Gallery Highlights offers a glimpse into the many works of art that we hold in The Gallery. This is a new segment for The Gallery, where we review one work each by four artists – including an accompanying note for each work. This month we highlight Large Tree Group, Winter by Victoria Crowe, the Gold & Platinum Brooch II by contemporary jeweller Jacqueline Mina, Westerly, 12.ix.2011 by the late landscape painter James Morrison (1932-2020), and Galashiels by James Spence (1929-2016).
James Morrison RSA, RSW
James Morrison first exhibited with The Gallery in the fifties. In June 2022, The Scottish Gallery celebrated the life and work of one of Scotland’s most-loved artists in a major retrospective show James Morrison A Celebration 1932 – 2020. The exhibition, held two years after his death, presented work from the entirety of his artistic career which spanned seven decades.
Like most of James Morrison's Angus landscapes, the subject here is less than ten miles from the painter’s front door. Here we see the wide expanse of the Montrose Basin, captured from the southeast looking west toward the distant Grampian Hills. Weather tends to build over the hills, and that is the principal subject here, with high clouds moving over the painter’s head and beyond.
James Spence
James Spence was an artist and teacher who became an established figure on the Scottish art scene when he co-founded the Glasgow Group (alongside James Morrison), an artists’ cooperative which promotes the work of artists who were born, live or trained in the city. It was founded in the 1950s as a response to the conservative outlook of local exhibitions and the lack of commercial galleries.
James Spence was the son of Highland fisherfolk from Findhorn who travelled south to Glasgow, much of James Spence’s subject matter could be traced to his childhood experiences – an evening at an open air boxing match in Glasgow, for example, the fighter silhouetted in brilliant light, a mass of crimson blood covering the face of one man. He was also inspired by the landscape of the north-west Highlands. This work, Galashiels from 1972, is part of a series inspired by the aerial patterns of the Borders landscape. A sister work is in the collection of the Hunterian in Glasgow.
Jacqueline Mina OBE
The Gallery has represented contemporary jeweller Jacqueline Mina since the 1980s. A Lecturer at the Royal College of Art from 1972 until 1994, she has made a significant contribution to art education. Winner of the Jerwood Applied Arts Prize for Jewellery in 2000, Mina also received an OBE for services to Art in 2012.
'The work of Amedeo Modigliani (1884 – 1920) has held a recurring fascination for me ever since, at Art School in the 1960s, we were encouraged to study what was then considered ‘Modern Art’. The way he was able to stylize figures and heads by employing such apparently simple lines, while still communicating the figurative subjects of his Art, remains a mystery to me. His lines speak of a designer’s approach, much as in the work of Ben Nicholson, particularly in Modigliani’s preparatory sketches for sculptures. I have always been drawn to this kind of reduction in form & line and, without consciously copying it, my own work certainly can be described as inheriting this abstract style.' - Jacqueline Mina
Victoria Crowe OBE, DHC, FRSE, MA(RCA), RSA, RSW
Victoria Crowe painted Large Tree Group in 1975, an iconic work from her A Shephard’s Life series. The etching and screenprint made in 2014 pays homage to the impact and continuing memory of shepherd Jenny Armstrong who was born in 1903 at the farm of Fairliehope, near the village of Carlops and worked all her life in the lower Pentland Hills.
‘The legacy of the Jenny paintings, and my experience of the landscape at that time, has continued to inform and feed my work over the intervening years, albeit in different forms.’ – Victoria Crowe
