Arran Visual Arts Summer Show at Kilmory Hall
As ever, this exhibition shows Arran’s incredibly active community of artists, working in a wide variety of disciplines. Inevitably, the enchantment of Arran’s natural scenery stimulates a large number of landscapes and studies of the beach and the sea, many of which would merit a place on any wall. These are under-represented in our photos because on a sunny day, glazed pictures reflect patches of light from the hall windows. Among them, David Penn showed atmospheric paintings from a wide travel experience, Helsinki Harbour featuring a working ship in all its rugged capability and Lyon in Winter showing a seductive warmth of stone architecture. Gus Smith has a lively appreciation of the patterns present in things commonly seen and so uncommonly thought about. His Invasion of the Cow Parsley was highly decorative, and in a completely different way, so was his interpretation of the stone patterning in Lerwick Loan, where a flight of narrow steps took on a marvellous brilliance of light and colour. Linda George showed a strangely poetic small picture in which a fast-moving black horse cut its own small pattern into a vast, empty landscape that reached to a high horizon. At the other extreme, Sharon Wedge used the bold technique of linocut to evoke a strong sense of wooded landscape.
Decorative art was, as so often in the AVA shows, a very strong element. The astonishingly talented Marjorie McDougall showed, among other lovely things, a painting on muslin called Nova, where muted faint colours found an intricate balance again a faint indigo background of great subtlety. On the embroidery stand, Betty McCormack’s sumptuous cushion with its soft mosaic of purple and violet and emerald was lit by the glow of metallic fabrics – a delectable thing. Just above it was a felt ring of dusky mauve flowers from Judith Baines, who also showed marvellously inventive combinations of embroidery and dyes to evoke the colours and fading warmth of autumn. There must have been many people who coveted Roslyn Gibson’s hand-spun and woven products, including a glorious wrap with a single pale stripe running through its delicious texture.
Ruth Mae’s little wire horses were so full of life that one felt impelled to give them a second glance in case their tails and manes had blown a little further in an invisible wind, and Susie Thompson showed tiny, delicate ceramic sculptures that held a group of visiting children spellbound. They stared in amazement at minuscule cygnets in a nest no bigger than a teaspoon and a mouse in a thumb-sized boot. At the other end of the scale were the lovely Shaker chairs made by David Samuels. He also made the beautiful musical instrument called a psaltery, with its bow. It lay there on the table in the silence of its potential music, and the evocative stillness of it somehow followed the viewer into the sunshine outside. Big congratulations to AVA for putting together such an enjoyable and stimulating show.
