THE studios were the art schools in the Renaissance. Artists taught by example; young hopefuls worked as their assistants and learnt alongside them. It was only when formal art teaching was introduced in the 18th Century that this direct link between
teaching and practice was broken. Within a century, however, people began to realise that much had been lost when this ancient system of apprenticeship was abandoned, so when new art schools were built in Edinburgh and Glasgow a hundred years ago, large studios for the heads of painting and sculpture departments were a key provision so they could once again work alongside the students and so set an example.
This arrangement became a glaring anomaly under the one-size-fits-all space norms of modern higher education funding, however, while the burgeoning demands of bureaucracy have also progressively eroded the time and energy teachers have available to be artists – and it gets worse the more senior they become. It is all the more creditable, therefore, when artists who are committed teachers continue to produce good art and to exhibit it so that their example is there to be seen by the younger generation.
Ian Howard, currently exhibiting at the Open Eye gallery, is the principal of Edinburgh College of Art. Exhibiting alongside him are Jake Harvey, who is head of sculpture at the ECA, and Alexander (Sandy) Moffat who until recently taught painting at Glasgow School of Art. The fact that this is Moffat's first one-man show for some time vividly illustrates the difficulty of combining a career as a painter with the demands of full-time teaching. At Glasgow, Moffat was a key figure and played an important role in inspiring a generation of figurative artists represented here by portraits of Adrian Wiszniewski and Ken Currie.
The portrait of Wiszniewski is a lively etching, but the painting of Ken Currie as a Young Communist, dressed for the part, shows him at the time that he was working on the murals for the People's Palace in Glasgow representing workers in the city's industrial tradition. Moffat's portrait reveals the direct link between teacher and pupil as Currie's murals echoed Moffat's own early interest in the radical tradition of figure painting, represented in this show by several of his early works, a painting of a dancer from 1968 and two large drawings of a cabaret from 1970. All three have echoes of Max Beckman, an early hero for both Moffat and his friend John Bellany.
Bellany himself is present here in several informal portraits. In drawings and paintings, Moffat also records other figures of Scottish life including Paul Scott, Richard Demarco and Neal Ascherson, the latter wearing a Polish army cap, appropriate to his passionate championing of Eastern Europe during the Cold War and after. Moffat's portrait drawings of women are particularly beautiful and two, both titled The Bar at the Plaza Hotel, are especially striking. So too is a large drawing of Linda Miles. But Moffat is not exclusively a portrait artist. As well as the dancers and other figure subjects there is a large and very splendid painting of the cliffs of Salisbury Crags glowing red in the evening sun. There are also two large recent paintings of the blind Minotaur led by a little girl, done in homage to Picasso.
Ian Howard is the first principal of Edinburgh College of Art to be a successful practising painter since William George Gillies retired more than 40 years ago. Of the three artists here, he is perhaps temperamentally closest to the Renaissance. Indeed in a mysterious way, it haunts his painting. A large composition called Martyrs is typical of his more familiar work. The canvas is divided horizontally into three. The top is blank and the bottom dark. The central section is bisected again vertically. In the two halves float strange vessels like alchemists' alembics or crystal balls used by strange Renaissance fortune tellers.
These objects appear to originate in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or Jan Van Eyck, but within each of them a separate microcosmic world is contained. In several, there are crucifixes visible and this seems to have suggested the title. These miniature inner worlds are beautifully painted and the real surprise in this show is a series of small panels in which they come centre stage. These really are exquisite and are full of echoes of Fra Angelico, Antonello da Messina and other painters of the 15th century in Flanders and Italy.
Golgotha is a lovely example. The site of the Crucifixion is implied by the shaft of a cross which bisects the picture and by skulls and dead trees. Beyond is a beautiful landscape. Within it, the light is pellucid, but somehow, though the details are vividly present, exactly what they are or even where they are can never quite be pinned down. It is almost as if one was looking into one's own head and watching the way that our memories of these familiar Renaissance paintings float and intercut each other. They are easily recognised when you meet them face to face, but never so precise or so separate in the mental images we carry with us. These are exquisite landscapes of the mind, the misty, magical places where memory resides.
Jake Harvey's work could not be more different from Ian Howard's. Both, however, are emphatically of their kind. Howard uses paint with virtuoso skill and Harvey unambiguously sculpts hard stone and wood to make clear and simple shapes. These are always finished to absolute perfection so that the impact of their objecthood is direct and emphatic – Whet for instance, in the simple shape of a huge whetstone, is made of polished granite on a sycamore base. Hone is similar.
Altar is an open cube of white limestone on an oak base. A second, smaller cube of reserved stone sits at its centre. It is polished on its horizontal face and so is dark and shiny in contrast to the surrounding white. These elemental shapes and titles suggest imaginative meaning and indeed ancient uses that reach beyond any formal minimalism that their simplicity might suggest.
As head of painting at Dundee's Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art for many years, the late Alberto Morrocco was an influential teacher, but this show suggests he was a good student too. He studied at Gray's School, Aberdeen, when James Cowie was teaching there and several of his more austere works from the 1950s clearly show Cowie's influence. A large painting of a beach scene from 1954, for instance, that was to be seminal in his work, shows the same fastidious surface that Cowie achieved.
Morrocco also prepared this ambitious picture in the Renaissance manner, just as Cowie would have done. There is, for instance, a squared-up compositional drawing for it (although it is not on view) and he made studies of the individual figures.
There is a large drawing of his son Leon posing for one of them, for instance. It was a painful pose to hold, Leon remarked looking at it, and though it was a summer scene, it was painted in winter and he had to be kept warm by a battery of electric fires.
Morrocco was a superb draughtsman, as was Cowie. It is another example of the teacher-pupil relationship and a reminder that when art first became a subject that was taught, drawing was its central discipline.
We have lost sight of that. For the first time in history we have a generation of artists who cannot draw, or at least have never learnt it as a discipline and so in consequence we have the Turner Prize and the other egregious aberrations of contemporary art.
&149 Open Eye shows until 15 October; Alberto Morrocco until 27 October
The full article contains 1314 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
