Artist Janette Kerr currently has an online exhibition called State of the Sea. It’s well worth a visit and will encourage much contemplation.
Her work is powerful and very evocative of wild water, raucous waves, wind-slapping cagoule and the emotions of being at the edge, the Northern edge. She writes that ‘My paintings represent immediate responses to sound and silences within the landscape around me; they are about movement and the rhythms of sea and wind, swelling and breaking waves, the merging of spray with air, advancing rain and mist, glancing sunlight – elements that seem to be about something intangible.’.
Paintings of the sea almost always show the ocean as a 2D surface. Whilst we know that there is a depth of material, of colour, of light and shadow, beneath the constantly moving water, we can neither see nor hear it. Yet there are paintings of the Scottish sea beneath the waves.
Zarh Pritchard (1866-1956), regularly bathed in the Firth of Forth from Portobello beach from the age of 10 and in his teens, he began to sketch what he had seen when swimming below the waves. Following an education in Art in Edinburgh, he learned in Tahiti how to paint below the surface. His were the first underwater paintings, proper seascapes.
His biographer, Elizabeth N. Shor writes that ‘for his underwater work Pritchard used lambskin soaked with oil and brushes thoroughly soaked in oil. Wearing a diver’s helmet, serviced by a tank from a boat on the surface, he sank to the seafloor with a coral or stone weight, selected the view that he wanted, had his canvas and materials lowered to him from the boat above, and painted for about half an hour’.
From Amazing Stories, 1948
He painted, fully immersed, off Tahiti and Scotland and other shores.
His paintings give us a different view of the Scottish seas, a space
Zahr Pritchard. 1910. Bream in 25 Feet of Water Off the West Coast of Scotland. Brooklyn Museum.
Space is experienced and understood by artists in different ways. There are empirical studies which support this conclusion, but it is simpler to compare two paintings of the same ‘space’, in this case the ‘empty’ seas around St. Kilda.
The painted surfaces are not simply a record of the physical three-dimensional reality that will be experienced at a specific latitude and longitude on the planet’s surface. These two artists inhabited that space and each brought back a memory of a unique experience. From his empirical observations, Golledge concluded that it is misleading to analyse human special understandings by referring to an objective ‘real’ environment. To develop his point bluntly, the single authentic world does not exist and an analysis of paintings should instead focus on how painters react in relation to how they perceive the space around them.
For some time, I have been energised by the hegemonic role of English art within British art history scholarship. A Gramscian-style analysis suggests that Scottish, Irish and Welsh (sub)cultures are limited in form and direction by the power and blind-spots of British cultural definitions. Hence, an artist like William McTaggart or Joan Eardley is allocated a peripheral status, and their work is not seen and largely ignored by people outside Scotland.
Eardley, Joan Kathleen Harding; (1921-1963),Self-portrait; National Galleries of Scotland;
Today, 24th May 2020, the Guardian called for a UK exhibition of Joan Eardley’s work, quoting author Laura Cumming as saying that ‘it is both a shock and a scandal to me that in all these years she (Eardley) has had no such recognition outside Scotland. This is the equivalent of ignoring a Käthe Kollwitz, a Gwen John or a Louise Bourgeois. London needs to wake up to Eardley.’
Joseph Henderson was 38 years of age when he painted this canvas, titled ‘A Northerly Breeze’. It is a portrait of the Scottish sea, its waves inundating the space to marginalise the figures of the women and the ship.
Henderson, Joseph; A Northerly Breeze; The Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum.
There are myriad writings, many of them challenging and scholarly, that explore the apparent distinctiveness of Scottish paintings. Whilst reviewing many images of the sea for clues about the genesis and form of any distinctive Scottishness, I realised that one contextual feature was always consistent for the painters, irrespective of the year, the local and national background, their domestic circumstances and personal histories. This was the land itself, that piece of the Earth’s surface that we currently call Scotland.
Any painter who faced outwards from a Scottish foreshore would experience the same Scottish sea. To explore the distinctiveness of such portraits as Henderson’s, one must examine the fundamentals of their Geography – the space, place, and location of what the artist was responding to. The concepts of space and place have been extensively discussed by cultural geographers such as Doreen Massey, Yi-Fu Tuan, Raymond Williams and Tim Ingold. All these writers emphasise that spatiality has been ignored in traditional social history, which instead stresses history and time. It will be fascinating to apply their understandings to the analysis of Scottish paintings.
There are books about Scottish art and Scottish artists, and they read like a pantheon of ‘greats’. The authors choose well-known stars like Alan Ramsay, David Wilkie, William McTaggart, Charles Rennie MacIntosh, The Scottish Colourists, The Glasgow boys, Susan Phillipsz. Even Joan Eardley will get a shoe-in, despite being born in Sussex. Celebrity status is important in selling exhibition tickets and books.
It’s a problem though to choose examples of Scottish art because there’s no agreement on what ‘Scottish’ means. Are these artists just good examples of quality, or do they create something exquisitely different that cannot be found anywhere else? Is ‘Scottishness’ an essential characteristic to be measured against ‘Italianness’, ‘Somalianness’ or ‘Englishness’? How Scottish am I compared to you? Are the Scottish Tories distinctively different from other Tories?
Questions like these underline the flexibility of the term. When Scottish means an ethnic group, then that identity can only be loosely defined and will be consistently contested. It cannot be a reasonable benchmark to evaluate anything, including art, against.
Yet, there is one aspect of ‘Scottishness’ that is distinct, that is different from any other ‘ishness’ on the planet….the place, the territory that we currently call ‘Scotland’. This place provides the context that any artist who works here shares, even if they live in different centuries.
William McTaggart. 1890. The Storm. Oil on canvas. 122.00 x 183.00 cm. National Galleries Scotland.
The definitive criterion of Scottishness is the presence and influence of Scotland itself – the land, its spaces, places, locations and peoples. This influences what anybody does here in this place, irrespective of where they were born or who their parents were.
William Crosbie. 1944. Cessnock in Summer. Watercolour. 47.6 x 66 cm. Private owner.
Cessnock in Summer depicts an industrial landscape in the burgh of Govan. Big ships were built there, goods traded across the Atlantic. The colours are pale, bright enough but hemmed in by upright shapes and blocks of black. The human figures cluster at the bottom right, their space invaded by the sea. This is a painting with social and political meanings, related specifically to a Scottish place.
When Scotland’s society and/or politics is noticeably distinctive then it causes friction with other British people. Murray Pittock tracked this by analysing the perception of Scottishness by media in England, post-1707. His article is fascinating (link below). He concluded that negative stereotyping waxed when the Scots were noticeably different, waned when they were not. Any Scottish behaviour thought to challenge or take advantage of existing arrangements was met with an outbreak of complaint that contrasted English virtues with Scottish vices. This perhaps explains why modern British red-top newspapers and right-wing politicians are so forthright about characterising anti-Brexit Scots as parasites and subsidy junkies. At the election in December 2019, 74.9% Scots voters did not support the current UK government.
The sea has been conceptualised in the western psyche, through myth, literature and art, as formless, wild and dangerous, romantically sublime. Yet this featureless void doesn’t resonate with people who live near the sea, as many people in Scotland do.
Our experiences of the sea are much more nuanced. I know how the little cold waves on Ayr’s flat sandy beach feel to a 4 year-old boy. I can still match my teenage fear of balancing up high with the thump of cold murky water on my chest after I’d jumped into a harbour from the pier. There are sharp sensory memories of being on the sea in a sailing dingy: sounds heard- the slap-slap of water against the hull, the deep creaking flap of sails, a tiller that thrums; odours smelled and movements felt. There are other memories of being ejected from the boat, flying and falling into cold deep water. Such experiences shape our consciousness and influence future behaviours.
I remember how the light winds of summer and the arctic blow of a winter storm felt decades ago on the West sands at St. Andrew’s, where I stood many times and faced the tide. Those experiences resurface whenever I hear the opening soundtrack of ‘Chariots of Fire‘.
Here are seven paintings of those West sands, ostensibly of the ‘same place’ (found through Google images). The last two though communicate more to me than the first five. Interesting that none of the artists has depicted a human being, and only some have included the town.
Imagine, if you will, what kind of day Joan Eardley had as she stood on the foreshore painting this picture of the sea-foam at Catterline, a coastal village on the North Sea in Scotland.
Eardley, Joan Kathleen Harding; Flood Tide; East Dunbartonshire Council.
An artist’s sensory experiences (of the sound of the water, the touch of the wind, the smell of seaweed and brine, the grind of sand on the skin) must surely, like everyone else’s sensory experiences, be incorporated into what they feel and do, into their way of being in the world. The resultant painting then comes full circle, because it in turn influences everyone who looks at the picture. Each viewer thinks about this portrait of the sea, incorporates something of what the artist has left there and carries around a new perspective, even when they themselves go to the sea in the future.
It is no surprise that many visit Catterline to ‘see’ what Eardley saw, to compare the painted place with the ‘real’ place. This small thought experiment begs the question: how do people experience the Scottish sea and what has it added to their sense of self?
Eardley at Catterline. Photograph by Audrey Walker, 1950s
Lil Neilson was from Fife and trained at Dundee Art School. She lived for a period in Catterline, spending much time with her friend and mentor Joan Eardley.
The subject of this painting, Todhead Lighthouse, is a specific place south of Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire. The lighthouse was designed by David Stephenson. The brushwork is a swirling churning movement in blue, a contrast to her later works which with an extended lighter palette require the viewer to do more thinking.
This one, for example, has the intriguing title of ‘Woman Unknown to Herself‘. It seems to echo the sea but what else is hidden in there?
