Scotsman Obituaries: Frank Pottinger, Scottish sculptor and printmaker

Frank Pottinger, sculptor and printmaker. Born: 1 October 1932 in Edinburgh. Died: 9 August, 2022 in Edinburgh, aged 89
Frank Pottinger connected poetry, landscape, music and architecture in his work (Picture: The Edinburgh Reporter)Frank Pottinger connected poetry, landscape, music and architecture in his work (Picture: The Edinburgh Reporter)
Frank Pottinger connected poetry, landscape, music and architecture in his work (Picture: The Edinburgh Reporter)

An artist fascinated by place and landscape, Frank Pottinger pursued his abstract style adeptly in a range of media, working until his late eighties. While he was never one to court adulation, his importance in Scottish art should not be forgotten.

Francis Vernon Hunter Pottinger was born in Edinburgh in 1932. His parents were Shetlanders who had settled in the city, where they raised their four children, Frank, his brothers Bill and Jim, and his sister Vera. Sadly, his father, who was a stonemason, died when Frank was 14.

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He left school for an apprenticeship in mechanical fitting with an engineering company. However, after National Service in the Army, he began to pursue his ambition to go to art school, taking evening classes at Edinburgh College of Art. He built up a portfolio which earned him a full-time place at ECA, and graduated with a diploma in Sculpture in 1963.

Like most artists at that time, he went on to train as a teacher, going to Moray House College in Edinburgh, and began his teaching career in schools in Edinburgh and Fife. In 1973, he was appointed as a lecturer at Aberdeen College of Education, where his departmental colleagues included artists Fred Bushe and Barbara Rae.

Living at Strathdon, in the Aberdeenshire countryside, he had space to make large-scale sculptural works in wood and bronze. His style was always abstract, but landscape was an important influence, from the granite mountains of Torridon to the fields and cliffs of Shetland and even the ploughed fields of Aberdeenshire.

When, during lockdown in 2020, he decided to fulfil a long-held ambition and assemble a book of his work, he titled it A Sense of Place. In the foreword, he wrote: “I have tried to show my fascination with the idea of a sense of place, which I believe can make us aware of so much of our environment, and also to demonstrate that this has been a central theme of my artistic output over the years.

“I have attempted in sculpture and in printmaking to integrate ideas and images from familiar sources and I am motivated by the notion that in poetry, landscape, music, architecture and in dialect speech there can be found affinities, which I find inspiring.”

From 1974, Frank exhibited regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture (RSA), becoming an Associate in 1979 and a full member in 1991. When, in 1985, he stopped teaching and moved back to Edinburgh to concentrate on his work, he became involved in various RSA committees and served as RSA representative on bodies such as the National Trust for Scotland and Edinburgh College of Art. In 2003, he was the Convenor of Sculpture for the 177th Annual Exhibition.

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Frank took up artist-in-residence positions in various places in the UK and in Germany, and enjoyed opportunities for travel. A travelling scholarship from ECA after graduation took him to study sculpture in Greece and Turkey. In 1988, thanks to the William Gillies Bequest Award, he visited ceramic and sculpture workshops in Hungary, and in 2002, a further travel award took him to the Baltic States to study folk art and wood carving.

In Edinburgh, where he had his home and workshop in a former factory building in Leith, he developed his interest in ceramics and had his own kiln. He completed several large-scale sculpture commissions for the public realm: a carved wooden relief for Heriot-Watt University; the Tale Stone, a large ceramic work in the shape of a standing stone for Uist & Barra Hospital; and he was commissioned to make the Coat of Arms for the opening of the Scottish Parliament building in 2004, creating the sculpture from fibreglass to a design by Mark Dennis.

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When the physical demands of large-scale sculpture became too challenging, he concentrated his energies on printmaking, and became an active member of the workshop at Edinburgh Printmakers. As a member of the artist community there, he did not hesitate to express his views on the music being played in the workshop: his preference was for classical and roots music, and he could be disparaging about rock and pop.

A Sense of Place is a modest but immaculate book, befitting a man who applied the most exacting standards to his own work and never boasted of his achievements – even close friends did not know about his Scottish Parliament commission. Looking through his book, one is struck by his wide-ranging interests, the various media in which he worked, and how his work always – regardless of medium – contained recognisable features of his signature style. In his lithographs and chine-collé prints, he often used abstract forms which recalled the shapes used in his sculptures.

He continued to work at Edinburgh Printmakers until the workshop closed for lockdown, and A Sense of Place includes prints made in spring 2020. His work was included in Reduct: Abstraction and Geometry in Contemporary Scottish Art, at the RSA in October 2020, and Imprint: New Prints and Multiples by Royal Scottish Academicians, in April the previous year.

Frank was a long-standing church-goer and found a spiritual home at Old Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Edinburgh, though he also liked to attend services at St Giles Cathedral, where he enjoyed the singing. At Old Saint Paul’s he used his sculpture skills to repair the broken finger of the Christ child on a statue of the Madonna and Child. It is perhaps no coincidence that many of the poets he referenced in his work – RS Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Traherne – were those who wrestled with religious themes.

Frank Pottinger died in August after a short illness, less than two months before his 90th birthday. He is survived by his nieces and nephews and by Norah Smith, his third wife, from whom he was divorced.

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