.
An artist whose work is less familiar - although he is now getting the recognition he deserves - is South African William Kentridge. Some of his prints at Edinburgh Printmakers look back even to Hogarth in their fierce satirical take on the world. Others, like his magnificent large etching of a Sleeping Man, take us back to the business of seeing and feeling. Here the power of the etched line is the vehicle of compassion. Through it we understand the vulnerability of the sleeping figure, the fragility of his peace, and so, acutely, of our own.
• The Curious Eye and Ian McCulloch run until 30 September; Jock McFadyen until 2 September; John Bellany until 5 September; William Kentridge until 8 September; John Houston: New Paintings until 5 September.
The full article contains 1327 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
