Reclaimed wood and reputations
Roland Fraser: New Connections
Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh
Whistler To Blow: 150 Years of British Printmaking
Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh
Roland Fraser recycles wood. It sounds prosaic, but he makes it poetic. The wood he chooses mostly carries traces of paint left from whatever its previous existence might have been. From the look of it too, it seems that, rather than a beachcombing, as so many artists do, he forages for his material in skips, or where the domestic fabric of an old house is being torn apart in the name of restoration. Artists who do rely on flotsam and jetsam on the beaches for their materials are at an advantage. Traces of the sea always add a bit of romance. Slightly chipped, offwhite, or cream coloured, domestic gloss paint does in contrast seem thoroughly mundane and much less promising. Yet Fraser is undeterred. Indeed in his show at the Open Eye, although there are a few works that are more brightly coloured than his usual output, fragments of cream or off-white painted wood are the dominant material. But it is what he finds in them that generates his favourite kind of poetry. In the tradition of minimalist abstraction, he gets maximum value from subtly contrasted tones of white, enhanced, too, by equally subtle variations of texture. What he does is make a kind of jigsaw puzzle. He takes his found elements and with occasional judicious cutting, but overall without radically changing their individual shapes, he fits them together into what is in effect a flat painted surface, picture-shaped in fact. There are no gaps, or if there are any they are filled with plaster so the surface is uninterrupted. Thus the lines where the elements abut each other become a kind of drawing. Shawfair and Scullery II are good examples. In both works, about 20 different-sized pieces of painted wood form vertical compositions, but what makes them really work is the way that the different qualities of white are played off against each other, warm against cool. Cauldcotts is similar, but in it there are so many elements, all closely packed together, that the effect really is like a jig-saw, satisfactorily completed of course. On the other hand, one of the most effective works here is Single Door. It seems to consist of just two symmetrical panels joined together creating a subtly textured field of cloudy, scumbled white.
There is also more to admire at the Open Eye. There is a group of prints by Barbara Rae and alongside this there is a kind of universal print retrospective from the great revival of etching with which Whistler is associated down to the near present in the work of the abstract painter and print-maker, the late Sandra Blow. Hence the title Whistler to Blow, 150 years of British Printmaking. There are familiar figures here. As well as Whistler, for instance, there are wonderful prints by DY Cameron, Muirhead Bone, Frank Brangwyn, James Mcintosh Patrick and Ian Fleming. There are also moderns like Graham Sutherland, Anne Redpath and Eduardo Paolozzi. But in the first part of the last century the etching revival first became a boom and then a bust. A lot of artists who rode the boom but fell with the bust have never really regained the reputations they once had and perhaps might still deserve. Sir George Rushbury, William Morgan, John O’connor and George Gaskell are good examples of this. To give credit where it is due, the Open Eye has always championed this forgotten generation and it is good to see them now brought together in a show where the work of their more familiar peers gives them context.
Roland Fraser: New Connections and Whistler To Blow: 150 Years of British Printmaking both end today