Tony Davidson’s Kilmorack Gallery is the small rural art gallery that breaks the rules. Occupying a former church, it lies close to Beauly on the road into Strathglass. This is gently undulating farmland with narrow, twisty roads. It feels less like the North West Highlands than middle England. Hereabouts, many of the modest parish churches have lost their flocks and are now offering a different kind of uplifting experience through their conversion to galleries. The old Kilmorack Church is a fine building dating from 1786 and appears still to be weatherproof. Inside, against a backdrop of fine Georgian windows, the visitor finds artworks. No postcards, no cakes and coffee, no souvenirs. Such appropriate devotion is refreshing. It’s a serious gallery inside a fine building.
This summer, Kilmorack has been waving Gerald Laing’s portrait of Kate Moss as its star attraction, Laing having lately returned to his pop art roots with screen printing. In the context of the other works on display it is clearly a stand out piece, but only because it seems not to belong. Indeed it appears to be almost a parody of Pop and isn’t as sharp in technique as perhaps it ought to be. Two large acrylics by James Hawkins depict Applecross in an extravaganza of futuristic colours applied liberally, one could almost say with abandon, by his free-spirited palette knife. Majestic as the scenery is in Torridon, these paintings reflect a grander scene, redolent perhaps of the Canadian Rockies in autumn. Much more Scottish in flavour are Kirstie Cohen’s bleak, desolate, monochrome mountains with swirling clouds and snowstorms. Robert McAulay has had several paintings in the gallery this summer including studies of deeply textured building facades which are given life and character beyond their otherwise unlikely potential.
I went along to the new exhibition’s private view, featuring the Iraqi Nael Hanna’s semi-abstract seascapes and Eugenia Vronskaya’s latest collection of studio works, which she subtitles An altar and fruits and a flame. Hanna’s paintings are large, expensive and not as abstract or as exciting as, for instance, Fiona MacIntyre’s studies of similar material. The tiny Finsbay Gallery on the Isle of Harris is currently showing MacIntyre’s latest works, which will, in all likelihood, be sold out by the time this review is posted. Vronskaya’s half of the exhibition is more satisfying and displays a well-rounded technical accomplishment as well as variety of composition. Hanna’s largest painting has a £25,000 tag, which seems a little steep, but Vronskaya was proving more popular and had sold three in the first half hour. She says that it’s not her intention ‘to shock or surprise, but I do want to touch people’s hearts,’ and that the process of painting ‘is a dialogue between me and my canvas. It consists of the deliberate and accidental…and when I begin I never know where the journey is going to take me.’ Be that as it may, what matters is the finished product and, as many of her oils take empty jam jars as their subject, it might seem slightly shocking that anyone would want to invest over a thousand pounds to hang them on a wall. However, her answer to this is contained in her manifesto for the exhibition: ’What you see is not what you see. So it is not about ‘still life’ or ‘glass jars’, rather they are my characters… performing the play I’ve written for them. When it [light] comes out to play it turns the jars into illuminated cities or drunken sailors.’
OK, this is where I lose the plot. It seems that Vronskaya might have just a little too much imagination whereas Hanna, on this showing, lacks invention. Davidson does his best to show both in their best light by creating a homely, cosy atmosphere in the old church, with spotlights trained on the most colourful parts of the canvases.
The Kilmorack Gallery is just outside Beauly, Inverness-shire. www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk
The current exhibition ends on 13th September 2008.
