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: Gill Tyson

A multiple practice

Gill Tyson has no less than eighteen works with Art in Healthcare, more than any other artist in the Collection.  Together they denote a wide range of media and printmaking techniques, extensive travels across the globe, a love for remote landscapes and last but not least, a giving disposition.

Doubtful Spring  lithograph 79x72cm

Art in Healthcare Collection

She exudes vitality and it comes as no surprise to learn that she studied the joint MA (Hons) in History of Art and Drawing and Painting at the University of Edinburgh. She reckons that her multi-tasking approach to work is due to this early dual training.

Printmaking was an option Tyson took in her final undergraduate years and she found that the department’s nurturing ambience suited her better than Drawing and Painting. Soon after graduating she joined the Printmakers Workshop, later to become Edinburgh Printmakers where she found the same support she had enjoyed at art college. Typically she soon gave back as much as she had received by serving as chairperson on their committee at a pivotal time of change in the 1980s.

Big Sky By Lismore   screenprint and lithograph 90x119cm

Art in Healthcare Collection

She is clearly passionate about printmaking and while lithography is her main practice, she uses a whole variety of techniques from traditional to digital technology. This is no mean feat as they all work on different principles. She loves the lithographic process and finds the grinding and preparation of the stone relaxing and conducive to the planning of her composition. Printmaking is all about deconstructing the image and rebuilding it layer by layer, like a slow form of painting, she explains, and because colours are applied sequentially, you have to adapt each one according to the others.

Rackwick  screenprint and lithograph 56x68cm

Art in Healthcare Collection

She frequently mixes elements from these different techniques to capture even the most subtle effect, screenprinting for opacity, manière noire for a touch of drama, soap washes for paler appeal and hand-drawn marks for direct impact. Her range of skills and her ability to adapt and switch between methods have proved to be most useful to her at times when working away in less well equipped studios.

This versatility imparts freshness and immediacy to her works while her calculated economy of details draws you into her compositions. You feel included in the landscape rather than an onlooker.

The End Of The Road - Craignish lithograph and screenprint 38x57cm

image courtesy of the artist

Her predilection for marginal places has taken her to St Kilda, the Lofoten Islands and the Namib desert among others, all names synonymous with harsh and precarious living. Humans’ aptitude to survive in those inclement conditions is often acknowledged in her vast landscapes by some small and somewhat futile signs of their presence like a telephone box or a tattered poster. She dedicated her exhibition ‘Shelter’ at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh in 2013 to this topic.

Out To The Atlantic  screenprint 63x85cm

Art in Healthcare Collection

Gill Tyson is currently organising an exhibition of fine prints created by the Edinburgh printing firm Harley Brothers whose master printers collaborated with the great names of Scottish art during the 1950s and 60s before going into decline. Their lithographs of works by Anne Redpath and Elizabeth Blackadder and many more will be brought together for the first time in Gallery Ten in Edinburgh, a space Tyson co-founded in 2012.

Strange Place, Believe Me  lithograph and screenprint 83x90cm

image courtesy of the artist

She is delighted to have been selected as the 2014 Printmaker of the Year by ‘Printfest’, an event based in Ulverston in Cumbria across the bay where she was born. She will be making new work during her residency and will help generate interest into her art, a role she is looking forward to with characteristic enthusiasm.

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

With thanks to Gill Tyson

Links to further information

http://www.gilltyson.com/

http://www.edinburghprintmakers.co.uk/

http://www.openeyegallery.co.uk/artist-details/gill-tyson/

http://galleryten.co.uk/forthcoming-exhibitions/

http://www.printfest.org.uk/printmaker_of_the_year.html

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: Gayle Robinson

Natural design 

Although Gayle Robinson’s prints are inspired by the Scottish countryside you will not be able to find their exact location anywhere. The rolling hills, the rows of trees, the earthy furrows have all been carefully pieced together by the artist into her very own imaginary landscape. 

Midsummer Meadows collograph, 68x68cm

Art in Healthcare Collection

Gayle confides that she loves her work and this shows in the vitality of her images, in their composition and colours. Her art form is collograph, a printmaking process based on collage. First you need a rigid board or plate on which to glue your composite elements. These can be anything you like, she explains, fragments of your daily life, string, cut-outs, wrappers and other throwaways, the more textured the better. You can also draw freely on the plate with carborundum, a sand-like compound she mixes with glue. When all these bits and pieces are securely fixed and the glue is dry, you then prepare your paints and apply them with a brush or a roller as thickly or thinly as you like. Thickness is important as it determines the tonal range of the print. The plate is finally pressed onto paper to produce a unique artwork as every print varies in colour. 

Harbour School collograph, 77x77cm

Art in Healthcare Collection

The process sounds like a lot of fun, almost like child’s play. But we should not be deceived by its apparent simplicity, it takes skill and experience to know what tones will work together and how to give depth to the flattened image. Gayle Robinson’s prints are exhibited widely around the UK. They have great feel-good appeal and it comes as no surprise to find that all her works in the Art in Healthcare Collection are out on loan to healthcare settings. 

Pine Tree Panorama collograph, 68x68cm

Art in Healthcare Collection

Gayle was born in Glasgow, the city where she came back to live and work after studying in Aberdeen and Dundee. She works from Glasgow Print Studio where she also teaches. Her early passion for architecture and textiles, for Gustav Klimt and Henri Matisse still inspire her art today, in the linearity of her compositions and her predilection for warm colours. Her technique of choice suits the stunning hues, recurring patterns and abstracted shapes that have become her trademarks. 

 Evening Harvest collograph, 68x68cm

Art in Healthcare Collection

Her interpretation of nature is stylised and at the same time realistic because it is informed by her knowledge of the countryside and its seasonal variations observed during frequent outings with her family. All the time while walking her eyes are storing up information about forms, light and tones which she later brings together into her compositions. 

Spring Fields collograph, 78x23cm

image courtesy of the artist

Gayle Robinson is perfectly in tune with her medium. Balance and harmony are crucial to her practice, not just in terms of composition but also in the synchronisation of life and work. For instance she sometimes notices after she has mixed her colours that they match the clothes she is wearing that day which also happen to reflect the mood she is in and the pretty heart and leaf motifs she currently favours are made with her young daughters’ craft punches. Combined with the shapes she delicately cuts with a scalpel or with pieces of distinctive fabrics like Harris Tweed, they create an ideogram or graphic alphabet that can be readily understood as there is no need of a Rosetta stone to decipher its universal symbols. Her personal language becomes our own. 

With thanks to Gayle Robinson


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

Links

http://www.gaylerobinson.com/  
http://www.gpsart.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: Ade Adesina

Martine Foltier Pugh presents Art in Healthcare latest artist

One of the highlights of the Art in Healthcare calendar is the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) New Contemporaries annual exhibition, not only because of the concentration of emerging talents on display, hand picked amongst the best of Scotland’s recent graduates but also because they are able to purchase works for their collection with funding from the Hope Scott Trust. 

This year Art in Healthcare have been bowled over by the art of master printmaker Ade Adesina, who graduated from Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen.

                                                                                                                                                                           

    RSA exhibition, image courtesy of the artist

It is easy to see why. The Nigerian born artist now based in the UK brings together technical virtuosity with thought-provoking themes. His highly detailed lino cuts and etchings showcase his dual Nigerian and British cultural heritage and his concern for environmental issues is delivered with a keen sense of humour. The accuracy of his drawings comes mostly from direct observation recorded through sketches and photographs while experiencing other cultures. Travelling is important as it helps him formulate the issues of cultural identity that are at the heart of his practice. 

                                                                                                                                 

RSA exhibition, image courtesy of the artist

The amount of details and repetitive marks that fill his landscapes is astonishing, each print taking him on average two months to complete.  He recalls the moment when, while visiting Paris as an undergraduate, he was awestruck by an impressionist painting by Claude Monet where tiny brush strokes filled up the large canvas. Adesina revels in labour intensive processes.

“I like to work hard and I like people that are hard working. Seeing the Monet painting, I felt the pain and sleepless nights.”

Mirage lino cut 112cmx76cm

image courtesy of the artist

There are echoes of Monet’s paintings in ‘Mirage’, one of the three acquisitions by Art in Healthcare, where almost every head of wheat stands out across the expansive field. The deep trenches carved by heavy agricultural machinery take the eye down to the myriad of ripples on the Firth of Forth and to flotillas of fish farm enclosures flanked by the rail and road bridges, with the city spread around Edinburgh castle in the far distance. The use of iconic imagery here makes intensive farming appear even more incongruous and unsettling.

Decline lino cut 112cmx76cm

image courtesy of the artist

‘Decline’ is a comment on the disappearance of the majestic and slow growing baobabs because of unsustainable logging. In the print, the trees seem to act as buffers between the restless and troubled sky and the ground. What will happen when they have all gone?

North East Safari  etching 100cmx70cm

image courtesy of the artist

 In ‘North East Safari’, where ‘North East’ refers to the Grampian region with Dunnottar Castle and the oil rigs in the distance, the punch is forceful and the argument is multi-layered. From the nesting grouse, that famous native bird game, in the foreground to the African endangered wildlife roaming the plain below, the peace in this Garden of Eden is about to be shattered by the hunt appearing on the left while the feigned naivety of the composition derides colonial perceptions of African culture. 

This satirical element transforms the work and places Adesina within the tradition of artists such as Chris Offili and Yinka Shonibare who both inspire him.

Adesina’s remarkable talent was rewarded during the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition by no less than three prizes. He has also now sold out a number of print editions. Altogether this is a highly deserved achievement that predicts a bright future.

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

Credits

With thanks to Ade Adesina for his information and images

Links

Ade Adesina website http://www.adeadesina.com

The Hope Scott Trust http://www.hopescotttrust.co.uk

Gray's School of Art http://www.rgu.ac.uk/about/faculties-schools-and-departments/faculty-of-design-and-technology/gray-s-school-of-art/gray-s-school-of-art

The Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries exhibition http://www.royalscottishacademy.org/pages/exhibition_frame.asp?id=392

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: Barbara Rae

This month our tour of the Art in Healthcare gallery focuses on Royal Academician painter and printmaker, Barbara Rae. The four works in the Art in Healthcare collection illustrate some of the media and techniques used by the artist: printmaking, paint and collage. 

Mull Ferry  watercolour  105x88cm  1996
Art in Healthcare collection

Her creative process always begins with creating studies on location whatever the weather. She is currently away somewhere “on the west coast of Ireland, sketching near the ocean’s cliffs in wild weather” her spokesperson tells me.  But Barbara Rae is not interested in topographical features and rejects emphatically the label ‘landscape painter’. What she seeks out are the signs that show the passing of time and the craft of humankind that give pattern and structure to the landscape, as she explains:

"It's the historic aspect fashioned by mankind, whittled away by use and weather that fascinates, the outline of an ancient farm building half-hidden in dense grass, a portal, wooden door once used now broken, paint flaking, a standing stone engraving barely visible clad in moss. I take time, sometimes weeks to absorb, you might say "experience" an area and meet the people there before I begin work." (March 2013)

Walled Garden, Culzean mixed media, collage  81x107cm 1979  

Art in Healthcare collection  

She logs her observations in beautiful and detailed studies, many of which can be viewed on her website.
Back to her studio, sometimes the process of transformation begins with the translation of her studies into print. Rae has been using printing to experiment with the image and with colours since her undergraduate days at Edinburgh College of Art. She uses her studies only as guides and does not aim to reproduce them in the finished artworks. Monotypes worked in the studio explore the original study, key variations forming the basis of future paintings.

Ballachulish I  monotype 87x70cm1985

Art in Healthcare collection

Barbara Rae is always challenging her painterly process through controlled layering of significant collage material and washes and through her search for inspiration which takes her to the margins of Europe, Africa or the United States. The sombre palette acquired during her formative years in Scotland changed completely during a trip to New Mexico in 1985 where the clear light revealed the intense colours that have recurred in her work ever since.

Spanish Window  lithograph 99x72cm 1992

Art in Healthcare collection

She often revisits the same locations and when I enquired if her trips followed a cyclical pattern, she replied:

“Now and then I return to old haunts because I know things will have altered. Paso del tiempo - time passes. Aspects of the historical artifact that first caught my attention can change radically, or in different light in a different season cause me to notice something new on it or around it.” (March 2013)

Time is as much a feature of Barbara Rae’s practice as the locations that inspire her. There is the time she spends researching and recording the alterations brought about by man and the passage of time. This slow cumulative pace is then punctured by the release of creative energy and the cathartic rituals of her painting process, itself a race against time. And let’s not forget that her paintings themselves reveal many archival layers that we, the viewers, can savour at a leisurely pace.


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

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The next blog will be a whirlwind look
at the history of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital
to mark its bicentenary

Credits

With thanks to Barbara Rae for her comments.

‘”It’s chance, but it’s controlled chance”: An Interview with Barbara Rae’ by Andrew Lambirth, in Barbara Rae, published by Lund Humphries in 2008.

Links

Barbara Rae  http://www.barbararae.com/ 

Royal Academy of Arts http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/

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/