Commentary
Fleming Collection April 2022
Scottish Art News Susan Mansfield
“Capturing the ever-changing moods of the Scottish landscape has occupied and obsessed artists for hundreds of years, and Helen Glassford is a painter in that tradition. Having worked at her craft for 20 years since graduating from Duncan of Jordan College of Art & Design, even co-founding her own gallery (Tatha, in Newport-on-Tay), her first solo show with the Scottish Gallery is a crucial opportunity to see a major body of work displayed to its full potential.
These are paintings of light and weather and also, perhaps, of a kind of internal weather: mood, experience and memory. Sometimes the contours of the land are clear, more often they are suggested through spray, mist, rain. The paint is handled loosely, yet at their most successful these paintings attain a kind of precision, capturing a specific day, perhaps even a specific moment.
These works are the result of journeys north, summer travels in the Outer Hebrides, and time spent in November in Assynt and Wester Ross. They are about finding edges, extremes, landscape at its most elemental. In that spirit, Glassford travelled to St Kilda and the rock stacks of the archipelago loom out of the ocean like otherworldly forms which, in a way, they are.
Glassford sketches en plein air, and paints in her studio, laying down thin layers of paint on primed board. In the expressionist’s alchemy of freedom versus control, the layers come and go within the painting, bringing a particular colour to the fore or concealing it in the background. Sometimes she pulls the painting back, defining, describing; at other times she lets it stretch towards abstraction.
Usually, the ocean features. Occasionally, the paintings are landbound, but there is usually water somewhere, shimmering faintly in the bogs of Wester Ross while Suilven looms out of the mist like a gnarled ghost. In ‘Morning Ritual (Sound of Harris)’, the ocean is a curve which seems to be lit from within, under a swirl of cloud. One night time series observes the Milky Way.
More often, her titles are suggestive, poetic: ‘Soar’, ‘Silence’, ‘Pulse’, ‘Absorbed’, ‘Time Traveller’. ‘Wind Coils (after MacCaig)’ is impressive, both in its scale and the fact that it is mainly light and sky. These are mature works, but dynamic ones. Glassford’s subject is always changing, so her engagement with it is never static. She has come a long way, and one senses her work has many places yet to travel”.
“A new exhibition by award-winning landscape painter Helen Glassford is always something to celebrate. Glassford is a genius at recreating the timeless quality of landscape. You might not be able to pin down the place, but with a few swift lines and a wash of paint, she puts you right in the heart of it. A new exhibition of her work at the Scottish Gallery on Dundas Street in Edinburgh, opened recently and runs until the end of April.”
“Encounters is Helen Glassford’s first major solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery. It brings to Edinburgh her experience of two rural Scottish landscapes in an impressive display of over fifty striking oil paintings, which span the main floor of the bright and spacious Dundas Street premises. With a gentle strength, this collection delivers a powerful interpretation of Scotland’s most remote and unseen locations.
The Scottish Gallery has a 180-year history, and continues to present the leading Scottish artists of today – its large windows, generous floor space, and high ceilings accommodate Glassford’s works nicely, within modernised Georgian rooms.
A Scottish contemporary landscape painter, Helen Glassford is an artist who seeks to encounter nature, hence the exhibition’s title. Her landscapes emerge from an intimate relationship with the remote areas of Scotland in which she immerses herself to understand their physical, geographical, emotional, and atmospheric language. Explaining ‘they are not a depiction but rather a communication of the feeling of being there’, Helen’s works are not paintings of, but about a place, and its personality.
With only oils, Glassford communicates her journey to the outermost edges of the north-western coastline. Despite the occasional warmer palette, blues encompass this show in which there is never an absence of sea or sky, and she skilfully translates the spirit of both.
The right-hand side of the main space hosts paintings of Assynt and the Northwest. Known for its distinctly shaped mountains, the sparsely populated coastal edge is of geological importance and Helen fills the walls with moments of its character.
At 150 by 120 cm, Wind Coils (After MacCaig) is among the largest of these works. Heavily weighted at the bottom of the composition, there is a ridge of deep blue on which rests a calm sea. It meets an expanse of bright, ceramic white, which dominating the frame, extends our attention to the high skies of the far north and holds our gaze over the horizon.
To its left are the night paintings of Assynt which capture the unfamiliar view of a star-lit sky so delicately. The Milky Way grounds a brilliant scattering of white in a darkness that frames this seascape. Glassford illuminates the central band of the sky with translucent flecks of light that make this a galactic composition with an ethereal quality.
Aloof is a smaller work which, similarly dark in colour, captures the oddity of the vertical extensions of this unique region. Quick and controlled marks conduct a tension against the softened skyline. Darkness hollows the ancient rock, which ejects from the water and ages this landscape into distant time.
Within a smaller room are the St Kilda and the Western Isles paintings. An archipelago with the highest sea cliffs in the UK, St Kilda makes up part of the westernmost islands of the Outer Hebrides.
Bird Culture (Flight) makes up part of a series of smaller works on the far end of the right wall. Simply titled, Glassford portrays the regions important birdlife population with an array of swooping marks that describe their impression rather than their literal depiction, which is playfully symbolic of their presence.
Horizontal strokes carve the seemingly infinite horizon of Good Fortune which blurs the collision of the North Atlantic with the Scottish shore.
A warmer, yet similarly supernatural work is Permeate. Its vibrant oranges strike the foreground and the sharp contrast brings a solar, otherworldly quality.
Unlike the vertical layout of the previously mentioned works are Pulse and Morning Ritual, which span panoramically. Both seascapes of St Kilda, they verge on a hemispheric view, which pushes against the flatness of the painted surface.
In Pulse we see flat, directional strokes that form a screen across the sky and accurately mimics the fineness of fleeting rain. A turquoise shore shallows this composition, reminding that these are works of the very edges of the land.
Morning Ritual (Sound of Harris) seems appropriately named as Glassford stretches lighter tones across the elongated surface to suggest the familiar haze of the early hours.
All void of human and animal life, this collection appears to be filled with absence. A painter who stands out against what is a crowded genre of Scottish art, Helen Glassford’s land and seascapes brings together the physical, emotional, and memorial experience of a place which make these a collection of semi-abstract works. As opposed to pure realism, she fuses both the literal and the expressive.
This is a show of the painterly observations of the sense of a place – a place that few are likely to encounter, and she coaxes the inaccessible into public view. These are places that verge on invisible, and that many can only imagine experiencing. Glassford certainly helps us to do so.”
With thanks to Danele Evans for this review.
Art North Review
Issue 9 • May 2021
by Miina Eskola - Art Writer
Feeling the landscape
Helen Glassford’s Everything In-Between at Resipole Studios represents an evolutionary step forward for the artist, says Miina Eskola, concluding that with its deep connection to the natural environment, here is art that is primarily about letting the landscape in.
There are two words from the Finnish language that do not easily translate into English, and both would be useful when writing about Helen Glassford’s art. Nevertheless, I will try to explain how the artist’s paintings speak to the Finnish part of me who views them as profoundly felt expressions of her deeply spiritual connection to the landscape as her cultural heritage.
The first word that would be useful, yet is not easily translated is sielunmaisema. If somebody has attempted to explain this to you, they will probably have described it as the soul landscape, but it goes further, deeper than this. The second word is easier and probably much better known: metsäsuhde. This I have seen this translated in English as something peculiar to the Finnish psyche, most often reading as forest culture and viewed as part of our Finnish being and relationship with the natural world, but that this is to misrepresent it in the naming of it. Both of these words I cannot really do without, however, so (rather inadequately) I will use the given ‘soul landscape’ and ‘forest culture’.
Some might think that I take an unnecessarily sentimental view of Glassford’s work in the first case. In the second, others will object because ‘forestry’ does not feature in her work. Too literal! I will deal with this as I go.
I think that artist Helen Glassford will know what I refer to in both cases because, she has written about her work: “to paint the landscape as I do means to interact with and explore the intimate and curiously infinite world. The lichens and mosses at our feet and the heavy skies above, the ground and roof to our world and everything in-between.” When Helen Glassford paints her world, she is within it and I have a sense that she feels it almost with an ache or a longing.
Of her works that reveal the winter landscape of Scotland, for example, she has written that “there is a delicate yet sure nature to the landscape in winter. I always feel it gives the landscape the chance to show its true personality. It carries the cold mists with a quiet elegance, the snow with an understanding that it must rest a while, and the winds and rain with gritty determination. While the edges can be obscured with the rolling weather systems, the skeletal forms are steadfast.”
That Helen Glassford writes of her feeling the landscape in the above gives me some indication of just how much she feels her place in the world and has found a soulful connection with that place. While many artists may claim this of their work, the test is whether they convey that same sense of feeling to others, and I believe that Helen Glassford can and does do this. In fact, of this, I have no doubt of this.
A person does not have this experience without living in harmony with the seasons and the place that they find themselves returning to often. Such authentic experience is, I believe, something that we are born with but it requires nurturing, too. To feel ‘deep connection with the natural environment’ and, what is more, to let it in, means that we must allow ourselves to feel to such an extent that our relationship evolves across time to become a part of who we are. The more we are open to letting the landscape into ourselves, becoming one with it, the deeper the relationship grows.
In Helen Glassford’s case, she speaks of this as not just a willingness to be open but a deeply felt “need”. Again, as she writes, “I find I have the need to paint most days, whether it be mark-making in a sketchbook or finishing a large oil or priming new boards.” Even the preparation of the boards on which she paints tells us that she is in constant dialogue with the natural world and in a state of continual preparedness to answer her calling.
What do I mean by her calling, and what is it that is calling her? It could be understood as a sense of being at one with those places where body and mind are at ease or where she feels most at home. With eighty-six per cent of Finland’s land area comprising forest, naturally, we have a deep cultural relationship with our forest landscape, which is why forest culture is widely recognised the world over as part of our cultural heritage. For Helen Glassford, she has her equivalent landscape in the north of Scotland as part of her own cultural heritage, and it has clearly become the enduring subject of her art over some time.
When she writes of encountering “the effects of weather patterns and atmospheric shifts”, she acknowledges that this is only part of the story. She also describes as immeasurable moments of influence upon her, walking into the shadow of a rain cloud and “stepping directly into the cloud’s influence,” and then, “if only for a moment”, becoming “part of something else.” The shadow of the cloud, she says, “not only defines the undulating fabric of the land but [...] it seeps into our skin if we allow it.” From this comes the melding together of the personality of the visual and sensory world.
As a painter who uses both texture and the flow of her medium, her task is to find a way to convey back to herself the melding of her person with the landscape she knows best. If she succeeds, then we are lucky enough to experience her record of that moment. Our job is simply to be open to this and let it into our world. Metsäsuhde aside, I have described what I mean as a ‘deep connection’ with one’s native landscape. The question is, in this exhibition, do we find the artist feeling a still deeper connection to her place and this work as the next step in her evolution? I think so, and my sense is that she may feel it, too. For her, it is the climatic conditions of Scotland. The clouds above and the lichens and mosses below. Hers is a subtle art. Though not of my cultural heritage, I still sense the profound beauty the artist finds here. ■
MIINA ESKOLA is a writer and critic based in Alppila, Helsinki. She is a regular contributor to Art North and divides her timebetween Tallinn, Helsinki and Aberdeen.
HELEN GLASSFORD: EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN
Resipole Studios, 30 May - 9 July
https://www.resipolestudios.co.uk
Dr Tom Normand HRSA
2019
An illustrated version of this essay can be found the exhibition book IMMERSE
In the beginning, it is best to imagine a woman in the landscape. Travelling, stopping, observing. Sensing the rise and fall of the undulating hillside. Surveying the shifting panorama. Hearing the murmur of the breeze and the tremble of the machair. Tasting the moist air. Recognising the slant of light, and the unsettled smirr of the land’s colour. Feeling the nature of place, gathered within the senses.
Later, these sensations will be made palpable. Their abstract qualities visualised. First as a sketched subject, urgent and responsive to the immediacy of the experience. Then as a painting. Reflective, pensive, evocative. Here, the mood of the landscape has been completed inside the imagination of the artist. The abstract nature of the encounter, the feeling, is given its equivalence as art. This is Helen Glassford’s art.
Something of this enigmatic passage, from impression to object, can be recognised in Glassford’s recent paintings Traveller I and Traveller II. These panoramic landscapes, abstract and enigmatic, conjure with the uncertainty of experience. The washes and scumbles in Traveller I, for example, offer the sense of a darkening weather-front drifting across a soft pale-blue sea and sky. The indication of a shadowed sand-dune and a dark promontory occupy the foreground. In the distance a suggestion of hills and land-mass sit beyond a far shoreline. Powerfully, the threatening cloud, transitioning from grey to black, creates a sense of menace and foreboding. This is a landscape of moods, and emotions.
But, this abstraction also recognises change. Traveller II, perhaps an image from mere moments later, registers the dissipation of this anguished scene. The dark cloud, now occupying the centre of the composition, has dissolved. While the accents of light and shade are spread across the painting, punctuations of land and sea and sky becoming washes of liquid colour.
These paintings explore the experience of landscape as an interior discourse. One governed by feeling and mood. They are memoirs of the kinds of elation, and fascination, that landscape can evoke. Fundamentally, however, they are paintings. They accent the visual as an uncanny realm. A kind of mystical encounter that exists beyond reason. Naturally, this stream has a source. And, in Glassford’s work, this can be traced to a youthful encounter with abstraction.
Early in her career, indeed as a student, Glassford was drawn to painting in an abstract style that drew on the inspired work of the Abstract Expressionists. Seminal paintings, like The Orchy and Rumbling Bridge, The Braan, looked closely into the churning spume of rivers and recognised the wildness of colour and form in this element. The large abstract titled The Orchy, named after the river in the Western Highlands that tumbles into Loch Awe, melds the pale blue and white of spray and foam with the umber and terracotta of the river’s bedrock. Its gathering of fluid shapes and fractured pattern evoking the power and passage of a torrent or spate. The Orchy would win the Sir Robin Philipson Memorial Medal from the Royal Scottish Academy of Art in 1998, and it is appropriate that such an expressive painting should be affiliated to the memory of one of Scotland’s finest gestural painters.
This thread of river subjects was developed throughout this period and Glassford would complete a number of works based on the River Braan, that tributary of the River Tay that eventually merges with the mother river near the town of Dunkeld. Rumbling Bridge, The Braan, evokes the falls and rapids of the small river at it tumbles through the wooded walkways of Perthshire. The russet colour of the bedrock is glimpsed in this painting, but now overwhelmed by the blue-greys and deep blues of pools and eddies in the stream. The release of a furious spray of water is given expression in the top-right corner of the image, and so the intense mood of the river is realised in a cascade of colour.
In her own testimony Glassford has recognised Richard Diebenkorn and Clifford Still as inspiration for her work. These eminent artists abstracted from nature and Still, in particular, developed an interest in fields of contrasting and complementary colour that would generate layered arrangements of form. These images were associational, creating parallels with the mood conjured by the experience of the natural world. They were also impasto and so moved from the colour-field to the gestural – that stylistic manner that recorded the passage of the artist’s brush across the painting as a recognisable mark-making. This type of creative tension, the field and the gesture, is evident in Glassford’s early work.
A further stimulus relating to the canonical figures of Abstract Expressionism may be traced in the paintings of Mark Rothko. A number of earlier paintings in Glassford’s oeuvre see her experimenting with simplified, essential, forms presented as washes of muted colour. These quiet, coordinated, compositions are reduced in their tonal range and exist as bands of colour arranged horizontally within the painting. Both At a Distance, and Untitled, echo the ovoids and elliptical forms that filled Rothko’s late work, a style that deployed subtle light-filled blocks of colour. The soft forms evoking notions of landscape but simultaneously conjuring an aura of transcendent experience.
In all of these examples the artist was attempting to explore the ways in which nature can be felt as experience and transformed into the metaphysical; even into something spiritual. This, in some degree, is the core aspiration of abstract painting but, importantly, it begins with landscape. As Glassford journeyed within this trope she came to understand the work of an artist who had, herself, been subject to the spell of Abstract Expressionism.
Joan Eardley was acclaimed for her graphic images of Glasgow’s tenements and street children. However, following her retreat to the tiny village of Catterline on the east coast of Scotland, she began to prospect a gestural abstraction that declared the majesty of land and seascape. Glassford has acknowledged this model in On the Shore (after Eardley) and Break in the Storm, Catterline II. Whereas the example of Rothko might provoke a composition based on thin washes of colour, Eardley’s passion for gesture, impasto and expressive movement have been gathered within this passage of Glassford’s body of work. There is, in On the Shore (after Eardley), an urgency and passion that speaks to the fleeting movement of the elements. A sense of a shifting weatherscape that is dramatically performed in the painting of Break in the Storm, Catterline II.
It might be suggested that these sources and influences form a bedrock for Glassford’s mature vision. They were absorbed, channelled and redirected into an authentic vision rooted in landscape. Notably, in these earlier works Glassford was in thrall to notions of place. The landscapes were particular. In which case many views and titles reference specific locations: in the west of Scotland, the Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland; the moorlands and marshlands of Rannoch; sites in Skye, Colonsay, and Arran; the mountains of Assynt and Etive Mhor; and, in contrast, the hills, glens and shorelines of the east coast of Scotland.
In recent years this orientation towards designated sites and places has faded. Here, the particular landscape is pushed to the margins. This has been overwhelmed by the notion of landscape as a recondite and even a transcendent experience. Material nature becomes expressed as ethereal conditions, most often as weather. Summer Rain, from 2018, for example, presents a wash of sea flowing beneath a horizon of cloud and sky. A dark cloud drifts into the centre of the image and from this a shower of rain is released as droplets of deep blue colour splashed and dripped onto the scene. The painting is evocative, presenting a mood located in atmosphere, climate and elemental nature.
These ‘weatherscapes’ mark a sea-change in Glassford’s oeuvre. Happy Cloud, and Magnetic North, both from 2018, are compelling works that speak to the sense that the encounter with landscape is contingent. The experience is both unpredictable and mysterious. Moreover, the encounter might invoke emotions that range from the lightness of Happy Cloud, to the dramatic, icy chill of Magnetic North. The paintings, in this case, become spaces wherein emotions confront the imagination in ways that allow for shared perceptions.
There is a parallel with poetry in this approach. The gathering of images and reflections such that mood, and the most intense sentiment, might be evoked. Evidently, Glassford is conscious of this association for, in works like To Earthward (after Robert Frost) and Falls the Shadow, both from 2018, she cites the poetic equivalents. In the dark abstraction of To Earthward, a mournful and poignant image, she references Robert Frost’s painful meditation ‘Love at the lips was touch/As sweet as I could bear/And once that seemed too much/I lived on air’. And, Falls the Shadow references T. S. Eliot’s forlorn refrain from The Hollow Men ‘Between the conception/And the creation/Between the emotion/And the response/Falls the Shadow’.
These sentiments may well echo deeply personal dispositions, but their complexion is realized in paint, and mirrored in the landscape. In this respect a singular feature of Glassford’s later work is significant. Most all the paintings from recent years have expressed the abstract landscape as a place of transition. Elements within the images are constantly evolving and changing. The ‘weatherscapes’ are places wherein an inconsistent world is in process. Often, as in To Earthward (after Robert Frost), the abstraction is composed of edges and borders and thresholds. The spaces are liminal.
A clear example of this liminal quality is the painting Deference, from 2018. As a composition this work is tripartite. The lower section a dark sea and horizon, the larger sky divided, asymmetrically, into a light-filled atmosphere and a clouded space. The borders between these competing land-masses and weather systems are ambiguous, soft, but evident. In which case the idea of shifting scene, a world in a permanent state of flux, is visualised.
There is an important consequence here, for both the artist and for the viewer. The idea of the liminal often refers to the passage between everyday experience and the transcendent consciousness of an altered state of being. Most frequently this is applied to a raw religious or ritual experience, a transposition from ordinary reality to a kind of spiritual ecstasy. When not being applied to religion this is sometimes described as ‘the aesthetic experience’; the recognition, in works of art, of a dissonant, otherworldly character. The ‘liminal’ stage in this experience is the axis of the threshold, the border between these psychological states. The uncertain space between light and dark, between substance and shadow, between the real and the abstract.
In this respect it is useful, again, to look at the particular subjects of Glassford’s oeuvre. The concern with edges; sea-strands and beaches, hill-tops and horizons. The fascination with fluid boundaries; tide-lines, weather-fronts, cloud formations, scudding skies. The appeal to an unsettled, fluctuating, mobile landscape. All of this references the contingent, liminal, world where everything is in a process of being and becoming. This is surely the magic of these paintings.
In her current work, from 2019, Glassford has developed these core ideas, but also deepened the fundamental themes of her painting. It is useful to review the very smallest images in regard to this feature. Paintings like My Whole Sky, and also Rain Shadow, are modest and even miniature pieces. Evidently, they both denote landscape and it is possible to read land and sea and sky in their composition. However, they embody the dynamism and the raw energy of Glassford’s sketches. The paint is applied expressively, and with a marked gesture. There are washes of colour, impasto passages and speckled spots of paint. The surface of the image has been scrubbed and the oil paint scoured such that the marks of the brush are conspicuous on the surface of the board.
There is a fascinating paradox here, for the paradigm of gestural painting implies a large scale. It is assumed that the mark of the artist’s passage across the canvas requires a monumental scale, and is completed in a bravura manner. Glassford has undermined, or reversed, this archetype. Challenging the established relationship between touch and scale, and so presenting images that are, at one and the same time, wildly dramatic and deeply intimate.
This manner is amplified in works like Absence and in Prospector Sky. Here it is possible to discern the more evocative elements in this approach. Both paintings are dark. In each, a steely grey sky arcs over passages of umber, black and a soft grey-blue. These connote hills and rivers, land and horizons. They are abstract, and explore that fascination with expressive gesture and mark-making that is indicative of Glassford’s painting. But these works embody mood. Perhaps the quality of a dreich Scottish winter, but also a sense of melancholy. The contour of the land is ambiguous, the topography unsettled, the prospect drear. In which case paintings like My Whole Sky and Absence can, in their sombre and pensive aspect, be viewed as equivalents for emotions and feelings. Less ‘weatherscapes’ than ‘mood pieces’, or even symbolic shadow worlds.
If these are the qualities of the smaller works then, it might be suggested, the larger paintings from 2019 explore a more open consciousness and a universal narrative. The majestic panorama that is titled Echoreturns to a recognisable landscape, in both its form and its content. There is a magnificent sweep of sky that occupies the upper two-thirds of the composition. A horizon line, set at the lower third of the image, establishes that meridian where the material world is presented. The colour of the image is dominated by a blue-grey. This fractures into broad tonal accents that range from grey to black, from a muted blue to a silvery white.
Echo registers as a landscape. The light-blue of the sky reflects in an area of water that falls to the nearest shoreline of the image. The horizon seems to contain a dark tree-line, the trees themselves bare in the cold winter weather. Indications of shoreline and estuary marsh are evident in the foreground. Certainly, the image can be recognised as a landscape but this remains contingent upon the will, the desire, of the viewer. In fact, it is a painting that is both elemental and elusive. It is composed of traces. This is surely the impulse of its abstraction. The landscape has created itself within the imagination of the artist, and here it has settled as a kind of reverie. This reverie, this abstract meditation, is then realised in an image of associations and sentiments. And, these impressions become available to the viewer as something half realised and half remembered.
In which case even these larger, more ‘representational’ landscapes are freighted with an emotional intensity that takes them to a place where nature is mediated by sensibility. It is this quality that makes Glassford’s paintings both alluring and otherworldly. Qualities that are writ large in a work like Roam. This is a painting that condenses the vision of the landscape to its core elements. A blue-grey sky with the mere echo of hills, the striated marks of a rain-shower, the foreground of sea and land. Each part available only as a shadow, a trace. A world completed in the imagination, in the senses, and in memory.
Roam, of course, recalls that primary dimension of Glassford’s creativity. A woman walking in a landscape. A woman recognising the landscape as pristine experience. An artist translating that experience into a visual language that is both evocative and compelling. A body of works, of paintings and imagery, that is endlessly mysterious.
Successful artists immerse themselves in their art. It’s the only way. Helen Glassford happens to be a successful artist while also balancing a parallel career as founding director and curator of Tatha Gallery in Newport on Tay. In its five years the Tatha (Gaelic for Tay) has been making waves by presenting a host of high quality exhibitions. Artists they have shown include Norman Gilbert, Marian Leven and Will Maclean, Frances Walker, Kate Downie, Ronnie Forbes and Richard Demarco, Calum McClure and Ruth Nicol. With co-director Lindsay Bennett, Glassford has displayed a mix of steadfast integrity and quiet determination to introduce the work of existing and emerging talent to new audiences. In the last year, Glassford has juggled her day job with creating a new body of work, travelling in all seasons and in all weathers to some of the most secluded parts of Scotland and immersing herself in the changing weather patterns. There are 45 oil paintings in Immerse; all inspired by the fascination Glassford has with laying down in paint a feeling for the many unpredictable moods of the Scottish landscape. Planting herself on deserted beaches or rocky outcrops, sketchbook in hand, she quickly makes marks in situ, recording and noting the feel of the weather and the sense of the place. Human insignificance in the face of nature is writ large in these works, which blur sea, sky and land to the point of abstraction. It’s nature, but not as any camera would record it. As art historian Tom Normand writes in the book that accompanies this exhibition, Glassford is “recognising the landscape as a pristine experience” and, in the process of creating Immerse has created a body of work which is “endlessly mysterious”
Jan Patience
Critic’s choice
The Herald
July 2019
There is a famous romantic myth surrounding the artist JMW Turner who claimed, in 1842, to have lashed himself to a ship’s mast in a storm to more fully experience and capture the very essence of nature at its most extreme. The contemporary painter Helen Glassford cites Turner (the show’s title is one such clue) among her artistic progenitors.
Some of these are referenced explicitly: one oil is titled By the Sea (Minus the Monk, after Friedrich), which recalls the great German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich and his work, Monk by the Sea, completed in 1810. Although Glassford’s painting is much smaller than the Friedrich its colours, tonal qualities, energy and subject matter all point to her distant predecessor, with one exception: like all her paintings By the Sea is utterly devoid of human presence. Conceived in isolation, like many here, in the more remote parts of Scotland, Glassford’s work also points to another literary and artistic concept, that of the sublime, in which the seemingly ordinary is elevated to a position of special significance.
However, these are not images of or about landscape or seascape where specific location and topography is a key element; they are, rather, about the feeling the landscape generates in the artist, which is then reflected back to the viewer.
Glassford describes her work as “a balancing act of memory and emotion” but says that “to romanticise the landscape, would be an injustice”. These are powerful works, full of heartfelt passion, craft, skill and integrity.
Giles Sutherland
The Times
★★★★
Review of Immerse
Solo Exhibition at Tatha Gallery
June 2019
Helen Glassford’s Immerse at the Tatha Gallery is an exhibition of over forty-five oil paintings that the artist has been working on for over a year, inspired by the fascination she has with the sensory experience of the landscape; the forces at play (both physical and psychological); and the wild and unpredictable personalities of nature. What we see here are what some might consider ‘the empty places’ – deserted beaches and rocky outcrops on the periphery of the Far Northern reaches of Scotland.
As reported in Issue no.2 of Art North magazine, the love and passion for being out there in the wildness of a landscape such as that which Glassford frequents as a painter was first kindled when walking in the Lake District hills as a child. Vivid memories of the smell of the air, the light on the mountains, and the sense of solitude that it evoked, all remain with her today and are as much the subject of her art as the landscape itself that she paints.
When in 1995 she moved to the East Coast of Scotland to study at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, it was the lure of the light and the easy escape routes to the hills and beaches that understandably were the draw, and as a consequence she made her home here, now living and working in Newport on Tay, where she established the Tatha Gallery – a space that has done much to advance the careers of artists of all ages and revitalise the art scene across the water from Dundee.
As I wrote myself, in the pages of Art North, “being ever aware of the transient nature of life that the landscape she is most drawn to evokes may be one thing, but what is it like to be an artist who is also Director of one of the most respected galleries in the region?” Now showing her own work at the Tatha Gallery, are there “any dilemmas, as if crossing an line should she do so?”
My conclusion was, and remains, that she has certainly earned the privilege of presenting her work to a wide audience in her own gallery, as she does now, and it is not before time. It’s not as though she has thrust herself at collectors by utilising the space for self-promotion, as anyone who knows Helen will agree: In fact, she has gone out of her way to put together an inspired exhibition schedule over recent years, promoting artists either senior in stature or new to the market.
There is something rather special in fact, in knowing that the artist is a person who, in presenting her own work to the public, knows intimately herself the hard-won struggle to bring such work to fruition, and all that goes with making the transition from easel to gallery wall as an exhibition nears. Of the work itself, Helen has written of her journeys to soak in the landscape:
Getting to know the landscape is a mysterious hunt and will perhaps always remain elusive. Yet it is as perplexing and as intangible as any other relationship. The dark hills forbid yet entice. The thin light on the water is fragile and uplifting. Softening light at the end of the day unifies landscapes to a single texture and quilts its harder edges. It is the fascination for these transient beauties of the landscape and the weather it wears that will forever inspire me.
Without a doubt, the art that Helen Glassford excavates in her search for the illusive qualities of the Scottish landscape that is her inspiration is every bit as eloquent as her writing on her own art. I therefore encourage anybody with an interest in contemporary landscape painting, or those who are willing to extend their interest to include such a powerful body of work, to be sure of adding the Tatha Gallery to their itineraries over the coming weeks, and be sure to give time to take in Glassford’s Immerse.
Ian Mackay
Art North 2019
In anticipation of Immerse at Tatha Gallery
This text can be seen on the Art North Website
Ronald Forbes RSA
Review: Into the Wild (Exhibition)
The Meffan, Forfar
This is Helen Glassford’s third solo exhibition and a major statement from an artist who has distinguished herself from her student days in Dundee in the late 90s to the present day. In 1998 she won the Philipson Medal for Painting at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Highland Spring Purchase Prize, and the Cuthbert New Young Artist award at the Royal Glasgow Institute, where in 1999 she also won the Armour Award. In 2007 she was a runner up in the Jolomo Landscape Painting Awards.
The title of the exhibition, Into the Wild is appropriate because we are led to inaccessible places that only the physically fit and adventurous of spirit can reach. In addition, there is also an unusual generosity in Helen Glassford’s paintings, because she is happy to share with us her intense sensations and personal observations rather than merely depicting visual detail. This is not ordnance survey topography, or postcard depiction: this is a search for the sublime. She experiences the moors and mountains of northern Scotland not only through walking, but also from rock-climbing in summer and ice-climbing in winter. Her experience of the sublime goes from awe and wonder at the beauty of her surroundings to the fear of the danger that is ever present when one grapples physically with the substance of our wild landscape.
She re-lives and re-creates her experience in her creative process in the studio. These works do not usually depict an actual place or a specific viewpoint, but rather they attempt to create a universal truth, synthesised from the range of sensations that she has experienced. The ever-changing weather patterns and light conditions that the Scottish highlands offer are used to explore a painterly equivalent of the terrain and the sky. The paintings have gestural swirls of paint, from washes to dry scumbles that appear totally abstract when the viewer is very close to the work. Further back, hints of details of mountain, corrie or loch key up the image and provide a resolved totality that we feel that we recognise, and may even claim to know intimately, even though it is an image born in the studio. The titles often give a clue to this poetry of sensation – Waiting for Clarity, Luminous to the Last, Crisp.
Helen Glassford handles the sensation of weather and light that not only inspires vigorous, painterly art-works, but also allows her to celebrate her sensitivity to colour, and her acute observations of it. Her palette does not provide Mediterranean garish heat: here we have a range of greys that move from cool blues to soft pinks and purples. There are slashes and patches of richer blues and russets that convey a hint of water or moorland scrub that smoulder richly, rather than burn brightly. They perfectly measure the richness of visual experience we have in lower light conditions where the chromatic intensity of colour is perceived to be greater than would be the case in bright sunlight. Getting this right gives the paintings tremendous authority.
There are forty paintings in this exhibition. A handful are very big, the majority are about 60x80centimetres, and some, including a block of nine, are quite small. While each has its place here, and contributes to the overall experience of the ensemble, some of the smallest works carry the greatest power. There is an almost casual directness in these that carries great punch. With amazing economy the artist reveals for us these hidden places, and offers aesthetic joy, as a confident fast brushstroke of rich colour sweeps across a crunchy melody of soft greys.
In this exhibition Helen Glassford has produced a body of work that is observant, creative and mature, and offers discovery and pleasure for those who allow themselves to be taken on her journeys Into the Wild.
Alan Greig
Helen Glassford walks and climbs in the Scottish hills, no doubt seeking the same things sought by others before her. That she shares a commonality of experience with all who yearn for that moor-and-mountain solitude, or a sense of the sublime, is undeniable, but her desire to translate something of her wanderings into paint less common, and her chosen language rarer still.
She finds no satisfaction in attempting to portray a singular viewpoint, aware that the mind’s eye does not settle easily that way, preferring instead to try to convey something of the things she saw and how they made her feel, in a manner that accepts the fleeting fluidity of perception. It is as if she wants to distil the journey, so that drip by drip, brushstroke by brushstroke, the jumble of sensory impressions that a day in the wilderness so gently imprints on the psyche, is sorted and catalogued into layers of oil and pigment. In some works the shape of the land is evident, in some less so, and in others almost not there at all, almost as if it was not seen or fully remembered, or even discarded as not relevant. In some, colour is naturalistic, while in others the viewer might be confounded by a block of blue, a slash of indigo, a zig-zag of green, or a swathe of golden ochre, hinting at a sensation more keenly laid down.
These things are not simply bravura gesture or visual punctuation, but snippets of evidence – stuttering, imperfect glimpses and traces of something felt viscerally, but already fading in the memory. Paint is applied and removed, assessed and re-assessed, images emerging out of the murk of imperfect recall. What is left is quiddity, essence, something to be recognised as verity, or as close as it is possible to get, and the artist moves on, to the next thing.
Georgina Coburn
Exhibition Review: Kilmorack Gallery, Kilmorack
A graduate of Duncan Of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Helen Glassford’s exploration of landscape is at its best and most potent when transcending the literal. Though works such as After The Burning and Rannoch Moor, November, are well-painted atmospheric evocations of landscape, it is in works such as Blackened Heather and First Flurries (Both Oil on Board) that she really comes into her own.
Here subtle variations of the palette, understanding of form and composition and handling of paint are acutely balanced. She distills the experience of the physical landscape into tangible poetic abstraction, creating an image which allows us not just to see but to feel unique qualities of location. These are images for the eye and mind to wander into rather than the two dimensional presentation of a particular view.
In Blackened Heather the strong compositional formality of the ashen foreground is complimented by sweeping ethereal under-painting, orange emerging through soft sage green. The sensitivity of the artist’s palette is further extended in First Flurries, matched by variation of brush marks. The purple darkened sky offset by hues of green, blue and pink are richly animated by gestural marks, fine areas of decalcomania and sweepingly curved drawn lines. A smaller work, A Little Piece of Paradise, is aptly named, a vision of green and vivid turquoise with strong blocks of colour dominating the composition.
Jan Patience on Helen Glassford
The Herald
As a painter, Helen Glassford brings a softness to her work, which nudges its way into the visual memory of the beholder. Her abstract landscapes reveal a deft touch and are in possession of a lilting approach to colour and tone. Everything in its place and a place for everything.
As a newish gallery owner and curator of her own space in Newport on Tay Glassford brings the same gentle yet deft approach to showing art. Her latest exhibition in the Tatha Gallery, a former hotel perched on the banks of the river Tay, is called the Newport Circle. As the name suggests, it takes on the virtuous circle of 11 artists with a link to each other and to this small Fife town which faces directly onto the city of Dundee.
All of the artists have left their mark on Glassford and a generation of other artists, many of whom - like Glassford - attended Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) at the tail end of the 20th Century. The artists in her circle are Joyce Cairns, Grant Clifford, Doug Cocker, Richard Demarco, Ronnie Forbes, Marion Leven, Will Maclean, Dawson Murray, Alan Robb, Frances walker and Artur Watson. Not all were Glassford’s tutors, but all had a connection to Dundee and the surrounding East Coast and have contributed to what Glassford calls the “energy and vision” currently transforming the city.
“There is no razzmatazz within this group’, says Glassford. ‘No need for constant admiration and acclaim . Their practice is rooted in distant history and culture, I think of them as the the hidden circle of European Art, like the stone circle of Easter Aquhorthies in the North East of Scotland.
A gifted painter, who was runner up in the prestigious Jolomo landscape award eight years ago, Glassford is not exhibiting in this show. She is there however in the circle, as a curatorial presence. She arrived in Dundee in 1995 to study at DJCAD. After gaining an initial degree in fine art, she went on to study a masters degree and never left. Her experience of being taught by artist such as Forbes, Robb, Maclean and Watson left an indelible mark on the way she approached art – and life.
I came to Dundee from Carlisle, she explains and went into second year having already studies for a year at the Cumbria Institute of the Arts. It was a great period in the college’s history with Alan Robb at helm in the school of Fine Art and I met all these influential artists. There was real thoroughness and depth of context on offer. The technical help was there and the support network was immense.
Having been a self employed artist of 15 years, Glassford wanted to find out more about the business of art and to share the fact that there were so many talented artists living in the immediate vicinity. This led her to setting up the gallery, which celebrates its first anniversary as this new exhibition opens. Sitting directly across the firth of Tay from the nascent V and A building, as a hotel it served passengers who caught the ferry over from Dundee in the days there was no rail or road bridge to speed their journeys. It takes its name Tatha, from the Gaelic word for the river Tay, but it is also the Sanskrit word for “thusness”, or a sense of being.
Adam Barclay
On Edinburgh Art Fair
Among the highlights of this year’s art fair was the space reserved for Fife’s Tatha Gallery. A beautiful space right on the ocean in Newport-on-Tay, the gallery prides itself on its collection of both established and developing artists. Tatha’s ethos is making art more accessible and they accomplish this brilliantly with the art they have brought along to the Edinburgh Art Fair.
Showcasing fantastic work from Calum McClure, specialising in wonderfully bleak and beautifully lush prints and paintings of country estates, cemeteries and botanical gardens alongside brilliant mixed-medium pieces by David Cass, whose timeless renderings of ocean scenes and mountain tops caught our attention from across the fair.
Also on display was abstract acrylic works by Christopher Wood, continuing the nautical theme of the showcase, splashing colour across the walls. Alongside this are large works by Helen Glassford, co-founder of Tatha, whose large scale works appear both still and in motion and are utterly captivating.
Together, the artists on display created a distinctly peaceful atmosphere in a crowded fair and consequently the Tatha Gallery showcase was among the most memorable of the whole event. While the fair may be finished, we urge you to pay Tatha a visit by the Tay and experience the pieces for yourself.
Tony Davidson
Dundee based Helen Glassford is one of the young rising-stars of the Scottish art world. Landscapes are hard to paint; for they are too vast and too changeable to capture in a single composition of hill, sky and river. But Glassford gets under the surface of it and captures the deeper more abstract qualities of a place. Her work is just as much about paint and energy that lets her do this as it is about the landscape.
Giles Sutherland
The Times
...Helen Glassford's small abstract oil 'The Sea and Me', a vital stroke of vibrant blue against a deep black ground. Maybe it's an autobiographical fragment which speaks about despair and ultimately its transcendence...
Amanda Brock
Painting the Nation: ArtScotland
Helen Glassford paints in a soft palette of earthy colours, sweeping brush strokes giving the viewer a sense of space of the vast mountains of Scotland she climbs and paints. Helen's abstract work captures the ever changing atmosphere and weather which creates a constant shift in the light of the landscape of Scotland.