Late September. Heavy dew on the grass of the garden with the hills rising beyond its walls; a small party of colleagues gathered before term begins. My friend John Morrison comes through the garden gate with the most beautiful dog in Scotland at his heel: the greyhound McCulloch with his gleaming blue-grey coat, like mountain distances towards nightfall. He moves like a shadow cast on flowing water.
John talks sometimes about his childhood, as a painter’s son amongst the painters living in the coastal village of Catterline. A sickle of white cottages on the cliff above the bay, with the Angus hills off to the west in the shadows of the clouds, or lit by flares of sunset under early dark. Or on a summer’s day – particularly those last days of summer when the barley has been reaped – the ridges of the hills turn to one pure line of indigo with azure fading above it. Once I had seen the way in which James Morrison’s paintings capture that shadowed, inky farness, it opened my eyes permanently to the shadowy distance, the deep recession of landscape, which is the essence of northern Scotland.
In his paintings, landscape and cloudscape are always bearers of meaning, of feeling projected into the depiction of place. No landscape painting, of any epoch, is simply an unmodified transcription; in all representation of place there is an element of grave play with time. Either the depiction of a landscape as it was on one day incorporates elements of the changing patterns of light and weather through all the hours that were spent in the making of the painting, or it pretends to the momentary completion of photography.
Distinct from this play with time, there is the tradition of the expression of feeling through landscape, the expression of ideas conveyed in the fall of light. In the work of such northern masters as Caspar David Friedrich, this expression of feeling moves eventually in the direction of legible allegory. Conversely, there are also landscape paintings which work like entries in a journal. Distinguished amongst these would be the series of northern English places which John Sell Cotman painted in the summer of 1805, a diary of one happy summer in a melancholy life.1 The painting of broken branches at the turn of a river deep in the woods is a record of the exhilaration of walking and scrambling to the place, as much as it is a fixing-in-time of the chance beauty of broken sunlight falling on brash and water.
A further possibility for the painting of place is to make an epitome, a concentration of the experience of presence, to elicit the emotion of recognition – the much admired Italian landscapes with ruins of the eighteenth century; James Pryde’s distillation (which is rarely, perhaps never, a direct representation) of the looming, tall houses of the Old Town of Edinburgh in their nineteenth-century decline; James Mackintosh Patrick’s curious, many-perspectived Autumn in Kinnordy which is the distillation of the chill, pre-war Scotland of memory.
James Morrison’s paintings partake to some degree of all these potentials of landscape. In conversation, always with characteristic modesty, he admits to a continual awareness that a landscape painting is a synthesis of apprehension of the place in deep time – its geology – as well as the individual’s experiences of it, gathered over a lifetime. And then there is the captured, measured time which passes in the course of the painting itself. Inevitably his paintings elicit the emotion of recognition: the coastal plain of Angus on a clouded May afternoon, a day of low skies over dark mountains, is also the expression of what he describes as ‘feeling the whole context, being in the landscape, bringing the landscape into myself, unmediated landscape’. His celebration of place is consciously Scottish, an attempt to defy the abstracted Calvinist denial of meaning in the visible world, the reluctance to read the signature of the leaf, the plant, or the landscape.
If asked directly, James Morrison will name two of the greatest painters of the landscape tradition, Poussin and Friedrich, as those who have fascinated him most throughout his career, for the ways in which they project feeling and meaning into depictions of place. The landscapes which he has been painting recently are, for the most part, celebratory, some almost paradisal. As such they draw on an awareness of a long tradition of the depiction of ‘the golden world’, the endless, abundant Mediterranean afternoon moving slowly onwards under unwavering skies washed with Naples yellow.
The other poetic landscape of Europe is the landscape of things-as-they-are: northern, belated and chill, with the mist in the fading sky or the early dark coming down in rainclouds, the kind of painting which contemplates tardiness, lateness in the day. Thus, for the northern landscape painter, paradise is more often to be found in the clouds or far into the western mountains, where a ray of transient light makes an otherworld of high lawns and bright valleys. The transformation of the northern European landscape into a vehicle for the expression of ideas is a complex process, highly dependent on the observation of light and skyscape, the movement of cloud shadows on distant mountains. Dawn and evening were loved by the Romantic painters of the early nineteenth century, offering glimpses of an otherworld, the physical landscape of twilight opening out into spiritual territories of the imagination.
Northern painting found itself in the half-lights which characterise the north. Caspar David Friedrich, whose work has a particular presence in James Morrison’s imagination, used early morning light streaming from the hills, or from a towered city on the far bank of a river, as a simple allegory of blessedness. The woman with her back to us is advancing through her life to the brightness beyond the hills; the deserted foreground is the expression of the absence of the dead friend who is now a citizen of the bright city on the other side of the water.
The allegorical aspects of Morrison’s recent paintings are similarly unforced. The dark tonality of his work in the years 2006 and 2007 was an expression of loss. These were, in many senses, impassable landscapes. The mountain of Suilven, in particular, took on a consistent symbolic force as a redoubt of death, set at an unapproachable distance across dark hills. The cloudscapes sealed the horizons, there were no tracks leading onwards, no visible crossings of the lochs, no passes in the hills.
The Assynt landscapes from more recent years revisit the same territory in a mood of tranquil exaltation. Before, Suilven was isolated on the far side of desolate regions; now there is a filtered brightness falling on the moorland grasses, a glimmer on the loch. Most importantly, the track, the way through difficult terrain, is the pivot of the composition. A mountain at a distance is still sombre, but it is no longer a redoubt of death, being painted instead with a simple awareness of the Scotland of the winter mountaineers: as an ill-wishing mountain, a place of patent danger. The finely illuminated snow-ridge and the misted corrie leading up to it are ambiguous territories, false hill-paradises to lead the adventurous into trouble.
A contrasting view of the Cuillin sets the serene mood of the spring and early summer pictures: the mountain has receded into bright distance and the quiet sea and green land in the foreground offer an alternative resting place for the eye and the imagination; the sandy shore, a safe landing. A landscape of the Black Cuillin carries the strongest reminiscences of Friedrich, but the mountain landscape presents an allegory of hope, for all the darkness of the peak. Although the unnegotiable fortress of black rock dominates the centre of the composition, light from the spring sky outlines the rim of the moor in the foreground, and the bright flank of high grassland holds the sunlight on the right. The way of moving through the landscape is clear, as the eye is led past the dark peak and on to the gentle shoulder of the moors.
Morrison’s paintings of the pool at Traquair in the Borders develop something of the same atmosphere as his melancholy and haunting series of paintings of Glasgow stone tenements did in the past. Two of these Traquair pictures, birch trees and still water under a dim sky seen late in the season and the day, have an almost nineteenth-century sense of lostness, of the kind of elusive nostalgia with which the Oxford Movement invested the secluded mansions of the recusant gentry. The third painting of the same place, with an audaciously simple foreground, shifts its viewpoint so that the birches combine with evergreens to produce a sense of a private experience of an enclosed and hidden place – a calm, unfrequented corner of Scotland found by chance on a winter afternoon.
As time goes on the dominance of sky in the pictures is growing ever greater, and yet there is no sense of stasis. The clouds are always on the move, the dark is always mitigated: a storm is driving away from the flank of the hill, and already brilliant sunlight is falling on the peaty ground by the water. Hills across water: grey-clouded Scotland, with a hint of rainy silver light in the distance. A destination for the navigating eye in white light on the far shores, and a finely observed pale brightness over the shallow water along the sands, leading the eye round the curve of the farthest bay.
This is one of the unifying features of the recent paintings: each is consistent in offering a way through the landscape of the picture for an imagined traveller within it. There are no dead-ends, no interposing cliffs, always the channels and tracks offer a route to the illuminated distances. James Morrison has often painted the Summer Isles before, under low skies, bare humps in the water, belying the associations of their name. Now, they present a wholly different aspect, with bright channels shining between them, indicating a course to steer towards the luminous hills.
The most characteristic expressions of this new mood are the series of late spring and summer pictures made on the west coast of Scotland, especially landscapes of Skye. They have, as Morrison himself describes it, ‘all the weathers of a day’, but the predominant mood is of the clouds breaking and the light coming through, light which also lingers on the high ground in the hills. As with all these pictures there is an awareness of an open course to be steered through the picture. Sometimes the water dominates the composition: the brilliance of the air is matched by the great wash of foreground sea and the intensity of the blue in the distance. This landscape is the antithesis of earlier landscapes of shadow; the coast is spread out, with the light falling on the green promontory in front of the hills of pure blue. Sparse clouds serve only to punctuate the space of the sky. The recession of mountain planes has the depth of multiplying gradations of blue.
These west coast paintings spill their light into the room, allegories of happiness and calm progress towards the bright skyline. Blithe navigations of the inshore waters, the sea-wind just stirring. Late spring, the cloud breaking and rising, the sky opening at last.
The texture which is most often evoked by painting in the north of Scotland is scouredness – frost-broken earth or wind-blown sand. This is achieved by most painters with the working of the paint surface, by graphic artists with the adroit deployment of captured shadow. A winter garden recedes into the burning depth of blue in a cold pool, a conifer is so shaded as to look as if it is made of blue frost over scratched white texturing of frozen earth. Debris on frozen ground is evoked with great economy of means by shapes floated onto a patterned material which has the precise density of frost on soil. A storm beyond temporary fencing makes its drama by the staring, lightning-flash colours of the agricultural plastics which cover cloches and frames. Rectangular panels in grey, the blood-spot of a setting sun, a panel suffused with dawn-red, muted and yellowed green like grass at the end of winter, mist-colour, earth-colour.
A command of ‘northern monochrome’ – a deployment of all the quietest colours of the north – can represent the hold of the snow on a frozen-over garden, with a bird perched above it. Elsewhere, minute textural variations can create a painting in which texture itself is almost the protagonist of a melancholy narrative of austere and difficult travel.
For many years now Frances Walker has been a respected teacher and painter, held in affection by many visual artists of northern Scotland. The consistent subject of her work is place observed in solitude; the trajectory of her career has been an outward spiral, a lifelong movement toward ever more distant places. It is a development with a simple and compelling logic: solitude in a familiar landscape or townscape gives way to the depiction of places which are solitary of their nature, and eventually astonishing by their very remoteness.
Other elements are consistent throughout her work, including an abiding interest in perspectives – especially the steep perspective of land falling away to water. This is matched by an interest (deepening and developing as she paints ever-remoter lands, ever-lonelier seas) in water refraction and reflection of clouds. Throughout, there is a sense of a private vision opened out for the viewer, a diary of private experience at least partially laid open.
Walker’s comparatively early depiction of an east coast fisher town is the nearest thing in her work to a conventional painting of place, part of a long Scottish tradition of such representations: St Abb’s, Pittenweem, Catterline. Stone cottages beyond a stone wall; a bright viridian-green gate to draw the eye. A hint of a harbour wall, curved against the force of the waves. The habitations are curiously enclosed, a weather-resisting fragment of townscape, its latitude and location implied by the strength of the buildings alone.
Soon after this came the first of Walker’s neglected places, pictures of things as they are when nobody is looking: detritus in an urban yard, scraps blown against its railings; a tiny enclosed space seen in plunging perspective from an upper floor; an expressive view from the top-floor window of her studio in central Aberdeen, with its powerful sense that the painter is alone in the city on a winter evening, observing the silent onset of the snow. The image is almost surreal: the huge flakes hovering and settling on roofs and towers, no sign of human life at all, a dream-like focus on the crack in the paintwork of the window-frame. It implies strongly time passing in silence, and the condition of observing acutely without distraction.
A print of a cold sun reflected in a puddle catches, in the same way, a moment of solitude late in a winter day, an unfrequented crossing of two rides in a wood. As in the painting of town snow, the implication of this picture is again of undistracted time, spent in the contemplation of an unremarkable place rendered remarkable by the conjunction of snow and sinking sun. The palette is of the utmost restraint: black and white, except for the colours of the early sunset and the trunks of the trees reflected in the black pool.
A Hebridean storm beach is shown as an expansive, bleak landscape rendered in etching with ink on the plate and watercolour tint. Its paucity of colour is as much a transcription of the reality of an overcast day as a deliberate visual restriction. Like the painting of snow over the city, human activity is implied only by traces: the calligraphic stone walls in the distance. The landscape is stony; hard to enter. A slick of navigable water appears to lead toward the dim, reduced horizon. Precise ink lines capture the gradual fading of the stormy day.
A yellow dog and a red boat – distant and brilliant – add animation to a painting looking out to the distant sea through sand dunes. Mostly, however, it is a painting of the emptiness of sands and shallows ribbed with turquoise water, in the same way that the smallness of the cottage, in her screen print of Achmelvich, conveys the smallness of the human element in the northern landscape, where habitations are swallowed up by expanses of worn stone and the overarching grey of the sky.
These compositions of lichen and rock avoid conventions established since the late eighteenth century for the depiction of the beauty of Scottish place. They are almost perverse in composition – the working-out of a personal geometry of place – often with the sky and the blue hills confined to a tiny area of background, or glimpsed through a break in the cliffs. In a view of Staffa, the first impression is of the dominating sweep of seascape whose strong curve gives a sense of immensity. The coastal land is green with the washed sunlight which breaks through between storms; the positioning of the figures on the cliff is ambiguous. By Walker’s standards, the canvas is unusually populous. But the figures are shown in the action of departure, making their way down a steep set of steps to an anchorage in the cove. The tenders coming in from the liner in the bay fix the moment exactly. The landscape already anticipates the evening, when they will be gone, and the next storm will wash in from the west.
These island paintings move outwards, farther into the western ocean and the storms. Depictions of far outlands and empty places, they are almost paintings of secrets: an island seen from a boat in foul weather when everyone else has gone below; a composition of shadows in rainlight, shadowy figures on deck, the island of St Kilda a looming shadow in mist and sea-spray, a whaleback of dark land in choppy water against a glassy sky thickening to black. Another of the St Kilda paintings invites comparison with the intensely patterned wartime watercolours of Eric Ravilious, forming its pattern out of sleety rain and storm light gone to a luminous greenish-blue. Our response is complicated by the immediate recognition of beauty and order, teased out of a scene which is dangerous in its bleakness and unpredictability.
The most recent, and technically most compelling, group of Frances Walker’s pictures are all of Antarctic landscapes. This is the last point of the outward spiral: these are by definition secret places, infrequently visited, barely settled. The icy paintings from Antarctica are emotionally neutral, achieving their own disquieting serenity. They are paintings of aesthetically wonderful landscape in and for itself, with no human emotion, inviting no feeling of recognition. Rather, they turn away from associations, either of sublimity or fecundity, which in the tradition of landscape painting have balanced each other. They paint silences and absences, unfamiliar movements of seasons. Their immediate quality is of depth: depth of colour, depth of reflection, depth of composition.
They endorse the truth of the perceptions of the veteran polar painter John Paul Caponigro, concerning the intensification of colour in extreme southern landscape. ‘Whites grew more golden with distance’; ‘it may be that there really are more blues in Antarctica than anywhere else on earth’.2 The sparse tradition of painting polar landscape is of itself liberating for a contemporary painter: like the places themselves, the art history of the poles is uncrowded. Hauntingly, the first painting from life of an Antarctic landscape is a ghost: a 1772 canvas by William Hodges (1744–1797) who sailed with Cook’s 1770s expedition. This first southern ice-scape3 can no longer be seen, because he overpainted it in the following year with a paradisal, Claudian prospect of Pickersgill Harbour, New Zealand. Before that, Friedrich and Abraham Hondius had painted the arctic from rumours and descriptions, from piles of river ice and from their observations of European winter weather. The tendency of nineteenth-century paintings of the poles is to emphasise the storms driving over, the aurora, a lighted ship with ice and darkness all around. The mid-twentieth-century North American painters of polar landscape, Lawren Harris (1885–1970) and Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) simplify and stylise, finding glassy art deco patterning in the strata of ice and rocks.4
Frances Walker’s paintings bypass both drama and abstraction. One is a study in darkness, the black depths of the far southern sea, shadowy rock, ink-deep sky, with no more than a scratch of finely-painted light on the horizon. Yet the mood of the picture shares the solitary calm of her crossing of rides in an Aberdeenshire wood, without any dramatisation of remoteness. Paradoxes of composition shape another Antarctic painting as a meditation on the ambiguities of light and cold, using the same high horizon as her paintings of remote Scotland. We are presented with ice-mist and cold, no light in the sky, two or three pieces of floating green ice in unfathomable waters. The only light in the painting is reflected deep in the sea.
Mist and reflections, an open pool of water amidst the floating ice-shards of the brief antarctic summer, ghosts of clouds. The deep water dominates the foreground with its drowned sky and the reflections of the shadowed peaks like monsters in the depths. In a painting called Antarctic Waters, floating ice and reflections are again the central element. With the whites of the snowy land removed to the extreme fringes of the canvas, the landscape is barely land any more, but a depiction of polar ambiguity during the brief period in the year when the solid is liquified and navigation is possible. This painting is, in a sense, a summary of the whole outward-spiralling tendency of Frances Walker’s works. The devouring intensity of slate and cobalt in the distance captures absolutely the remoteness to which her depictions of place have been tending, throughout a career which has moved outwards from eastern Scotland to the ends of the earth.