The Herald - The Herald Magazine
An intriguing take on Scottish woods
LANDSCAPE artist Anna King has always been drawn to the margins. Her distinctive paintings depict neglected rural spaces which bear light traces of a human hand and by default, a human heart. There is no mistaking an Anna King painting in which signature sparseness translates into bleak beauty. She never knowingly places a mark where there shouldn’t be one, working in oil paints on paper pasted onto board, drawing into the wet paint with a pencil. There is a light, sketch-like touch to all her paintings; which conjures up the ephemeral nature of human interaction with nature.
As King says, she loves the freedom this surface gives to combine washes and slicks of oil with fluid pencil marks. Having taken a year off when her daughter was born 18 months ago, the Borders-based painter returned to the easel at the end of last year to transfer a mass of images from her head onto board.
It looks effortless, but I am sure it is not. As the painter Francis Bacon once said: “real painting is a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance.”
The result is a new body of work which has just gone on show at the at Resipole Studios on the shores of Loch Sunart. I stumbled upon the exhibition, featuring 18 new paintings (including two diptychs), at the end of a lockdowneasing few days on Ardnamurchan. With the gallery having tentatively re-opened two weeks earlier, the exhibition launched without a fanfare, which is in keeping with the unshowy nature of King’s oeuvre.
I first came across the work of King in 2007 at the old Glasgow Art Fair on George Square. I wasn’t exactly flush, or in a position to buy a painting, but when I spotted a wee painting by King of a hedgerow in Catterline on Aberdeen’s Gallery Heinzel stand, I couldn’t resist. I found myself paying up the £350 price tag on ten interest-free instalments through the brilliant Own Art scheme. It gives me great joy on a daily basis.
King had spent two residencies over subsequent winters at Joan Eardley’s clifftop studio, the Watchie in
Catterline, and the spirit of the place, which had so inspired Eardley, seeped into her bones. Today, prices for an
Anna King painting are considerably more than £350 but I’d say they are worth every penny. There has been a subtle gear-shift in her approach to subject matter. Where once she looked to wastelands, abandoned buildings and barren pieces of scrub-land, now she is drawn to forestry clear-fell sites near where she lives in a small village on the edge of a community woodland.
But nature is not always natural. It can be as industrialised as we humans make it. Many of us have been looking more closely at the world around us in lockdown and, in this body of work,
King is ahead of the curve.
When I talk to her a few days after seeing her paintings, she tells me about going into her studio as lockdown began. “In the first few weeks, as spring was about to begin, I wanted to pin down the images of winter trees. I can keep images in my head for a while and I became quite focused on nature taking over after trees had been felled. There are normally big areas in the Borders as there are in other parts of Scotland, but I got interested in ‘shelter belts’ – strips of trees – which are there to provide shelter for stock.”
Although she probably wasn’t thinking of Ardnamurchan or the Road to the Isles when she painted this new work, the parallels of the scenery encountered along the way to Loch Sunart are obvious and part of a wider phenomenon in Scotland of nature as