A kaleidoscope of artistic styles

Sproson Art Gallery presents a new exhibition of female artists titled Kaleidoscope, opening Saturday September 1 with a champagne and chocolates reception from 10am-6pm.

The exhibition is a celebration of female artists including veterans of the Scottish art scene and a host of new rising stars. The work travels from light observational drawing into deep, exquisite and emotionally naked explorations of painting and drawing combined. It showcases artists such as the powerhouse Joyce Gunn Cairns (MBE), whose brilliant, restless mind breaks ground, moving seamlessly through drawing and painting with an impressive lightness of touch. Jackie Gardiner’s sensitive landscapes evoke the natural history drawings of the 19th Century, where colour is the co-conspirator and nothing is ever neutral. These seemingly straightforward landscapes often carry a seed of subversion in the facture of the abstraction and the melancholy nature of the scene. Alison McWhirter and Poppy Cyster embrace the late 20th Century struggle between figuration and abstraction and come out the other side with work that is both unique and refreshingly new, masterfully depicting a world that is both surprising and ambiguous.

Fiona Sturrock and Jessica Oliver’s work contains echoes of 19th Century German landscape and still-life painting, and both are artists who look to the past to understand what might resonate into our artistic present. Their richly painted canvases and provocative impasto of the painted surface are a delight. These are contrasted by Gillian Murray’s superb collagraphs of Scottish landscapes, which present raw, elemental and often beautiful scenes where the absence of people reflects in the artist’s own words: “a need to escape the ‘clutter’ of the city and the busyness of my thoughts.” Joining these artists are Clare Arbuthnott, Jen Collee and Katie Boyle whose work is likewise charged with urgency, commitment, and an intellectual curiosity that walks hand in hand with an abandonment of intellect for feeling. It is this constant struggle, between myriad artistic pushes and pulls that makes the exhibit so consistently interesting. The exhibit will run from September 1 until October 30.