5 MARCH 1977, Page 25

Arts

Scottish landscape painters

Martin Baillie

Landscape painting inevitably played a leading role in the emergent Scottish school of the second half of the nineteenth century and, rather against the tide, continues to do SO in the twentieth. In the big annual exhibitions of Academy, Institute etc, the confusion of everyone doing his own thing somewhat abates with the landscape painters, who despite individual differences are held together by common objectives and Common tradition, inviting the critic to Make comparisons and evaluations which may have some objective validity.

It is with six landscape painters that I concern myself here, William Johnstone, William MacTaggart and W. G. Gillies representing the generation born at the turn of the century, and a second generation in Joan Eardley, James Morrison and Bet Low. Gillies and Eardley died respectively in 1973 and 1963, but the others are still painting, the older men no less vigorously than the Younger.

Gillies though also a painter of still-life is generally and justly considered to have done hiS best work painting the Lothians, where he was born and bred and where, save for three short periods, he remained throughout hIS life. A prolific painter, of whom it has been written that he surmounted problems bY simply not being aware of them, suggesting the amateurish and naive, he was in fact highly accomplished, clear as to what should be rejected and what retained from his academic training; and sophisticated, foraging around in the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, both in Scotland and elsewhere, but always unmistakably himself.

The so-called Scottish colourists Peploe, Cadell and Hunter had already adopted the impressionist palette but the Edinburgh Art College of Gillies' student years following the end oft he First World War had not caught with these innovations. Gillies on a scholarship in France in 1924 could study these at their source, embracing at a later stage the more sharply expressionist colourstructure of Bonnard. His brilliant colour Palette, like that of Peploe, Cadell and Hunter remained in part derivative; a little at Odds with the Scottish scene. What he also learned was the realisation of perspective dePth while affirming the surface plane, though this expressive device, a constant in the Painting of our time, can often lapse into soPhisticated decoration. There are, however, these landscapes (and the 'fifties was a fruitful period here) where he works with more sober colours (bearing nonetheless the imprint of chromatic thinking) and where surface plane and perspective depth pull sharply against 'one another.

'Hangingschaw Woods' of 1962 may have been sparked off by Munch's 'Girls on a Bridge' which had been recently exhibited in Edinburgh. En Gillies' watercolour a burn winds brightly between banks of pink soil breaking into grass, with a bridge thrown across the picture in a shallow arc sustaining the weight of piled-up, dun-coloured hills, to whose slopes the woods cling like a black carrion-bird. This touches upon darker aspects of Gillies' character but regrettably he never probed further.

Where Gillies confined himself to the Scottish scene, MacTaggart, often abroad for reasons of health, has taken in quite a bit of the continent ; but attentive as he can be to the characteristics of a landscape he does not allow topography to play any conspicuous role. Less of a draughtsman than Gillies, he has increasingly given to colour tlie function of form.

The influence of Rouault and Nolde is often referred to, though with the latter this is purely a matter of colour. The relation with Rouault is rather more complex and one which I cannot consider here, beyond remarking upon a certain haptic force; but he no more loses himself in Rouault's religious preoccupations than in Nolde's neurosis.

Although this may have no more validity than a personal response, 1 find in much of his work an affinity with Courbet, even where the colour structure is most advanced; a density and concentration in chromatic sonority and dissonance which are almost palpable. Such richness can occasionally result in something as soggy as a collapsed fruit-cake but also in a canvas light and crisp as the 'Lights of Klampenborg' of 1964.

Before turning to the avant-gardist William Johnstone it may be,as well to consider the work of Joan Eardley, James Morrison and Bet Low.

Joan Eardley won both popular and academic recognition before her untimely death at the age of forty-one in 1963. The harshness of her work both jolted and won the recognition of her fellow painters, and

even where she is most topographical (where what she painted, and from where she painted it, can be pinpointed) she is closer to MacTaggart (closer still to Johnstone) than to Gillies; splashes, dribbles and slashes of colour which have little to do with the observed scene and without parallel in the work of Gillies, have their formal source in Jackson Pollock—Johnstone's work which might have provided this.was little known in Scotland at that time.

I can only discuss her development in summary terms. In 'Winter Landscape' of 1954, inner and outer reality are in fruitful interplay, but through the years one sees an increasing blackness of mood which ends in despair. The last big Catterline (Kincardineshire) landscape, painted in the last year of her life, floats a moon (or sun) in heavy cloud, casting a struggling light on a row of cottages, like fleshless vertebrae on the back of a dead world.

James Morrison working in Catterline had a different approach in his greater concern with observed fact, though the later 'sixties (the artist having moved to Montrose) saw an unexpected development into surrealism and abstract-expressionism. When the return was made to landscape in the spare panoramas of Angus the camera-eye approach was more emphatic. These works reject chromatic colour, in reaction against the 'Scottish colourist' tradition, but the absence of any tonal organisation results in something more of drawing than painting, with velvety blacks of trees, hedgerows etc like the burr of drypoint.

Bet Low has found inspiration in Orcadian scenes; land, sea, cloud and sky reduced to simple shapes in flat pigment and unbroken colour which hardly detach themselves from the plane, yet lie in a sufficient perspective depth. The colour is tonal, often seeking no enrichment beyond gentle oppositions of cold and warm; in subtle modulations sharpened by occasional collisions of black against white; the mood is idyllic, even elegiac.

The landscape paintings of William Johnstone, though identified as such by their titles, are no more landscapes, it may be argued, than Braque's 'Man with a Violin' is a figure painting. Yet colour and shape, lachiste flick and spread of the brush (John stone was a tachisie before the event), the iridescence which plays around sober hues, have their origin in the observed scene and never lose contact with it.

Where Gillies is a painter of locality, Johstone, no less closely bound to the Borders than Gillies to the Lothians, is concerned to hammer out an image of this world in this time; the emotional and intellectual range is exceptional; Johnstone has the presumption of the poet McDairmid in believing that the Scottish experience is one of world importance.

The landscape drawing 'Near Montrose' is not representation but reconstruction, an architecture of the imagination embodying the land as it is but also, like a skeleton beneath the flesh, the land in the childhood of man. Later paintings go much further in abstraction ; the painter looking through the canvas rather than at it, a window framing and concentrating the vision lying beyond it ; spreading the colours in obedience to his whole being; now boldly, now with a careful search for every nuance contained in tone, hue, substance and the movement of the brush; in washes thin as mist or thick impastoes standing out like nail-heads. The painting has become the totality; the border landscape only a material aspect of his vision.