Visual art reviews: Scottish Summer Exhibition | National Gallery of Scotland | Hayley Tompkins

Published on Monday 18 July 2011 19:49

A sale of Scottish work and a loan of English art from our own galleries make an impression on London

Scottish Summer Exhibition ****

Fleming Collection, London

Masterpieces of English Watercolours and Drawings from the National Gallery of Scotland ****

Lowell Libson Ltd, London

Hayley Tompkins: Currents ***

Studio Voltaire, London

LAST year, the Fleming Collection in London – the only museum in the UK devoted solely to Scottish art – invited certain artists to contribute work for a summer selling exhibition. The Scottish Summer Collection was so successful that they decided to do another this year, thus putting an impressive show by living Scottish artists at the heart of Mayfair for the summer.

Though the emphasis is on painting, the artists are diverse, from Edinburgh College of Art principal Ian Howard to Alexander Allan, an ECA student just finishing his MFA.

Kate Whiteford presents a series of works created as part of a commission for the Imperial College Healthcare Trust relating to Alexander Fleming, the inventor of pencillin. These delicate works play with scale: we could be looking at an aerial view of Fenwick Moor (near Fleming's birthplace) or at cultures in a petri dish.

There are prints and photos by Graham Fagen from his earlier body of work about Robert Burns, an impressive piece by Aspect prize-winner Adam Kennedy, inspired by Glasgow's shipbuilding past, outstanding pencil drawing by Mark l'Anson and Jo Milne's abstracts made from interlocking patterns of circles.

Jackie Anderson's superb figurative paintings capture the faces of passers-by in Glasgow streets, lost in their own thoughts. Delia Baillie is exploring being lost too, with tiny cut-out figures wandering in vast, intensely painted vistas of abstract colour. Andrew Mackenzie's fresh take on landscape painting builds silhouettes of trees and rocks, then overlays them with structures of the man-made.

The show also includes a portfolio of prints made at Edinburgh Printmakers showcasing works by ten artists: Chad McCail's disturbing analysis of human relations played out in the style of illustrations from a children's textbook; Kirsty Whiten's excellent drawing, in which explores male/female power dynamics; puns and psychedelia from Norman Shaw ("Princess of Wails") and a rare piece of drawing by Kenny Hunter.

Meanwhile, a showcase of a different kind is happening a few streets away at Lowell Libson Ltd, to mark the publication of a new catalogue to the National Galleries of Scotland's collection of English drawings and watercolours. The NGS has something of a treasure trove. This small show of 18th and 19th-century works illustrates its diversity.

There are gems such as William Blake's God writing upon the Tables of the Covenant, and George Romney's ink and wash study for Elizabeth Warren as Hebe, which has a deft, casual elegance. There is something of an emphasis on landscape, from John White Abbott's lovely study or rocks and trees in Devon, to Thomas Girtin's watercolour of Jedburgh from the late 18th century, a clutch of cottages with toffee-coloured thatch nestling in a green valley, and Peter de Wint's unusual view of sunken waterway in Lincoln. Turner is represented by unusual gouache and watercolour study of Caley Hall.

In that age of expanding travel, watercolours and drawings were used to record new places, and there are fine examples here: William Callow's study of Palazzo Grimani in Venice, John Robert Cozens dramatic paintings of the Colosseum and the mountains on Elba, John Frederick Lewis's beautiful study of Cairo. There is a pencil sketch of the inside of a native American home in Nootka Sound by John Webber.

Some of these works, like this last, are rough and unfinished, yet they offer us an insight into the working process of an artist.

Gainsborough's studies are deft and full of character, while an unfinished drawing of a jester by Richard Dadd is quaint and troubling. The mood is lightened by a cartoonish drawing by Thomas Rowlandson of a lord pulling a chambermaid into his bed.

When Hayley Tompkins graduated, she was hailed by the art world as a painter, but her practice has evolved since. These new works at Studio Voltaire are tightly arranged assemblies of objects, textures and photographs where ordinary things – a spanner, a shirt sleeve, a battery – hint at a kind of human presence or activity. There are a handful of watercolours here: dense networks of colour suggestive of street maps or circuitry, and paintings on wood to which objects are added: a leaf, the fragments of a chopped-up credit card.

Often she paints objects themselves – it seems to be her way of transforming them and asking questions of them. Some of these are more successful than others: a blue painted knife, placed next to a triangle of fabric, effortlessly becomes a boat. The multicoloured chair, however, stubbornly remains a chair with some paint added. It doesn't do to take Tompkins too literally. Her work has a quotidian poetry about it. It may appear vague and inconclusive, but given space and time it has the potential to create powerful resonances.

• The Scottish Summer Exhibition runs until 3 September; Hayley Tompkins until 6 August, The Masterpieces show has ended.