Artist Uncovered: Elspeth Lamb RSA

The eight prints by Elspeth Lamb in the AiH Collection span three decades and altogether encapsulate the internationally renowned printmaker’s diverse repertoire of silkscreen, collage, lithograph, screenprinting and papermaking.
The titles March Hare, Miracle Fish and Milagro give us an inkling of Lamb’s predilection for fairy tales and enchantment and this is indeed confirmed unmistakably by the allusion to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the cover image of her website and by the artist’s long blond hair that echoes the famous golden locks. Motifs from Lewis Carroll’s classic novel recur in Lamb’s iconography, not only the hare but also the ubiquitous ellipse, sometime egg, sometime mirror. 

Spinner screenprint, 103x113.8cm

AiH Collection

These references to Alice seem most appropriate when you consider that it is the privilege of artists to cross over two worlds, the mundane and the extraordinary and to take the viewers through the looking glass into the land of dreams. And as in Alice’s story, there is a certain frisson of danger in Lamb’s make-believe art with appellations like ‘chimera’, ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ and ‘cantrip’, the Scots word for magical spell.
Printmaking is steeped in rituals and processes. But for printmakers, the exacting nature of their methods is not limiting but opens up an ever-increasing array of possibilities the more skilled they become.

Milagro lithograph, 125x92cm

AiH Collection

Elspeth Lamb is an expert in her art form which she taught for over twenty years at Edinburgh College of Art, latterly as Head of the Printmaking department. Then in 1999 she left college to embrace a freelance career, a momentous decision that allowed her to divide her time from then on between her own practice and teaching through workshops.
Travels had always been important to her work and she was now able to spend even more time abroad at the invitation of art institutions. Japan held a particular fascination for her and in 2000 she got the opportunity to immerse herself in its culture when she was selected for an international residency programme. She spent ten weeks in the village of Nagasawa and turned the tables on herself by becoming the pupil of master craftsmen to study moku hanga, a water-based method of woodblock printing that produces stunningly vivid and transparent colours. 

March Hare screenprint, 71x41cm

AiH Collection

She returned to Japan two years later to learn traditional papermaking as part of her research for a book she had been commissioned to write which was subsequently published in 2006 under the title Papermaking for Printmakers.  Lamb called upon a number of experts to work with her on this very detailed handbook and in her introduction she explains eloquently the seduction and rationale of papermaking that she describes as “a tactile revolt against the limitations of the flat, one-dimensional print”. 
Physically challenging and time consuming, it is also enormously rewarding because the artists can add to the pulp specially chosen elements that evoke places and emotions through touch and smell as well as visually. The end result is two artworks in one, the paper and the print which complement each other perfectly, layers upon layers.

Miracle Fish screenprint, 70x40cm

AiH Collection

Inspired by her two visits to Japan, Lamb produced in 2006 an artist’s book Nagasawa Cantrips. In this limited edition of ten, the artist has conjured up the best of her skills to bring together traditional and modern printing methods, Western and Eastern thinking and her favourite themes. March Hare and Miracle Fish are two of a few prints that were produced separately and that can be enjoyed today by the patients, staff and visitors of the healthcare setting they enhance.

Martine Foltier Pugh is a freelance writer and visual artist based in Edinburgh

For further information:
http://www.lambbo.macmate.me/Site/Elspeth%20Lamb.html 
http://vimeo.com/15252990 
http://www.endeavor.or.jp/nap/index.html 
Papermaking for Printmakers by Elspeth Lamb, pub. A&C Black, London



And special thanks to Balfour Beatty Investments and Arts & Business Scotland for their financial support, which has enabled Art in Healthcare to produce 18 Artist Uncovered blog posts and accompanying video productions.

Artist Uncovered: Catriona Mann

It is difficult if not impossible to imagine Catriona Mann ever being idle. In her own words, she likes to have a project on the go that “she can sink her teeth into” and she always finds plenty to keep herself busy.

Sylvia’s Lilies 91x91cm, mixed media

image courtesy of the artist

Having first graduated in Fine Art at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art, she went on to study law.  She combined law and painting for a while until her children came along. Nowadays she finds law very useful to advise young artists and art organisations on tricky issues regarding copyright and contracts. 

Madonna, Siena Cathedral 72x51cm, mixed media

AiH Collection

She has made her mark on the art scene in Scotland in many ways. She got involved with ‘Paintings in Hospitals, Scotland’ from the start in 1991 as a founder trustee and as some readers will know, ‘Art in Healthcare’ was born of PiHS in 2005. An elected Professional Member of the Council of Visual Arts Scotland, she is a past President of Visual Arts Scotland and currently a Director of Exhibiting Societies of Scottish Artists.
She has also found time to renovate her house to its former glory and being a keen gardener, created a beautiful garden with flowers to inspire her from an overgrown mess. 

Daffodils 91x91cm (detail)

image courtesy of the artist

She describes her artworks as drawings rather than paintings. Indeed the prevailing linearity brings out their dreamlike feel and the words she frequently includes for their visual impact are evocative of surrealist automatic writing.

Shipping Forecast 91x91cm, mixed media

image courtesy of the artist

Her sources of inspiration are wide-ranging: music, foreign travels and cultures, religion and the plants she grows in her garden, particularly lilies for their shape. Her works are not simply representations of landscapes or seascapes but imaginary abstractions. For instance when a friend asked her to paint Iona, the green marble stones, known as ‘St Columba’s tears’ which he brought back from the island, guided the colours in the painting.

Celtic Blessing 30x30cm, mixed media

image courtesy of the artist

Mann does not paint on conventional canvas or paper, she prefers to work on mounting card which is strong enough to withstand her particular method of working. 
Forgoing brushes, she builds up layers of pigment and collage with watercolour crayons, water-based paint and tissue paper that give her better control and if the painting is not working, she simply scrapes off certain areas and starts again. Traces of the previous drawings remain visible on the surface. She welcomes these ghostly residues and integrates them into the next stage of the painting. She has very seldom regretted making such radical decisions. She believes that artists should experiment and take risks to push their work forward.

Venetian Facade 96x81cm, mixed media

AiH Collection

Sometimes she even peels the entire top layer right off the forgiving card. She showed me one of these discarded ’skins’ stretched out in her studio. It is down to her experience and skill that such a large area has survived in one piece this forceful separation. She will later integrate parts of it into new works. 
This process of deconstruction, reconstruction and metamorphosis denotes the close relationship, dependence even, between Mann’s finished paintings and her rejects and I am reminded of Picasso’s famous quote “The very act of creation is first an act of destruction”.

Lux Aeterna 91x91cm, mixed media

image courtesy of the artist

This is an artist who finds it liberating and inspiring to subvert conventions and who positively thrives on a state of creative flux. She explains that she starts with an idea but not a vision and that her most successful works have happened when she is least sure of the outcome, adding: “if it is too easy what’s the point?”

The following anecdote illustrates this statement. She recently brought back some incense sticks from Vietnam, not the usual twig-like sticks but five-feet long poles painted in striking red with gold lettering. Their transport back to Scotland took some resourceful wrapping and even more ingenious convincing of airline staff and customs officers. But in the end it was worth it. They arrived intact and will be featuring in future works. 

Martine Foltier Pugh is a freelance writer and visual artist based in Edinburgh

With thanks to Catriona Mann

For further information:
http://www.visualartsscotland.org/?page_id=608 
http://www.scottish-art-scene.com/ZSAS%20Q%209.pdf 
www.rsw.org.uk
www.catrionamann.com


And special thanks to Balfour Beatty Investments and Arts & Business Scotland for their financial support, which has enabled Art in Healthcare to produce 18 Artist Uncovered blog posts and accompanying video productions.

Artist Uncovered: Marjorie I Campbell 1936-1999

Marjorie Campbell was a professional book illustrator, graphic designer and lecturer. She was a most talented and prolific artist who left a collection of works that amaze by their diversity and strength.

Art work for the book jacket for ‘The Emperor’s Winding Sheet’

image courtesy of A G Campbell

Marjorie’s younger sister, Dr Alison Kerr, has made a meticulous inventory of her sketches, drawings and paintings and numerous sketchbooks. She showed me a selection while telling me her family history. The two girls were born in northern China where their parents were medical missionaries during the Sino-Japanese war. When their father died of typhoid aged 31, their mother had to make the perilous journey to the coast during brief periods of ceasefire with her two very young daughters of three years and eleven months respectively before boarding a ship home, a passage which during WWII, was fraught with danger.

One Feather & Four Stones 

image courtesy of A G Campbell

Back in Scotland, they settled down first in Inverness-shire and later in Edinburgh. Theirs was an artistic, musical and very supportive family. They occasionally received visits from missionary friends who would mesmerize their young audience with true and heroic stories. Later Marjorie would provide others with the same warmth and generosity she had grown up with. 

Edinburgh Castle Sketch 

Art in Healthcare Collection

Her talent was soon noticed and nurtured at home and at school. Alison remembers how their mother, now a teacher, involved her older daughter in creating art work in preparation for her own class teaching and in drawing paper dolls with which the two girls played. The family enjoyed outdoor pursuits such as camping and cycling that offered many sketching and painting opportunities. The Highland and Hebridean landscapes impressed Campbell early on, particularly the island of Lismore where she would often return as an adult with her husband and four daughters. 

Untitled [seascape], watercolour

image courtesy of A G Campbell

In 1954 Campbell went to Edinburgh College of Art, winning scholarships to London in 1956 and Paris in 1957. She qualified as a designer and book illustrator, a considered choice that combined her love of books and art and could earn an income. She became a Member of the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers in 1985 and also applied her design talent to quilting for her family and friends. In 1989 she founded Luckenbooth, a small crystal engraving business, in collaboration with engraver Wilma MacKenzie.

Croft Cottage & Sitted Man, screen print

AiH Collection

In parallel with her professional practice, Campbell never ceased to draw and paint the world around her, her children, still lifes and flowers.  These loose and expressionist sketches, quickly executed, reveal an artist always challenging herself and equally at ease with representational or abstract language.

Untitled [abstract drawing], ink

image courtesy of A G Campbell

Dr Kerr explains that Campbell did not regard these experimental and fluid works as especially significant and many were given away or simply disposed of but those she kept were tucked away in an attic space. It was only after her death that her close family discovered the extent of her output and have since endeavoured to make it known.
For a couple of years Campbell had a studio in an abandoned brick works near Edinburgh, an environment that inspired a series of works featuring industrial rejects that she endowed with animal-like presence

.Untitled [industrial reject], watercolour

image courtesy of A G Campbell

Marjorie would have approved wholeheartedly the donation of sixteen of her works to Art in Healthcare to brighten up healthcare settings. Together they showcase the artist’s talent in a variety of media such as watercolour, pen and ink, screen print and oil from the fine details of ‘Edinburgh Castle’ to her powerful and subjective landscapes and seascapes. 
A surprise for the family was to discover several doll pictures among the attic stash. Reminiscent of her childhood cut outs, these dolls, despite their smiley face, are poignantly eerie and allude to carefully hidden turmoil.

Untitled [doll], watercolour

image courtesy of A G Campbell

As a whole the collection offers a remarkable insight into a personal artistic journey that epitomizes the renaissance of Scottish art in the second half of the twentieth century. It deserves to be pored over and appreciated by a much wider public. 

Martine Foltier Pugh is a freelance writer and visual artist based in Edinburgh.

With thanks to Dr A Kerr and A G Campbell

Further information:

Marjorie I Campbell's website http://www.marjoriecampbellina.com/main.htm 

Luckenbooth Fine Arts 
http://www.scotlandsglass.co.uk/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=269:wilma-mackenzie-luckenbooth-gallery&catid=16:glass-makers-a-c&Itemid=8


And special thanks to Balfour Beatty Investments and Arts & Business Scotland for their financial support, which has enabled Art in Healthcare to produce 18 Artist Uncovered blog posts and accompanying video productions.

Artist Uncovered: Iain Stewart

Close and connected

With pure luminosity reflecting on dark matter and vast expanses of sky, sea and land, Iain Stewart’s photographs have a dream-like quality that hovers on the threshold of consciousness. Are these balanced compositions the product of hours of digital wizardry? The answer is definitely not as I discover that this artist works only with film cameras for his Fine Art photography. 

Eve  30 x 40 cm

image courtesy of the artist

This means that all decisions regarding composition and light are made at the shooting stage as there will be no cropping, erasing or any other kind of image manipulation later, just nature’s magic captured at the right moment and from the right viewpoint.

Such perfect timing is hardly down to luck. Instead it relies on the artist’s thorough knowledge of the terrain, weather conditions and seasonal fluctuations and on his profound connection with the landscape.

Path 98   60 x 60 cm

AiH Collection

And indeed Iain Stewart needs that emotional trigger. His landscapes are either familiar places he frequents often or special places that he empathises with immediately, like Cape Wrath. Born in Yorkshire of Scottish parents who were both doctors, he regularly visited Scotland while growing up, loved it and always knew that this was where he would eventually settle down.

Closing   90 x 90 cm

image courtesy of the artist

He chose to study textile design at Edinburgh College of Art in the 1980s but was always drawn towards painting and photography which was not yet a full curriculum, and inspired by great photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. He was however able to do a Master degree in photography, the only student on the course, and this is where he learnt his skills from his tutor and mentor Murray Johnson. This somewhat circuitous approach taught him not to let technicality get in the way and hinder his creativity.

Sound   76 x 100 cm

image courtesy of the artist

He recalls that his first body of work was a series of portraits of his father’s patients from the newly born to the terminally ill. This assignment proved to be a determining experience that made him aware of that special connection between practitioner and patient. It was also to bring him some important commissions from the medical field later in his career. 
Stewart’s commercial practice is in complete contrast with his Fine Art photography. Not only is it all digital but also, while his landscapes are very quiet and devoid of the human figure, his commissioned works are all about people and Stewart recognises that one could not exist without the other.

Tender   76 x 100 cm

image courtesy of the artist

They are opposite and at the same time share the same process. In both cases the artist gets closer and closer to his subject and this closeness together with the removal of all superfluous information, combine to deliver a universal message. His images are not about that particular horizon or that particular patient but about that fleeting and all enveloping moment when connectivity and healing can happen.

Spindrift   30 x 40 cm

image courtesy of the artist

Iain Stewart has works in the Sanctuary of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, a non-denominational space for reflection and prayer where his meditative and immersive seascapes fittingly welcome visitors, drawing them in with uninterrupted lines and colours.

He exhibits widely at home and abroad and is represented in many collections including that of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
He is currently working towards a solo exhibition to be shown in the autumn in the Wild Space, the John Muir Trust visitor centre in Pitlochry.

Martine Foltier Pugh is a freelance writer and visual artist based in Edinburgh

With thanks to Iain Stewart

For further information

Iain Stewart's website and blog: http://www.isphotographs.co.uk/   http://isphotographs.blogspot.co.uk/
The Sanctuary, The Royal Infirmary Edinburgh:  
http://www.publicartonline.org.uk/resources/reports/rephealthcare/sanctuary.php 
The Wild Space: http://www.jmt.org/wildspace.asp 


And special thanks to Balfour Beatty Investments and Arts & Business Scotland for their financial support, which has enabled Art in Healthcare to produce 18 Artist Uncovered blog posts and accompanying video productions.

Artist Uncovered: George Donald

Fusion Painting

"Your brain is processing constantly millions of impressions and the more you look the more you remember... you have a warehouse of memories in your mind. Then you work in the studio, you distill, you make things that satisfy you, that delight you, that unburden you of imagery."

The tranquillity of the Scottish Arts Club lounge belies the hustle and bustle of nearby Princes Street’s Christmas shopping frenzy. George Donald looks at odds in these sedate surroundings for he is bursting with energy and ideas.

To interview George Donald is to go on a whirlwind journey around the world to the places he has visited and lived in. Born in Southern India of a Scottish colonial family, he was immersed from a very young age in the two countries’ contrasting cultures. 

Dance  etching with collage 86x98cm

AiH collection

These early experiences and subsequent numerous travels have sharpened his “antennae” for visual stimuli while the study of worldwide diaspora has developed his aptitude for making unexpected connections between countries and even eras. He has over the years stored up a whole “warehouse” of images, all waiting for a signal to resurface when he least expects it and wherever he may be, here in Edinburgh or in a Kyoto garden, in China, India or Australia. 

Kyoto Garden  mixed media 78x97cm

AiH collection

Consequently his prints and paintings are delightful juxtapositions of images and patterns that deliberately clash with one another so as to pique our curiosity. Printmaking informed his painting rather than the other way round and particularly chine collé, a process where tissue paper is pressed into the print, lends itself perfectly to this layering. But not content with simply following the established method, he has developed his own technique by hand-colouring and tearing the paper and using it to add emphasis here and there to stimulate the eye. 

Evening Song  screenprint A/P 71x85cm

AiH collection

This innovative approach is characteristic of his inclination to challenge the status quo such as his decision in mid career to go and study for a four years part-time Master degree course in Education and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. This was in the late 1970s at a time of radical changes to the education system in the UK. Rather than just “grumble about it”, George went and learnt about governmental policy making. Years later he would use this theoretical expertise to push for the creation of a part-time degree at Edinburgh College of Art. And many of us are very grateful that he did.

Balinese Woman  oil 41x46cm

AiH Collection

In his portraits, the subject often sustains our gaze intently.  When I query this with him, George evokes the paintings of the wives of Spanish conquistadores he saw in the Dominican Republic where, painted rather awkwardly in faded court fineries, the young brides look at the viewer as though stunned by the realisation of their doomed fate so far from home. Their eyes haunt him still.           

Renaissance Piece mixed media on board  60x54cm

courtesy of the artist

For this master of anatomy, the human body, the way people stand, facial expressions, someone’s shaven head, all are a constant source of fascination and inspiration. The Renaissance with its elegant costumes and music is also very much part of his work and his life as I learn that he has been a practiced chorister since childhood. Later he joined the Edinburgh University Singers, leading a double life, a scruffy art student by day and a smartly dressed performer at evening performances.

It may come as a surprise to learn that George Donald admires minimalist artists who convey so much with so little and that he wishes his work was “less complicated”. His trip to Japan was especially intended to study its calm and ordered sense of composition. 

Silver River mixed media 80x97cm

2013 RSA Summer Show

courtesy of the artist

The paintings he exhibited in the 2013 Royal Scottish Academy Summer Show reflect this recent “de-cluttered” approach. Without the usual patterned borders and patchwork effect the elements appear to be floating on the canvas, but this does not diminish the impact at all as the fusion of cultures through metaphors is as powerful as ever.


Martine Foltier Pugh is a freelance writer and visual artist based in Edinburgh.

With thanks to George Donald.

Art in Healthcare Artist Uncovered film http://youtu.be/6ZMkckAuzt8
George Donald RSA RSW  http://www.georgedonald.com/
Edinburgh University Singers http://singerseu.wordpress.com/
Royal Scottish Academy http://www.royalscottishacademy.org/
Scottish Arts Club http://www.scottishartsclub.co.uk/


And special thanks to Balfour Beatty Investments and Arts & Business Scotland for their financial support, which has enabled Art in Healthcare to produce 18 Artist Uncovered blog posts and accompanying video productions.

Artist Uncovered: Ian Hamilton Finlay

Martine F Pugh searches for the man behind the genius

Ian Hamilton Finlay was a philosopher, a poet, an ‘avant-gardener’, a sculptor and a revolutionary in thoughts and temperament. How should I uncover arguably the greatest Scottish artist of the twentieth century?  Then I came across an insightful essay by his son Alec where I learnt that Finlay suffered from agoraphobia all his adult life. His affliction revealed to me the man behind the genius and somehow it all began to make sense.

A, E, I, O, Blue, 1992 with Julie Farthing

silkscreen, 45.8 x 152.0 cm

Finlay dismissed his ‘nervous anxiety’ as “unpleasant, but no more interesting, really, than toothache” but his son’s tribute shows what profound effect his fear of busy urban streets had on his life and work and how it inspired him to create  gardens and organise work settings where he could feel safe in natural but controlled rural environments. 

Little Sparta, Finlay’s best known garden and artwork, is situated in the Pentland Hills, south of Edinburgh. Originally called Stonypath, it was an untamed moorland with only one tree in 1966 when Finlay and his wife Sue moved in. With Sue’s planting and Finlay’s planning, it evolved slowly, money was scarce,  into the series of verdant gardens we can visit today that are filled with neo-classical references to Ancient Greece, Finlay’s spiritual and cultural home, and to the French Revolution whose theorists he greatly admired. 

Citron Bleu, 1994, with Gary Hincks 

silkscreen, 45.3 x 57.7 cm

Art historian Bill Hare defines Little Sparta as “a masterly twentieth-century reworking of the Enlightenment Landscape Garden where Apollonian power of reason seeks to control and order through art the ever-threatening chaos of unruly nature.” 

What is true of the great eighteenth-century landscape tradition is also true of Finlay’s endeavour to control his own emotions by immersing himself in art and in the physicality of gardening.

Column Drum to Drum, 1991, with Gary Hincks 

silkscreen, 23.8 x 57.0 cm

But Apollo carried a bow as well as a lyre and when his Arcadian haven came under bureaucratic attacks in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Finlay channelled his frustration and anger into artistic ‘wars’ through sculptures, poems and prints. Stonypath then was renamed ‘Little Sparta’, an allusion to the Spartan wars of Antiquity against Athens and to Edinburgh’s nickname of ‘Athens of the North’.

His movements may have been restricted but Finlay was nonetheless well informed as he corresponded with writers and poets in Britain and around the world. He also surrounded himself with friends and collaborators who were curators, publishers, printmakers, poets, sculptors and stone carvers. With his garden, they provided him with the supportive environment his creativity needed. His genius was to know how to use their particular vision to fulfil and expand his own.

Seams, 1969 

silkscreen, 43.5 x 56.3 cm

Finlay's pioneering written work took many forms that defied syntax and convention: concrete poetry or poem objects  that you can touch, one line poems, poem drawings, sound poems, embroidered texts, texts shaped in neon, small press publications such as POTH (Poor . Old . Tired . Horse) to name a few.

Art in Healthcare is fortunate to have six prints that span four decades. Together they showcase his characteristic wit and visual power and speak for themselves. Two of them may need further explaining. With ‘Citron Blue’ Finlay alluded to the shape of Orkney boats which reminded him of lemons with their protrusions fore and aft and to a poem by Goethe whom Finlay greatly admired. As for ‘Column Drum to Drum’ it refers to the building process of classical columns that involved stacking up drum-shaped sections. 

Sackcloth, 1992, with Pip Hall

silkscreen, 42.0 x 42.3 cm

Ian Hamilton Finlay’s lifelong struggle against agoraphobia had an extraordinary conclusion. He suffered a stroke near the end of his life which reversed his phobia and allowed him to do some travelling once more. 

Since Finlay’s death in 2006, Little Sparta has been looked after by his trust. The future seemed uncertain because of the high maintenance costs but it was announced in June this year that a deal has been signed with Edinburgh University (which now includes Edinburgh College of Art) that will allow scholars to use the house as a study centre. A new beginning unfolds.

Martine Foltier Pugh is a freelance writer and visual artist based in Edinburgh

With thanks to

Bill Hare, art historian and Chair of Art in Healthcare Board of Trustees

The Wild Hawthorn Press for their information on the prints in the AiH collection. http://www.ianhamiltonfinlay.com/wild_hawthorn_press.html

‘Ian Hamilton Finlay – Selections’ edited and with an Introduction by Alec Finlay, University of California Press, 2012.

Little Sparta trust: http://www.littlesparta.org.uk/

The exhibition ‘Ian Hamilton Finlay. Poet. Artist. Revolutionary’ is currently running at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow until March 1 2014.

Artist Uncovered: Alastair Clark

Colour can provoke a powerful emotion in artists, Claude Monet called it an ‘obsession’, and it is this passion for colour that comes through first in printmaker Alastair Clark’s intense images.

Studio shot of work in progress
image courtesy of Alastair Clark

Glasgow born Clark graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in Drawing and Painting in 1990 and went on to specialise in printmaking. He is now Assistant Director of Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop where we meet early one morning before the start of his busy day.

  

He explains that his practice is about the transformative process of printmaking that gives him the freedom to edit images and experiment with tones and that unlike painting where every brushstroke is locked into an unbreakable sequence, printmaking allows him to go back a step or two or more to introduce a different hue or a different perspective.

It is the energy and the beauty of the forces of nature that inspire Clark. Working from satellite image sequences, he takes on those great swirls that permeate our everyday consciousness and shock us with their power for destruction and step by step constructs series of images which although still recognisable are now essentially abstract.

If you get close enough you will notice subtle and deliberate marks in pen
and pastel which are there to remind us that the artist retains manual control over the mechanical printing process.

Ammonite sky, lithograph, 30 x 84 cm
image courtesy of Alastair Clark

He describes his method in his website:

“The prints Longwave and Ammonite Sky were inspired by the Tsunami of Boxing Day 2004, their long shapes originating from weather satellite imagery which I stretched and enhanced until they reminded me of a wave, notably the Japanese printmaker Hiroshige’s famous wave, which also represented a Tsunami.”

Art in Healthcare owns three of Clark’s prints, including this two-part screenprint / lithograph entitled Red Sky at night where the close up view on the left enables us to observe a detail from the bigger picture. Clark often uses this diptych format as a device to provoke our curiosity. For him art and science share the same purpose which is to make us question the world around us.

Red Sky at night, screenprint/lithograph, 83 x 57 cm
Art in Healthcare collection

For the Skylight series Clark worked with the Aurora Borealis which he describes as an elusive mystical phenomenon that few are privileged to witness. 

Skylight 2, pigmented inkjet print, 58 x 42 cm
image courtesy of Alastair Clark

After a sighting in Edinburgh, he started by drawing on paper with pastel, he then scanned these drawings and combined them with digital images to reconstruct the display of pure energy he had experienced. With this process of altered reality, Clark certainly gives the series a multi faceted mythical perspective.

There is humour too as the skylight component is a reference to the small aperture near the magnetic poles through which the charged particles enter the earth atmosphere.

Borders and edges are of particular importance to printmakers and Clark’s more recent work plays around with this element. His 2011 ‘Skyshapes’ series, consists of assembled weather satellite scans printed on delineated MDF supports which seem to be floating off the wall. He is currently pushing this idea further still by meticulously creating fictitious islands constructed from pieces of Scottish islands. With these he intends to explore climatic change by showing the relationship between the land and the elements. 

Squall, laser cut archival inkjet print, 40 x 47 cm
image courtesy of Alastair Clark

 

Martine Foltier Pugh is a freelance writer and visual artist based in Edinburgh

Credits

Thank you to Alastair Clark for his time and for the use of his images.

Links

Alastair Clark's website http://www.aclark.org.uk/index.html

Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop http://www.edinburghprintmakers.co.uk/