Art reviews: The RSA Christmas Show | The Scottish Portrait Awards | The Compass Gallery Christmas Show

For its winter show this year, the Royal Scottish Academy has invited its members to submit smaller works – plenty of scope, then, for Christmas shopping, writes Duncan Macmillan

Installation shot of the RSA Christmas show, with Kenny Hunter's Fox x 2 and and works by Lennox Dunbar

RSA Christmas Show, RSA, Edinburgh ****

The Scottish Portrait Awards, The Scottish Arts Club, Edinburgh ***

The Christmas Show 2020, Compass Gallery, Glasgow ****

The induced coma of the last nine months has hit the world of art as hard as anywhere. After all, it too is an economy. The private galleries have kept its heart beating as best they can. They went online almost straight away and opened again as soon as they could. They had to. Their survival depended on it, but so too does the basic economy of art still depend on them. There are more alternatives for artists than there used to be, grants, prizes, residencies and the like.

Reflecting this, much of the art that gets into the headlines is actually unsaleable except perhaps to public galleries that sometimes ought to know better. The Royal Scottish Academy, however, is a survivor from the times when there was only the art market to sustain our artists. Indeed, while it has admirably extended its public role, selling art is still the RSA’s vital function. Lockdown happened just as its annual show was ready for the galleries. With admirable speed, it was put online instead.

In recent years, however the RSA has also put on a winter show of smaller works and has done so again this year. It is a real show with work on the walls that you can go and see as well as being online. If, in the past, this winter show conveniently fitted the calendar of Christmas shopping without actually saying so, this year it is simply called the Christmas Show. It is hung in the lower rooms where the Academy has retained control and it is a members’ exhibition, not open submission as it has been in the past.

Nor was there a precise limit on size, though members were invited to send in “smaller” works and most have done so. The argument was space, not saleability, though conveniently smaller works also fit the latter case. Several artists whose work is usually big have sent in things that are modestly sized. Past president Arthur Watson, for instance, who we associate with big assemblages, is showing a set of rather beautiful abstract prints just eight inches high. They are on the theme of harbour lights. Glen Onwin is another artist who often works on a big scale, but is represented here with a group of three small, but correspondingly intense works. Leduc’s Blessed Messengers is particularly lovely, intense blue with crystalline patterns. The title cities Stephane Leduc, a 19th-century chemist who experimented with forms of inorganic growth just as Onwin has done for many years.

Mind Your PPE's, by David Mach

In the RSA’s Black and White Room, the risk of monotonous rows of small pictures has been avoided by gathering together a group of 21 works by various artists. Predominantly black and white, they make an imposing wall, even if it is a little to the disadvantage of individual works. I had to borrow a chair to see Open Heart by the late Willie Rodger, “skied” four rows up. A black torso with a zipper opening over the heart, it suggests ambivalently either an affair of the heart or open-heart surgery. It is one of a group of works commemorating Rodger who died last year. The others hanging nearby include several of his familiar small and often very funny prints, but also a very striking abstract called Winter Wedding from 1964 and a painting called Snow Hedge in an almost abstract expressionist mode.

The wall of black and white works also includes a number of Ade Adesina’s complex and technically amazing linocuts, several of Stuart Mackenzie’s impressive birds and fishes, just single creatures against white, usually in oil on paper. There are also several of David Mach’s skillful, but also rather beautiful small collages and a single woodcut, Mind Your PPEs. Showing a startled 1950s nurse dropping a tray of cupcakes on her recumbent patient, it is a lively, topical riff on Roy Lichtenstein. Ross Sinclair riffs topically too with Real Life is Dead, A Record of the Plague Year 2020 – six pop records, mostly from the seventies, overprinted Real Life is Dead 2020 in technicolour, but “still playable” also noted in the label.

For Jo Ganter, the experience of real life in 2020 seems to have softened her approach. Instead of the geometric austerity of her usual prints, she is showing a set of watercolours, freely drawn and brightly coloured squares and rectangles reminiscent of Paul Klee. Paul Furneaux’s lovely woodcuts in softly textured rectangles are equally reminiscent of that kind of poetic abstraction, but Snow Mountain with an echo of Mount Fuji is, unusually for him, more figurative. There is much else to admire here. Henry Kondracki’s vividly characteristic paintings of Edinburgh, for instance, Alfons Bytautis’s abstract collages, or Victoria Crowe’s lovely images of trees at twilight, but one of the most striking works is Kenny Hunter’s Fox x2. On a plinth that is just a pair of wooden pallets, two russet coloured foxes crouch, intertwined, looking back at us with flat, impenetrable golden eyes.

I am afraid my heart always sinks a little when I have to review an exhibition of contemporary portraiture and the Scottish Portrait Awards is no exception. The painted portrait has lost its way. I think I have said this before, but it was doing fine until the advent of colour photography. Since then it has been all over the place. It is perhaps in tacit acknowledgement of this that the Scottish Portrait Awards include a photographic section and, whether by accident or design, the photographs tactfully spare the competition by being limited to black and white.

Sea Light 1 by Barbara Rae

Nevertheless one should not dismiss the painted portraits entirely. Emmeline Consett’s Mask Maker is, I think, a self-portrait. She is working at an ancient sewing machine making masks. It is at once beautifully seen and nicely understated. In Mr Richard Demarco in full voice, Jonathan Fremantle captures something of his sitter’s irrepressible energy. Ruby Scott-Geddes’s pencil drawing of Rosie Leech is also very nicely executed, but then pencil takes us back to black and white and the photographs.

Several of them are outstanding. I especially liked Natalia Kretzel’s study of a pensive old woman called Forgotten Stories and also Tanya de Villiers’s Summer, a vivid picture of two children playing with a hose pipe. Mark Shields’s Riverman, the improbable sight of a pensive man in a rowing boat on the Thames in the middle of London, is intriguing. Julie Wilkes’s The Magic and Mystery of Scotland is an evocative picture of a girl and her reflection in the carriage window of a train crossing the Glen Finnan viaduct. Harry Potter has made the viaduct famous. The photograph and the child’s reflection open towards a whole world of magical fiction.

Finally, spare a Christmas thought for Compass Gallery. Locked down in Glasgow and unable to open, it is celebrating the season nevertheless with a Christmas show online. There are some real treats here for your Christmas stocking too, a beautiful homage to Seurat by Peter Thomson, for instance, a poetic small work by Will Maclean, several characteristic paintings by the late Jack Knox and a great deal else besides.

The RSA Christmas Show runs until 22 December; The Scottish Portrait Awards are at Edinburgh Art Club until 27 December, then at Glasgow Art Club from 15 January to 20 February and Duff House, Banff, from 1 April to 30 June; The Compass Gallery Christmas Show runs until 30 January