Tag Archives: identity

19th-century, Place and Space

What is Scottishness in art?

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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.

20th-century, 20th-century

Scottishness

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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.

Murray Pittock (2009) To See Ourselves as Others See Us  European Journal of English Studies, 13:3, 293-304.

20th-century

Place, belonging, identity (& Joan Eardley)

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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

 

 

Artwork, Ideas, Light thoughts, post 2000

Ten Thousand Miles of Edge’. Calton Hill. Edinburgh. January 2020.

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The photograph shows an artwork projected onto an old Edinburgh building to celebrate the New Year of 2020, a transcendent time for many Scots. It is ostensibly about the country’s coastline, ‘ten thousand miles of edge’. However, this is Nelson’s monument. It stands on Calton hill, overlooking the Scottish capital, and McKee makes a convincing case for it being a declaration in 1810 of Scotland’s identity within the British state. It is interesting that a memorial to the iconic British admiral was illuminated with images and poetry that portrayed a solitary island Scotland, linked to Europe by seas; the unionist stone transformed by an autonomous light. It may also be significant.