Book Review: James Morrison and Will Maclean

By Bill Hare, 05.04.2022

Land and Landscape by John Morrison. Courtesy Sansom & Company.

The Bristol based publishers, Sansom & Co, must be congratulated and thanked for the way they have, over recent years, supported Scottish art.

The new publication, Land and Landscape, about the late painter James Morrison, who sadly died in 2020, is written by John Morrison, the highly regarded Scottish art historian and son of the artist. There is also a foreword by Guy Peploe of The Scottish Gallery, a long-time supporter of Morrison’s work and an introduction by Patrick Elliott, chief curator at The Scottish Gallery of Modern Art.

Morrison’s paintings have been consistently and keenly sought after and collected by both major private and public collections, including the National Galleries of Scotland, which cemented Morrison’s reputation as an eminent landscape painter with the 2021 acquisition of For a Lady Remembered (2007). The work captures Suilven mountain in the Western Highlands and was painted as a memorial to Morrison’s wife, Dorothy, who died in 2006. It is currently on display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and is the focus of detailed critical analysis in Land and Landscape.

The authors offer a fascinating examination of the inner tensions and contrasting characteristics that underpin Morrison’s work. A superficial view of Morrison’s landscapes may suggest a series of relatively straightforward topographical and geological representations of various aspects of the Scottish scenery. John Morrison instead draws our attention to how the artist’s approach is steeped in the history of European landscape painting. Morrison’s pictures subtly make veiled allusions to a wide range of Classical (Claude Lorrain), Dutch (Jacob Van Ruisdael) and Romantic (John Constable) masters.

The author also points out that the geographical locations of Morrison’s landscape subjects involve marked contrasts between the cultivated lowlands of southern and eastern Scotland and the much more austere mountainous terrains of the north and west. Under all these differing landscapes however, there is the unifying presence of Morrison’s ubiquitous majestic skies that have become such a distinguishing hallmark of his memorable, pictorial presentation of the lands of Scotland. Included in the book are also other landscapes and vistas accumulated from Morrison’s global travels to various remote places such as Greenland and the Canadian High Arctic.

This spring Sansom & Co will also publish Points of Departure, which focuses on another well-established Scottish artist, Will Maclean. Written by distinguished Scottish art historians Professors Duncan Macmillan and Murdo Macdonald and the artist and writer Kim Ness, the publication coincides with an Edinburgh Festival retrospective exhibition of Maclean’s celebrated career at the City Art Centre, running from the 4^th June to 2^nd October 2022.

Although Maclean is best known for beautifully hand-crafted boxes and wall constructions, Points of Departure draws attention to the wide range of other media to be found in his multi-faceted artwork, including drawings, prints, digital animations, along with his work on the three Lewis memorials. 

The exhibition will be made up from around 140 works that will include 14 pieces of Maclean’s famous Ring Net series, borrowed from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s holdings and also the Fleming Collection’s North West Passage, Artic Route (1994).

All of Maclean’s works are extensively researched, beautifully crafted and sensitively presented to the viewer to examine and meditate on the profound themes on social history, ecology and ethology which are embedded in them. Maclean’s art, which is invariably anchored in the material histories of the peoples of the Celtic communities past and present, is suffused with the imaginative power to transport us to other times, to other places, to other ways of living, different from our own.

These two publications are a much welcome addition to the growing body of writings on recent and contemporary Scottish art.

Land and Landscape by John Morrison. £30 Publication Date: 31 May 2022 | Points of Departure by Duncan Macmillan, Murdo Macdonald, Kim Ness. £20 Publication Date: 2 June 2022