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Atlantic Watch

Artist: Walker, Frances, CBE RSA RSW D.Litt Hon FECA · b. 1930

inspired by the landscape around the artist's retreat on the Island of Tiree. The work is discussed in Professor Duncan Macmillan HRSA's essay 'Land and Sea, Place, Space and Time' in the catalogue accompanying Frances Walker's solo exhibition 'Coastal Glimpses' held at the Talbot Rice Gallery in 1995;

"Scotland is celebrated for its wilderness, for the expanse of its wild and empty places, but it is a land shaped almost wholly by human habitation over millennia. Its hills, its valleys and its islands bear witness to the experience of the generations that have
passed their lives there and their relationship to the land that they shaped with their labour.

It is a paradox that it is in some of the places that seem wildest and most remote that the enduring truth of Wilkie's remark and the continuity of this witness is most apparent. Frances Walker has for many years dedicated her art to evoking it. She has worked
in many parts of Scotland, though in recent years almost always within sight of the sea, and since she went there to teach, shortly after she graduated from Edinburgh College of Art, she has returned most often to the Western Isles and especially to Tiree. It is
clear from her art how much she loves its island landscape and how intimately she knows it and its constant exchange with the wide Atlantic. At the centre of the present exhibition are two major works that celebrate this island and the beauty of its ancient
places.

Both of these works are folding screens. They each have eight panels and so are almost twenty feet long. The first function of this form is practical. As she herself describes it, paintings on such a scale would not fit into her studio, or indeed into the studios of many artists. It is the same practical reason that led the Japanese to use screens of this type as a support for large-scale painting in relatively small interior spaces. But though it is practical, the form of the screen also subtly changes our relationship to the image.Japanese artists knew this and exploited it as an integral part of their understanding of space in painting.

In landscape, especially a large-scale purely flat representation, a boundary is implied between the spectator and the landscape that he or she is looking at - and the word at is important here. The flat surface of the picture and the internal structure that
depends on it imply a made space which we are not part of and so are looking at and into.

The informality of the screen breaks down this barrier. lt suggests that the painting's coherence does not depend only on visual factors. The intervals in the screen reflect how we explore progressively a landscape which we are actually part of. Even its angle,
imply the possibility of discovery of the unexpected as we move through it.
In the West, too, there is a close analogy and a historical link between landscape painting and map making . Maps are formalised landscapes. It is a reflection of this that in Western painting the usual approach to landscape is through something a bit like
Mercator's projection, and to subject what is in front of the artist to the rigidity of a grid. Thus the space in the painting does not surround us. It is suspended in front of us. The horizon is not a curve, a section of the circle of the globe, but a straight line . On
the other hand, the space in a screen is flexible. It can bend around us, not in a way that depends on any abstract geometry, but in the way that we do actually experience space.

These are the special qualities of screen painting that Frances Walker understands and exploits eloquently, but they point to qualities that are important for her art as a whole. In her panoramic compositions, of which there are a number apart from the screens
themselves both among the prints and the drawings here, she approaches space in this way. The curve of the horizon is clearly visible.Thus they locate us in a landscape that is not set apart. On the contrary, we are made conscious that we are part of it, just as
it is itself a larger part of the continuum that we share. She neatly makes this point as in her collograph Self-Portrait, she shows herself walking through the landscape. Though enigmatically, like Vermeer in his self-portrait painting his muse in The Artist's
Studio, she is seen from behind, her muse, the landscape, all around her.

She reflects the same approach to the way we inhabit landscape in the series of seven screenprints that she has made of the Ayr coast. These were in response to a commission to provide prints for South Ayr Hospital. The prints reflect the sequence of views you experience as you walk down the coast near the hospital which is by the sea. They literally take us on a walk-a refreshing and imaginative diversion to offer those who are bed-ridden in hospital. It is these prints that have provided the title of the exhibition,
Coastal Glimpses, presenting the idea of landscape as an exploration.

But then this walk on the Ayrshire coast is familiar from their childhood to the local people. They know it from when they are pushed along in the pram till they take it leaning on a walking stick. And so she introduces the other dimension of the continuum
we inhabit-time. It is implicit already in the idea of a walk, but this association enlarges that idea and makes it explicit that this is time experienced in landscape, not within an abstract framework of history, some kind of temporal equivalent of Mercator's
projection, but like the artist's description of space, from the point of view of the individual.

Like Japanese painting, to which at least through the form of the screen they are related, therefore these works are about space and time together. For in fact we cannot separate our experience of these things as for a long time Western painting sought to do.

This kind of localisation of time and space together which we see so clearly in the Ayr Hospital works, both in the screenprints and in the small oil sketches on which they are based, is typical of all the works here. They are about the experience of place, but
also about the experience it contains and that has shaped it. None of them is about the appearance of landscape alone. They depend on association with people and describe the physiognomy of place with, as with human physiognomy, all that we can read into it
of age, character and experience.

One of the two great Screens is a view out from Tiree across the wide horizons of the Atlantic. It is called Atlantic Watch. Coastguards once manned the lookout from which it is painted, watching over the Western Approaches that were so vital in the
Second World War. (The hut itself appears in the large monotype, Early Spring Landscape.) Yet near that coastguard hut to the left and to the right are two prehistoric duns, or castle mounds. The Coastguards were in a long tradition. This place was already defended thousands of years ago. The coastguards looked out to America,. watching for danger and for help. For their earliest predecessors, their outpost was the edge of the world. Beyond lay the land of the setting sun, the land of the dead. But for them too danger could come by sea and the differences here are far less than the continuities. While the character of the towering winter sky, here lit by a silver sun glimmering through the dark blue paint, has not changed at all.

But what we see here is not just the history of ancient struggles and their continuation into modern times. Here Frances Walker differs from Wilkie's vision of history and comes closer to his actual practice as a painter. For in his pictures his subject was not
the epic, but the events of ordinary human life. These may be microscopic in the scale of history, but added together, though infinite in number as grains of sand in the desert, they are actually its substance.

This is apparent in the other painted screen, Machair Walk. In pointed contrast to the view over the winter sea, it is a view across the machair on a brilliant day in early summer. We are facing across the bum that flows through the crofting township of
Balevullin, looking over a green world of still unfenced common grazing, dotted with flowers and grazing sheep. It is a world that can have changed little since the early inhabitants grazed their animals there and washed in the waters of the little burn.

In the foreground a path winds away across the grass. Made over the centuries by the forgotten passage of countless feet of people and animals, it is a metaphor for that same process of microscopic accretion that is history. As it invites us to explore the landscape, it reminds us how closely allied are our movements in time and in space, both personally and in the great expanse of time implied in this panorama. For, like the individual viewpoint within the curve of the horizon, these traces of human history are set in the much greater framework of geological time. In all her work, the artist makes us conscious of this through her account of the structure of the rocks and the way that working with the sea, they have shaped the land.

These two screens are ambitious, fully realised paintings. Their scale is a reflection of their theme, individual human experience against the wide horizons of space and time. There are several other paintings of similar ambition in the show, if not of quite the
same scale. In one of these, Summer Day in the Dunes, the brilliant colour of sea and sand, white where it is dry and pink where it is wet, set off by a red boat and a tiny, vivid red figure in the distance show her in the tradition of Cadell. In the screens themselves too, her ability as a painter is clearly apparent. The dark sky, laid over silver paint in Atlantic Watch is a brilliantly inventive device. She does the same thing with silver showing through a dark sky in a fine monotype of Gunna Sound and the monotypes
generally demonstrate her painting skills.

There is no doubt of her ability as a painter, therefore, but the essential instrument whose use underpins the artist's ability to realise these ambitions, in paint is the art of drawing. Again there are practical reasons for its importance to her. Working on the spot in a part of the world where the climate is not noted for its gentleness, she needs an easily portable medium, and one that will not blow away. She does use watercolour and even small on-the-spot oil sketches with effect, and there are good examples of these in the exhibition, but in these circumstances only drawing can encompass what she is trying to do in her most ambitious works. This is clear in the panoramic drawings on which these larger works are based . The preliminary drawing for Atlantic Watch for instance is made so that it can fold for ease of carrying. There is also a series of other works of the same character like the panoramic monotype Early Spring Landscape, or the large lithograph and screenprint of the stones of Calanais.

The drawings are the necessary preliminaries of the major paintings, but they are also magnificent works in their own right. As she uses it, drawing is like the gate and path in the drawing Skye Gate, or like the path in her screen, Machair Walk. It is both an
invitation to explore the landscape and a record of the process as hand and eye travel together on a journey of enquiry. They can pause to analyse form and detail without losing either the essential structure of the landscape, or the essential continuity of the
experience of it. It is this combination which gives these works their poetic power.
As well as the study for the screen, Atlantic Watch, there are other works closely related in subject as well as form. In fact this whole group of Tiree works could be plotted on a map as a series of intersecting views. One of the drawings, The Dun Burn, is a
view across the burn which winds to the sea round the foot of one of the dunf4 that is seen in Atlantic Watch. There are glimpses of the sea on either side of an expanse of rock. The other, Stormy Day at Craignish, is a view over raised beaches on a narrow neck of land between two expanses of sea and out along the peninsula near by. The working character of these drawings is evident, but this only enhances the way in which they successfully combine grandeur with immediacy.

Her command of drawing also underlies the artist's achievement as a print maker. She has worked in a variety of print media with great distinction. In the present exhibition there are both screenprints and monotypes in which she works variations on so me of
her favourite themes. It is etching though that is the purest distillation of drawing and there is a recent etching here, Rock Pool Cleft, which shows how intensely the etched line can explore the structures of our experience. In this case it is a view down a lon g
narrow cleft in the rocks out towards a glimpse of the sea.

It is an image which summarises the idea of Coastal Glimpses. A glimpse is a fractional view, something seen momentarily arid in part. In the landscape that Frances Walker explores so lovingly and where both space and time are so grandly visible, the individual
human life seems just a glimpse. It is her awareness of this tiny human dimension and her ability to set it meaning fully in this wide framework that gives such poetry to these works.

Duncan Macmillan"