Review: Art of Sylvia Wishart RSA - Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh

It’s a shame that Sylvia Wishart believed those of us ‘fae Sooth’ of Orkney wouldn’t care for her work, as her posthumous first major show gives us a vivid sense of a life spent on the islands

ORKNEY, an archipelago of green, fertile islands in the middle of some of wildest and windiest seas in the world, is a remarkable place. It is a place too where the remotest past is always close. The richness of the islands’ astonishing neolithic monuments suggests it was once at the centre of things too. During the Bronze Age – when activity in Europe centered on the Mediterranean trade routes – the islands perhaps became remote, but they later became once again central to the North Sea politics of the Picts and Vikings.

They left more grand monuments, too, from the mysterious brochs to the glory of St Magnus Cathedral, the finest Romanesque church in Scotland. Now, however, those of with the perspective of the south we are once again inclined to think of Orkney as remote, with all the disadvantages we imagine that condition brings. Too readily, I think, for there is a healthy alternative view.

To the Orkney painter Sylvia Wishart, who died in 2008, we in the south were simply “doon there”. When Colin Greenslade at the RSA invited her to exhibit in 2006 her response was nobody would want to see her stuff “doon there.” That is us put in our place, certainly, but it is a pity that because of that mistrust her work is not better known doon here. Over the years she did show at the RSA and was also elected to the Academy. Nevertheless we have not before had a chance to see enough of what she did to recognise what a significant artist she was. Now, however, the RSA is showing an extensive group of her pictures. Selected from the major exhibition held at the Pier Art Centre in Stromness last year, and so inevitably smaller, this is not a full retrospective, but it does span her career and so gives us a good idea of the richness and beauty of her art.

The distinctiveness of the Orkney landscape and way of life and the extraordinary presence there of the ancient past have inspired both art and literature. Before Wishart the most notable painter of Orkney was Stanley Cursiter. He became director of the National Gallery (the last native-born Scot to hold the post) but he always remained a painter for whom the sea and the rocks of the Orkney coasts were his principal inspiration.

More recently, George Mackay Brown achieved much wider celebrity with writings in which Orkney is both setting and subject. He was also part of Wishart’s story. Although he was 15 years her senior, they were brought up neighbours living by the pier in Stromness. Wishart went away to art school in Aberdeen, but was later to have a relationship with Mackay Brown that ended in 1965 in some bitterness. This story is incidental to her art, no doubt. Nevertheless, there is a real affinity between her work and his, and her association with Mackay Brown also suggests that, in the strength of their Orcadian identities, neither artist was alone. They shared a consciousness of the distinctiveness of their native islands and a conviction of their beauty and poetry and it was this that shaped what both of them did.

Encouraged by Orkney artist and art teacher Ian MacInnes, Wishart went to study at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen and later taught there, although she kept her base in Orkney. A set of drawings that she did early in her career for calendars in response to enlightened patronage by the Orkney printers, J&W Tait, shows how her work is grounded in beautiful draughtsmanship, something she shares with Frances Walker, of whom she was student, friend and colleague.

In 1970, Wishart bought a building on the pier at Stromness. It was later to become the Pier Art Centre and so Orkney’s famous gallery in part at least owes its existence to her.

“I have bought a pier with an old stone building on it in Stromness! At least let us say I have acquired it with help,” she wrote excitedly to her friend Anne McWilliam. The letter also includes a drawing and a detailed description of her new acquisition. It was to be her home and studio, but she also added “I intend to have a small gallery place in time.”

Nearly 20 years later, when Sylvia told Gardiner that she wanted to move out of the building she had converted, the idea was born that it could be home to Margaret Gardiner’s collection, and so the Pier Art Centre was created. Wishart’s pier gave it its name. A lovely painting here called Harbour Window records the view from the building looking out at a yellow trawler moored at the pier and seen against a light blue sea. Much of this picture is dark yellow scumbled paint indicating the internal wall. The blue and gold rectangle of the window is like a little jewel in this neutral field.

The exhibition has been selected around the places that Wishart lived and worked. The Pier was one of these. Another was North House, a tumbledown cottage with a turf roof at Rackwick on Hoy which she rented from 1967 and restored so she could live in it. Rackwick is a little valley with half a dozen scattered houses. It faces south across the Pentland Firth and is sheltered from the north and east by the hills of Hoy. Rackwick Bay is flanked by the high cliffs of Hoy where the hills meet the sea. Several of Sylvia Wishart’s works from the 1960s of Rackwick record both the house and the view dominated by these cliffs. These earlier pictures are painted in impasto so heavy that the surface is like relief sculpture. (Unfortunately in the exhibition several of these pictures are displayed in deep frames that cast strong shadows.) In one dramatic view from the cottage it is autumn. The foreground is a field of scarlet bracken that then leads down through gold to the whites and greys of the sea and cliffs beyond. Though her drawings are precise, her paintings, which were done from memory, are more poetically composed. Indeed her method – at least in later pictures which tend to be oil and mixed media on paper – was, she said, to work outwards from the centre of a large sheet of paper, allowing the picture to evolve under its own dynamic. She certainly moves the landscape around to suit her poetic need. In Broken Croft, Rackwick, for instance, the cliffs have been made to curve round Rackwick Bay to enclose it and the house in a protective embrace.

In 1987 she moved to Heathery Braes just outside Stromness. It was to be her last home and once again enjoyed a magnificent view towards Hoy and across the Pentland Firth. From her window in winter the sun sets beyond the cliffs of Hoy and this was a frequent motif for her, as in a screenprint of the Kame of Hoy. She also introduced a new dimension into her work by incorporating the reflections in the window into her compositions. The result in Reflections II, for instance, is a richly layered image. The window itself frames the sea with cliffs beyond. In the foreground on the window sill are various still life objects, a ship in a bottle and some fruit in a bowl. Floating above this are disembodied reflections both from inside the house and apparently too from unseen windows behind her, so that birds and fragments apparently from a different landscape appear. Even her easel is hanging there in front of us. It is a strange, poetic mixture where the actual seems to become the imagined. It is an image of the layers of time and memory that inhabit place and nowhere perhaps more than Orkney.

RATING: ****

• Until 29 February