Orkney's Pier Arts Centre: the blend of the pier show

ON THE dockside in Stromness, on an overcast Monday morning, the Orcadian artist Diana Leslie is working intently at her easel on an oil painting of a coloured boat moored by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Leslie, an Orkney native and Glasgow School of Art graduate who has returned here to live and work, is wrapped in a well-worn survival suit, headphones clamped over her ears, oblivious to a passer-by craning over for a look.

She's working just down the harbour front from the Pier Arts Centre, where one of the touring Artist Rooms exhibitions, from the collection of art dealer and tastemaker Anthony d'Offay, is currently on show. The show, Beautiful Being, includes the work of American painters Alex Katz and Cy Twombly, the latter in particular a celebrated, even revered name whose artworks change hands for millions of dollars.

Twombly's Untitled 1982 is the highlight of the show. A cascade of red, white and blue strands, in oil, oilstick and crayon, fall across the paper from left to right, evoking spreading hair or the sensation of falling down a mountain. The picture, like every work in the art centre, is expertly placed for maximum effect, occupying its own space on the end wall of the main temporary gallery.

"Utterly beautiful," is how Leslie describes Twombly's work. Her own show, Hill and Voe, a set of dark and rich small oils of Orkney land and seascapes, is showing in an upstairs room at the centre until Monday next week. This week, she has been tutoring schoolchildren on the joys of painting outdoors. Her prices are more modest, a couple of hundred pounds a picture, which cover subjects such as the Stromness Post Office, a local Co-op and a surging sea. There's a respectable number of red dots.

"Oh, I wish I were Alex Katz," says Leslie, wryly. She paints en plein air, which has a different meaning in Orkney from the south of France. With the "somewhat stinky" survival suit, she says, "instead of an hour to become cold, you've got five hours, you've got time to play with, and time is one of the biggest things to inform a painting". Oils allow her to keep painting through a certain amount of rain, and if the wind blows "a proper hooligan", she hopes the elements blow out through her art, in blustery works brimming with local depth and weather.

A visit to the Pier Arts Centre, four years after it reopened with an award-winning extension, is a powerful and provocative study in contrasts.

Its exhibitions play off the extraordinary core collection of 20th-century British work from the likes of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, to show both international contemporary art, as well as work firmly rooted in the local community.

Beautiful Being is on show at the venue until 4 June, part of the Artist Rooms' touring collection of more than 700 works, set up when the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate in London jointly bought Anthony d'Offay's collection at a knock-down price. Included in that purchase was Twombly's suite of six abstract watercolours, Souvenir de l'Ile des Saintes, inspired by his stay on a French Caribbean island, running from thumb-print sized sprays of colour to spreading areas of milky rose. The two more striking works, Untitled 1982, and a triptych of black-and-white abstract prints, showing boats with spreading oars and flags flying, are on loan from d'Offay himself.

Katz's work includes 20 small studies, from little land and seascapes or flower pictures, to four claustrophobic little portraits, expertly displayed in two rooms, with windows looking out on a muddy harbour floor. They run from bobbing boats and dotted waves in Penobscot Bay (1999) to bleak wintry twigs in Winter Branch (1953). The portraits include Kate (1994), in a shocked nervous grimace, the slightly sneering Vincent (1996) and an abrupt and bold-looking woman in Pink Sweater (1981).

But the high-impact single piece is Green Table 1996, 17 cut-out portraits of Katz's family and friends, set out on a large table, a noiseless crowd of unsmiling faces with harsh expressions, in unflattering colours and contours. Katz himself is grimacing slightly, with a sidelong look and gritted teeth.

He is not an easy artist to like. Born in 1927, Katz is known for his large-scale portraits and is seen as a forerunner of Pop Art. While the studies are in the publicly owned collection, Green Table is also listed as a loan from d'Offay himself. It's been used as a model for local schoolchildren to do their own, deliciously anarchic Katz-style portraits, displayed on a table nearby.

The Pier Arts Centre, which opened in 1979, sprang out of a "domestic collection" put together by the art lover Margaret Gardiner. She first met Hepworth in 1930 and then bought from a circle of friends - centred on St Ives in Cornwall - that grew to include Nicholson, Margaret Mellis, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton and other luminaries. Her connection with Orkney began when her son, Martin, took his National Service leave on the island. The collection, including Nicholson's 1929 (fireworks), a Hepworth's oil and pencil Figure, her Oval Sculpture and their son Simon Nicholson's charming Acres St Martin's, Isles of Scilly, reflects one person's extraordinary eye.

The gallery already hosted international shows, but the d'Offay Collection, staff say, has helped build connections with a network of UK galleries hosting Artist Rooms exhibitions.

It runs about four temporary shows a year, with new work by Jim Lambie coming in the summer. It has added acquisitions from British artists, from the usual suspects - like Callum Innes or Douglas Gordon - to the Orcadian painter Steven MacIver.

The centre uses international artworks to stimulate the local artistic community; the equivalent of the Royal Scottish Academy and the National Galleries of Scotland rolled into one. It has no formal acquisitions budget, and is an independent gallery, though it has funding from both Creative Scotland and the local authority. Its open exhibitions have had more than 100 submissions from local artists.This summer the gallery is embarking on an ambitious celebration of the Orcadian painter Sylvia Wishart. On her death in 2008, Wishart was remembered in the national press as one of Scotland's leading contemporary painters, but she scorned the kind of self-promotion that helps make art superstars. Born in Stromness, she studied at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen and became a lecturer there, but remained solidly based in Orkney. Her luminous pictures, both abstract and detailed, were typically painted from the windows of her Stromness home, the subjects running from the Hoy skyline to objects on her windowsill and her own reflection.

Wishart was a close friend of Gardiner and a trustee of the Pier Arts Centre, which was established on the site of the Hudson's Bay warehouse that was her studio. On its reopening, just after her death from cancer, it showed her pencil drawings of 12 scenes around Orkney commissioned by a local farmers' merchant, J&W Tait, for a calendar.

Earlier this year the centre put out a call in the local press for Wishart artworks. "She was a very modest painter, so we are trying to source a lot of her paintings that are all over the place," says Isla Holloway, marketing development officer. "A lot of people have bought, or acquired, or been given art works. We have had hundreds of people coming forward. There are no records at all."

• For more information on the Pier Arts Centre's programme, visit www.pierartscentre.com