Helen Glassford: Encounters

By Susan Mansfield, 25.04.2022

Drawing on the Isle of Scarp, near Harries, in July 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

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’, ‘Silene’, ‘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.

Helen Glassford: Encounters is exhibited at The Scottish Gallery until Saturday 30th April.