- Various Artists
The Northern Isles
The Northern Isles is accompanied by a major publication bringing together artists responding to Orkney and Shetland, places shaped by light, weather, and the meeting of land and sea. It reflects on continuity and change, craft and resilience, and the enduring relationship between people, place, and history in these northern archipelagos.
Decades is accompanied by a beautifully illustrated publication which offers a reflective and forward looking view of Crowe’s practice – with personal insights from both the artist and Julie Lawson, the former chief curator at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Modern Masters XVI
Publication to accompany Modern Masters XVI exhibition, on display in The Gallery January 2024.
Artists featured:
Harry Jefferson Barnes | Reinhard Behrens | Elizabeth Blackadder | Robert Henderson Blyth | Gordon Bryce | Victoria Crowe | James Cumming | Pat Douthwaite | Joan Eardley | Ian Fleming | William Gillies | Carola Gordon | John Houston | Robert Scott Irvine | William Johnstone | Bet Low | Margaret McGavin | Ellen Malcolm | David Michie |James Morrison | Leon Morrocco | Lilian Neilson | Denis Peploe | S.J. Peploe |Robin Philipson | Carlo Rossi | Margaret Kemplay Snowdon | Ethel Walker | Carel Weight | Gordon Hope Wyllie
Ten Years of Modern Masters, 2022
A publication to accompany our special 10 year anniversary edition of Modern Masters.
A publication to accompany Victoria Crowe’s 2021 exhibition, Another Time, Another Place.
‘Great art is both timeless and of its moment. The twelve paintings by Victoria Crowe and the accompanying poems by Christine De Luca in this book will resonate powerfully with our memories of isolation and confinement during lockdown. But through the intensity of their observation, their emotion and imagination, the artist and the poet remind us that we should never take the ordinary for granted and that there is mystery and wonder to be found even in our most familiar surroundings.’ – Sir John Leighton, Director-General, The National Galleries of Scotland
Modern Masters Women
A catalogue to accompany Modern Masters Women, August 2020
We are taking this moment to reflect on one key area of our history and review one hundred and twenty-five years of exhibiting women artists. This continues the spirit of our Modern Masters series and allows us to celebrate the pioneering, persistent, creative women artists at the end of the 19th century, and all the curators, gallerists and individual talents who have contributed to the equality enjoyed today in the cultural realm.
A catalogue to accompany Victoria Crowe’s September 2019 exhibition 50 Years: Drawing & Thinking.
2019 marks another significant moment in the career of Victoria Crowe with a major retrospective 50 Years a Painter at the City Art Centre. The Scottish Gallery has been part of the artist’s life since 1970 and the challenge for this pivotal year was to find a way for The Gallery to celebrate the work of Victoria with a complementary exhibition alongside her retrospective. Victoria had come to the conclusion that the exhibition would be about Drawing & Thinking; the essence of what she does as an artist. This special exhibition features previously unseen works from the 1960s onwards, covering most aspects of her working life.
This beautiful catalogue includes written contributions from Victoria Crowe, her husband Mike Walton and daughter Gemma Gray, providing a unique insight into her life and work.
A catalogue to accompany The City Art Centre’s major exhibition Victoria Crowe: 50 Years of Painting by Susan Mansfield, with written contributions from Duncan MacMillan and Guy Peploe.
‘Equally at home with portraiture, still life or landscape, although her work often defies such classification, Crowe’s work takes inspiration from her study of Italian Early Renaissance painting, as well as the landscape of the Scottish Borders and the light of Venice and Tuscany. Her practice encompasses painting, drawing and printmaking, each discipline informing the others, and all imbued with sensuous colour and an exquisite sensitivity to line and tone.’
Susan Mansfield
The Scottish Gallery has championed the work of Victoria Crowe since 1970 and we consider her to be one of Scotland’s most significant living artists.
Enchantment covers many familiar places and themes: Kittleyknowe, where she recorded the life of the shepherdess Jenny Armstrong, Italy and Venice where she has a home and studio and works from Edinburgh, West Linton and the fruits of her artist residence at Dumfries House.
This exhibition was part of the London Art Fair in 2018.
A Shepherd’s Life centres on Jenny Armstrong, born in 1903 at the farm of Fairliehope, who spent her life working as a shepherdess in the Pentland Hills. In a series of remarkable paintings made over twenty years and based on close observation, Victoria Crowe, one of Scotland’s foremost painters, pays tribute to the life and work of this exceptional woman. In spite of their different ages and backgrounds, the two women came to value each other’s company and it was through the shepherdess that the artist learned how to interpret the surrounding landscape. At the same time the paintings depict an ancient way of living that has been long in the decline and which, at the start of a new millennium, may be finally disappearing.
A catalogue to accompany ‘A Certain Light’ by Victoria Crowe at The Scottish Gallery as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, 2 August – 1 September 2018.
Victoria Crowe locates much of this new body of work in the transitory moments between light and dark, in the dusky palette of half light when colour is transformed, intensified by the diminishing light. Her dusk is a metaphor for stillness and with the pause it creates, we wonder: shall we step on into the unfamiliar or retreat to the comfort of our firesides? As the hour turns so does the day and the season so that our contemplation must turn to joy and loss, to life and death.
Four Women Artists
Edinburgh College of Art unites these four women artists, Elizabeth Blackadder graduated from the college in 1954 and was a dedicated teacher from 1962-1986. Victoria Crowe graduated from the Royal College of Art, London before being invited to teach drawing and painting at the college from 1968 until 1998. Elizabeth Blackadder and Victoria Crowe have each made a significant contribution to art and art education and they continue to be leading lights in their field, not for being women but by having an extraordinary vision and dedication to their art. Alison McGill and Emily Sutton are part of a younger generation who continue to fulfil their journey through art, and in very different ways represent an ongoing painting and graphic tradition
This exhibition of new work by Victoria Crowe for the Edinburgh Festival in 2014 contained an astonishing body of work in a variety of media and techniques, references to the arcane, the natural world and art history all contained in her particular, magical weave. Her pictures seem unforced, as if revealed so that each can chime with our own visual understanding. The distinct loci of studios: Venice, Edinburgh and West Linton, does not divide the exhibition into groups but rather each might provide an atmosphere, like the light true to a place at a particular time of day, which is nurtured as the picture develops its thematic complexity.
“Victoria Crowe has quietly emerged into a preeminent position in Scottish painting. Since she stood down from her role as a tutor at Edinburgh College of Art in 1998, she has been able to expand her professional practice so that as well as working in West Linton and Edinburgh she has spent many months in Venice where she and Mike Walton, with a property and a boat, can think of themselves as Venetians!” (Foreword, Guy Peploe)
With great depth and perception, the author considers the work of one of Scotland’s leading painters from her earliest days at Kingston School of Art, through to her most recent commissions, setting it in the wider context of artistic thought. Her full range of work is covered, including still lifes, portraits, self-portraits, landscapes and interiors. The insightful writing, accompanied by lavish illustrations of Victoria Crowe’s work, gives readers access to the paintings as they relate to the different eras of her life. The artist’s studies at the Royal College of Art, her move to Scotland, the ‘Kittleyknowe years’ and ‘A Shepherd’s Life’ exhibition are all discussed, as are ‘Plant Memory’ (a series resulting from her visiting scholarship at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge) and the impact of her travels abroad, particularly her time in Italy. In the latter part of the book, the focus moves to the artist’s most recent work, including a reflective series of Venetian pictures and a significant group of luminous winter landscapes.
