Arts diary: Wartime woman artist's work emerges from the attic

TWO unknown female artists are vying for attention in Edinburgh this month, with different stories of survival. On Dundas Street, Colours Gallery is banking that the singular wartime tragedy confronted by Claire Ritson, who died in 2005, will at least attract the curious to a show of her paintings.

According to the biography provided by a distant relative, who apparently retrieved more than 30 of her pictures from an attic, Ritson was born in Maryhill, Glasgow, in 1907, daughter of a father in the Ceylon tea trade. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art in the 1920s, and then at the former Westminster School of Art in London.

In the Second World War she joined up as one of the "Fannies", women drivers for generals or ambulances. In July 1941 she got married, in Elgin, to Squadron Leader Pat Burdett. He was killed over the North Sea in 1942.

Transferring to work at Bletchley Park and later the Foreign Office, Ritson then met and married a Major Vivian "Teddy" Ritson, who was killed at Arnhem in 1944, six months after their wedding.

Ritson painted all her life, attending art colleges and working in London and Cornwall, showing with local galleries and art societies, with her last exhibition in 1997.

The work at Colours, after at least 30 paintings were shipped to the gallery, runs from cheery hunting scenes and respectable renditions of horses, cows or swans to big, blocked out abstracts of figures at fetes or bandstands. There is an abstract portrait of her mother, but none of her husbands, in works priced at 350 to 2,500.

Ritson may not be quite the art world's biggest discovery, but the gallery's Vanessa Davila sings her praises. "The way she painted for those years was very advanced," she said. "She captured something in the figures. She didn't need to be very precise. I really like her story as well. I think it shows determination."

Deadly art

Susan Brightman, 51, describes herself disarmingly in a press release as a "completely unknown artist". Trained as a geographer, with just a few courses at Telford College behind her, she's taken on a highly personal subject that is a potential minefield.

Brightman is from Cumbria, just one year younger than Derrick Bird, who went on a murderous rampage there in June 2010, killing 12 people and then himself.

She was at the secondary school nearest his and says the killings "happened in all the places that used to be home for me" before her move to Edinburgh.

Describing a serious family crisis in her own life, where her mother saved her young sister from a "life-threatening illness", she said, she speaks of empathy for Derrick Bird, whose killings she said speak of "intolerable psychological pain". "I know what it's like to be the black sheep of the family," she says.

"I have been extremely near the edge."Her show, It Could Have Been Me, opens at St Margaret's House arts complex on London Road this weekend. Works quote lines from William Wordsworth, like the title of his sonnet, The World Is Too Much With Us, while another, with hanging apple cores, is called Communication Breakdown.

Brightman says she is aiming to make the point that Bird's "murderous and suicidal journey… did not come from nowhere. As a nation, we need to look for, to hear and to heed the lessons of that day."