Art Review: South by South West

SOUTH BY SOUTH WEST: THE STORY OF ART IN SOUTH-WEST SCOTLAND

Dick Institute, Kilmarnock; Tolbooth Gallery, Kirkcudbright; McLaurin Galleries, Ayr

IN THE Hitchcock movie North By North West, Cary Grant takes an involuntary road trip across America to clear his name, dodging torture, cops and criminals and, most memorably, a malevolent aeroplane. I'm therefore a little tentative setting out on my own road trip South by South West, to trace a three-part exhibition of that name covering more than 200 years of art.

Apart from a persistent tailgater on the A713, my 200-mile round trip is fairly relaxed. I begin in Kirkcudbright. It is chronologically the middle of the three-part show, a collaboration between local authorities and independent museums in Ayrshire, Wigtownshire, Kirkcudbrightshire and Dumfriesshire, but geographically it's the best starting point to take me northwards home.

The town is spick, span and summery, still living on its reputation as an artist's colony which stretched from the era of the Glasgow Boys to the 1930s. The house where Jessie M King and EA Taylor settled in 1915 on leaving Paris, is a spruce B&B. Its mint green exterior (it is called Greengate Close) is in bright contrast to the scarlet geraniums on its window sills. Along the road, Broughton House, once home to local boy made good EA Hornel, with its purpose built gallery and studio and Japanese influenced garden, is one of the finest yet most modest artist's houses in the country. There are antique shops, tea shops, beautifully kept faades. It feels like little might have changed since Dorothy L Sayers set a mystery novel, Five Red Herrings, here among the artist community in 1931.

Yet there are hints that small town life is as rough and ready here as anywhere. The gossip in the shops is of some local drama that seems to have involved the police. As I walk down the high street towards the Tolbooth Gallery, a gaggle of animated people erupt angrily from the tiny sheriff court. It's not quite the Wild South West, but even picture perfect Kirkcudbright must have its own cowboys.

In the hospitable and friendly Tolbooth Gallery the art on show is from 1880 to 1940. The setting, a former debtor's prison, is resonant – the building itself was portrayed as a local landmark by such luminaries as the Scottish Colourist Peploe – but its interior stone walls and small spaces make it awkward and cramped to hang an exhibition. Logistics presumably have meant that the most famous Kirkcudbright painting of the era, George Henry's Galloway Landscape, has not been borrowed for the exhibition.

Henry is on show though, with a couple of works including a portrait of an anonymous Geisha, the result of his famous trip to Japan with fellow Glasgow Boy Hornel. Hornel's Japanese works are well known. Henry's were unluckily damaged on the way home. Both artists were examples of the outward looking culture of Scottish art at the time – the kind that saw King and Taylor set up shop in a Paris atelier. Their return to Scotland was meant to be temporary but became permanent by default. Their influence on decorative art and in particular on women artists of the period was invaluable.

Armed with the excellent catalogue I leave Kirkcudbright to move northwards to Ayr and backwards to the period 1780-1880. Crossing into Ayrshire, the storm clouds are looming. The mysterious interior of the Galloway hills, gives way to the wrecked post-industrial landscape of places like Dalmellington and the former brick works at Dunaskin. I feel that familiar thrill when I finally glimpse the dark peaks of Arran wreathed in sinuous cloud.

I creep through the manicured streets of Alloway, past those Burns heritage landmarks of Alloway Kirk and Burns Cottage and turning in to the park at Rozelle, home to the McLaurin Galleries. The clipped formal landscape and the top of the range motors parked outside the gallery are a world away from places I have driven through. I lived in Ayrshire for a few years and it was always hard to square its pockets of glitzy affluence, with the shocking poverty of once thriving industrial centres like Doon Valley.

In the McLaurin Galleries, South by South West charts the origins of that industrial era. There are a series of portraits of the great and good: representations of the landed and their land. By the 19th century, the cult of the late Robert Burns has already taken hold, with the painter DO Hill making his name with a volume of Burnsiana.

But by far the most exciting images are those that show the times changing. An anonymous painter records Scotland's first railway in 1831. It ran from Kilmarnock to Troon to take the Duke of Portland's coal to the docks he had founded on the coast. Local painter Alexander Mackay captures an entire spectrum of social classes and local characters at play curling on New Farm Loch.

This period sees artists emerge from the role of skilled artisans into professional and trained individuals with a growing sense of autonomy. By the time it gets to the Pre-Raphaelites hanging out with the local gentry at Penkill Castle at Girvan, and reliving medieval fantasies of knights and ladies, one wonders if it has all gone too far.

By the time I reach Kilmarnock, the weather has broken, as it seems have parts of the town, cleared one hopes for redevelopment. I dash in to the Dick Institute in a smirr of rain. It has a well-stocked library and a magnificent municipal art gallery with a stunning interior stripped back to emphasise its fine cornices and architectural mouldings. Its honey sandstone exterior glows after being cleaned.

Here, focusing on the period 1940 to 2008, the complexity of the other two shows reaches a kind of fruition, the strains of art for art's sake bohemia and the weight of local history resolved in a handful of key contemporary works. Upstairs there is work by two of the century's great Scottish artists, the fierce and melancholic Colquhoun and MacBryde from an era when, as an artist, leaving Scotland seemed the best option. There is the embarrassing excess of Peter Howson. And a different kind of freedom in the work of the late artist Alasdair Taylor.

Downstairs there is a set of compelling documentary photographs of Galloway by the late Raymond Moore, empty landscapes that are not quite bleak so much as beautifully blank. Moore is one of a number of photographers of the Seventies once deemed hopelessly unfashionable, but currently getting a welcome reassessment in the Hayward Gallery touring exhibition No Such Thing As Society.

It is in a handful of living artists though that the themes of South by South West reach a kind of coherent climax. In Christine Borland's installation Handiwork the local industry of lace work meets the art of medicine in a series of cast objects. The young artist Kathleen McKay has woven a dust mask of human hair weaving together the twin legacies of coal and lace.

In a newly commissioned topographical print Graham Fagen brings together his memories of growing up in Irvine, with the inescapable ghost of Robert Burns. Fagen has scratched the glass that frames his print, as Burns once etched a poem on a tavern window. These artists seem comfortable with their south-western roots.

It's almost 5pm, the gallery is closing and I need to get home. My journey has been far less traumatic than Cary Grant's. The only planes I've seen were landing at Prestwick, with no sign of murderous intent, as far as I could see. v

Dick Institute and Tolbooth Gallery, and Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries run until September 20; McLaurin Galleries, September 21 www.futuremuseum.co.uk