The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
A display of true capital talent
A Brush with Colour, on at Kirkcaldy Galleries until November 4, is a demonstration of the genius of the Edinburgh School and its lasting influence on many generations of artists
The Edinburgh School’s lasting influence can be found the length and breadth of Britain.
Initially a group of former students of Edinburgh College of Art between the wars, the movement’s pioneers included William Crozier, Sir William Gillies, Anne Redpath, Adam Bruce Thomson and John Maxwell.
Their work – characterised by vivid and non-naturalistic colours – inspired a whole new wave of Scottish artists in the second half of the 20th Century, most notably Dame Elizabeth Blackadder, her husband John Houston and Redpath’s son David Michie.
Kirkcaldy Galleries’ latest exhibition pieces together the timeline of the Edinburgh School by delving into Fife Cultural Trust’s fine art collection and bringing to public eyes some of the movement’s key yet invariably rarelyseen works.
The exhibition’s curator Janice Crane is in no doubt about the contributors’ significance in Scottish art’s history.
“The National Collection in Edinburgh has a good number of paintings by all of these artists,” she says.
“Many are within living memory and Elizabeth Blackadder is still very much to the fore, so it’s almost too soon to say what the legacy of some of them is. What I do know is that the older generation went back to Edinburgh College of Art and became tutors and lecturers.
“They weren’t just artists in their own right, they were handing on traditions and passing on knowledge and encouraging new ways of working to the next generation who, in turn, passed things on to their students.”
Janice trawled Fife Cultural Trust’s
2,000-plus works for Edinburgh School paintings as part of her painstaking research for the exhibition, which took close to six months to prepare.
“This was an area of art history I really wasn’t familiar with so it was a good opportunity to get my teeth into something new,” she explains.
“I started looking into our database to figure out how many works we had by artists who’d been to Edinburgh College of Art and gone back and taught there. I had to decide which works told the story best and I also wanted to represent each of the artists as best as I could.
“The way they’re hung on the wall kind of moves on from that, so that it makes sense as you walk round.”
“I think it’s the first time in several decades that we’ve had an Edinburgh School exhibition,” adds Janice.
“There are a few paintings that’ve only been out very briefly in other exhibitions over the years and we also took the opportunity to display a newly acquired painting by William Gillies, which was a bequest we received last year.
“It’s the first time it’s been displayed in public and it’s important when people are donating works to the collection that they see that they do get out there and that they’re enjoyed.
“The Gillies painting’s in beautiful condition and it’s a joy to put something like that up.”
Buckhaven-born Houston is A Brush With Colour’s sole Fife representative. “We have a good handful of his works on display,” says Janice.
“They include a pair of still-lifes which sit nicely together and which complement the other still-life paintings within his generation. I’ve also chosen a couple of his landscape paintings which I felt illustrated his love of colour and very loose and expressionistic style.”
However, it is a Redpath depicting a hillside village in Italy that is Janice’s personal favourite. “The painting that jumped out at me and which gave the exhibition its title is called Dolce Acqua.
“When I looked at it in the museum store I thought it was the one I wanted everyone to see first when they come in.”
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They were handing on traditions and passing on knowledge