Constructed Narratives, Edinburgh review - three artists brought together by an eccentric teacher

An inspirational teacher is the common link for the artists featured in Constructed Narratives at the RSA, writes Duncan Macmillan

Constructed Narratives, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ****

Gerald Laing: Myth and Muse, Fine Art Society, Edinburgh ****

Modernist British Prints, Open Eye, Edinburgh ****

Anon, Anon & On & On by Arthur Watson in Constructed Narratives at the Royal Scottish Academy PIC: RSA PRSA

There are all sorts of reasons why a group of artists might get together to hold an exhibition, but what brings Arthur Watson, Ian Howard and Lennox Dunbar together in Constructed Narratives at the RSA is both unusual and significant. The three were taught at Aberdeen Grammar by art teacher Charles Hemingway, who, they say, was highly eccentric. The show is a tribute to his memory, but is surely also a reminder of how important school teachers are: how just one good teacher, however eccentric, or perhaps because they are eccentric, can inspire a generation of pupils. Here are three senior academicians, one of them, Arthur Watson, a past president of the Academy, who all set out on the course they have taken from the inspiration of one teacher.

The show began in Aberdeen Art Gallery and that is fitting, too. Hemingway “was insistent that his pupils get to know the history and current practice of art” from the collections in the gallery. They had to comment on what they saw too and it might be stretching a point, but commentary on the art of their great predecessors still features in the work of two of these artists.

This is particularly true of Ian Howard though the pictures that fascinate him now are from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and so a long way from anything he could have seen as a boy in Aberdeen Art Gallery. Quotations from Hieronymus Bosch, Dürer, Holbein, Piero della Francesca and other Renaissance masters have featured in his work for a long time.

These references drift through a kind of painted mental landscape much as they might drift through memory or dreams. In Day and Night, for instance, organised like a diptych in light and dark, in the Day panel the landscape beneath a blue sky suggests Piero della Francesca and a hexagonal fountain is an echo of Jan van Eyck, while the dark sky in the Night panel suggests the nightmare darkness of Hieronymus Bosch.

B.B. (Brigitte Bardot), 1968, by Gerald Laing PIC: Hugh Kelly / Fine Art Society

Looking at Howard’s pictures you feel that these old masters, less encumbered by empirical reality then we are, have better access to the liminal places where imagination is free to roam. One of the most striking of his pictures here, for instance, is The Rose of Paracelsus. Its title and imagery refer to a story about Paracelsus, the sixteenth century Swiss savant who historically occupied precisely that position between the empirical and the magical that Howard’s pictures explore.

Lennox Dunbar’s work is physically very different from Howard’s. The works on show are clearly paintings, but rather than flat canvas or panel, he constructs his support from overlapping pieces like a layered jigsaw. Consequently his painted surfaces have low relief to which he also frequently adds collage. The edges of the constructions are both sharply defined and irregular. This effect is then enhanced by a glossy finish that looks like a ceramic glaze. The results he calls “paintings as objects.”

His imagery is abstract, but with enough hints of a recognisable world to keep us intrigued. In Windstorm, for instance, things are clearly being blown about, while Beach walk has flotsam and jetsam collaged onto it. Going back to those schoolboy visits to Aberdeen Art Gallery he, too, makes references to the work of other artists.

There are hints here and there of Klee, Miró or Picasso, but at times he is more direct citing a particular artist in his title. Beach walk, for instance, is subtitled ‘after Stockholder’ (apparently referring to Canadian multi-media artist, Jessica Stockholder), Forest walk is subtitled (after Matisse), Garden wall is (after Nicholson) and Night walk (after Braque).

Detail from Interlock - Overspill by Lennox Dunbar in Constructed Narratives at the Royal Scottish Academy PIC: Mike Davidson / RSA

Here the references seem to be more of mood than image, but at the same time as in Coastal walk (after Pasmore), for instance, you do get a sense, not of imitation exactly, but of connection, of a soliloquy on the named artist’s work.

Although all three artists are distinctive, Arthur Watson’s work is perhaps the most unusual. He describes having a bit of an epiphany on seeing Eduardo Paolozzi’s Krazy Kat Archive when it was in St Andrews. (It’s now in the V&A.) Paolozzi’s insight that art must encompass all the imagery we make seems to have led Watson thereafter on a very individual path.

The memory of Paolozzi, a tribute even, is there in a set of variations on Mickey Mouse, a favourite motif for Paolozzi, that Watson has made as prints. Characteristically, starting from a still recognisable mouse mask, when he sees a visual analogy with a longline basket used in by fishermen of the north east coast, the mouse undergoes metamorphosis into basket forms in print and then into three-dimensional sculptures which in turn become masks representing the many anonymous Scottish singers in the great folk tradition.

Watson himself is a folk-singer of standing and prominent here is his Singer’s Chair, a kind of wooden, acoustic version of an Orkney chair.

This interlocking imagery leads him on to weaving and that in turn leads him on, or rather back to song. Weaving and song being intimately connected in Scotland, it all meshes together in a remarkable series of objects and images. These include a weaver’s loom and paraphernalia and, too, a magnificent, woven Year End Drinking Coat made for Watson by master weaver, Jimmy Hamilton, at Newburgh Handloom Weavers.

At the Fine Art Society, though he would never have acknowledged it, Gerald Laing was also a beneficiary of Paolozzi’s insight which somewhat to his regret later gave birth to Pop Art. In 1962, while still a student, Laing made a colossal – 12 foot high – painting on nine panels from a newspaper photo of film actress Anna Karina, faithfully reproducing the newsprint dots of the original, tiny picture. There was bit of zeitgeist in this. Warhol’s Marilyn print was also 1962 and Roy Lichtenstein had begun to use newsprint directly in his paintings the previous year. In 1963, Laing was in New York where he became friendly with Andy Warhol. He was later commissioned to make a bust portrait of Warhol which is also in this show. Laing was in the US when Kennedy was assassinated and that tragic event inspired his painting Lincoln Convertible done after his return to the UK. These and other images, including his Brigitte Bardot of 1968 and a series of bikini clad starlets, had considerable success as screen prints. He also sought to return to this early success much later with a new series of similar pop-art screen prints including a print of Kate Moss.

In the 1970s, however, he turned to sculpture and working with sculptor Gavin Scobie, began to cast his own bronzes at his home on the Black Isle. His then wife Galina Vassilovna Golikov was the inspiration for a series of stylish and highly stylised bronzes which dominate this show. In them he abandoned any pop-modernity to return to the inspiration of early modernist sculptors like Jacob Epstein and Umberto Boccioni whose art helped inspire Art Deco. In consequence, these bronzes, though very striking, have a curiously anachronistic feeling about them. As a result, however, they also chime somewhat unexpectedly with a show of Modernist British Prints from the 1920s across the road in the Open Eye Gallery that includes some very fine examples of the work of CWR.Nevinson, Claude Fight and Sybil Andrews and other artists of the Jazz Age.

Constructed Narratives until 28 July; Gerald Laing until 31 August; Modernist British Prints until 20 July