I’m just going to come out & say it. There is some truly appalling art that has been made depicting the buildings & streets of Scotland. Appalling. Not even funny, just badly made, wonkily rendered, horribly coloured & I repeat: appalling. Several times, I was tempted to ditch this one & just use photographs but that would’ve been cheating. I’ve done my best to avoid the terrible stuff; if I could stand to look at it, I’d probably get several months of blog entries out of it. But life is too short for bad art (unless it actually IS funny), so I’ve tried to spread the net. As I said when we looked at Scottish towns & cities, there is a heavy emphasis on the larger settlements.
The tragedy is, we have many beautiful buildings. Of course there are some wonderful photographs & photographers. We have Mackintoshes & Thompsons & we have town houses & museums, granite & sandstone. The architectural drawings are often stunning. We have the architects, the function & the materials, but they are terrifically hard to paint & they’re terrifically hard to draw. I know this, because I’ve tried. What’s also tragic is the fact that I’m an architect’s daughter that finds drawing a building one of the hardest things to do.
Lunga House (2013), Esther Green
The proof. This is Lunga House on the west coast. There was a spell when several very kind & lovely friends of mine were commissioning me to draw the places several other friends were getting married in to give the couples as presents. It was kind of them to ask me but I also thought it was a kind thought for a wedding gift. This is when I realised how hopelessly difficult it was for me to draw buildings. I mean okay, they were happy with the results but I was not. For me making art is 80% process & I did not enjoy it. I constantly wanted to use a ruler & to measure every single detail & whilst this might be a passable image, I was keen to make the frames of these “building drawings” as fancy as possible to detract from the building itself. Haha.
St Andrews Cathedral (bet. 1920-1943), Alexander Nisbet Paterson (1862-1947)
St Andrews is known primarily as a university town…& probably for its golf course. It does however boast a castle & cathedral too. The cathedral, which dates from 1160, was a place of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages & as a result St Andrews exerted quite some influence across Europe at the time.
September (1993), Avril Paton (b. 1941)
Like Joan Eardley, Avril Paton featured in the Scottish townscapes in art blog too but they are both such great conjurors of place. They reach the universal through the specific & for a staunch town dweller such as myself, I relate to many aspects of Paton’s works, despite being in another city. I could trick myself into believing this building is granite & the grey/pink/orange sky is evocative of many skies we see in Scotland from autumn through winter. The main difference is that it’s dark here in winter by about 3:30pm.
A Byre in Benderloch (?), George Pirie (1863–1946)
Pirie had some connections with the Glasgow Boys & was president of the Royal Scottish Academy for eleven years. Here we have the interior of one the lowliest of buildings – a byre – but the cows must be out to pasture. Instead, the chickens are making the most of the straw to scratch around in & perhaps getting some heat away from the bitter cold of Scotland’s west coast.
View of Townhead Studio & Glasgow Tenement Blue Sky (1956), Joan Eardley (1921-1963)
Here is one of Eardley’s sketches of her studio (photo above) & a painting of the tenements opposite. When inner Glasgow was being “redeveloped,” many tenements were simply torn down & communities scattered. This is now seen as a regrettable policy, not only for the loss of identity & neighbourhood it generated but for what replaced the tenements. I recall my geography teacher repeatedly reminding us that it was “better to redevelop than to build what will become the slums of the future.” These particular buildings are amongst those now gone but were captured by Eardley for posterity.
Jamesone's House Schoolhill (1898), George Gordon Burr (1823-1898)
This Aberdeen building is another that has long gone (apparently in 1886 – the painting must have been made “posthumously” if the dates are correct) but there are many photographs to prove its existence. Schoolhill is right in the centre of Aberdeen & like many other city centres across Scotland has suffered from a downturn in trade & jobs.
Glasgow Tenement (2012), Michael Murray (?)
Murray’s tenement is reminiscent of Avril Paton’s work but has the difference of being an imaginary composite. Murray creates digital images & photographic art. Here he has included various aspects of modern & bygone Glasgow city life, such as buses, a Mackintosh window & a more modern (hopefully secure) skyscraper door.
Building the School of Art, Renfrew Street (c. 1908), Muirhead Bone (1876–1953)
In Muirhead’s typically accomplished style, we have here all at once a tantalising & depressing image. Tantalising because it depicts Mackintosh’s great masterpiece The Glasgow School of Art under construction, from the library wing & depressing because as we now know this building was destroyed by fire. On a positive note, I’m thrilled at the thought of the master Muirhead sketching the library at this early stage of its creation.
On Easdale Island (1986), Sheila MacNab MacMillan (1928-2018)
I do like the flat planes of Sheila’s cottages. These white-washed buildings are typical of many Scottish mainland seaside towns, yet Easdale is an Inner Hebridean island. It is known as one of the Slate Islands – no surprise it was once quarried for slate. Areas like this are presented as beautiful, perhaps idyllic, but today their portrayal sometimes evokes concerns in Scotland about environmental & contemporary socioeconomic issues such as impact of heavy mining, isolation, loss of island communities as young people depart, unemployment, land erosion & climate change.
No comments:
Post a Comment