BORN: 1976 Lancaster. EDUCATION: Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee: 2002 Masters of Fine Art; 1995–1998 BA (Hons) Fine Art, Drawing & Painting HELEN GLASSFORD AWARDS: 2007 Awarded runner up of the largest privately funded art award in the UK: the Jolomo 2007 Lloyds TSB Landscape Painting Awards 2001 MFA Scholarship: Duncan of Jordanstone. 1999 The Armour Award, Royal Glasgow Institute. 1998 Cuthbert New Young Artist Award, The Royal Glasgow Institute. 1998 Sir Robin Philipson Memorial Medal, Royal Scottish Academy. Helen Glassford’s paintings are in essence abstractions of the Scottish landscape in which she finds herself immersed. Her painting is in a constant state of flux, a condition perpetuated by her experience of the shifting weather systems that roll inexorably across this landscape, as a counterpoint to the slow creep of geological time. She reacts freely to the immensity of nature before her, attempting both to capture the spirit of place, and humanity’s transient experience of it.

I Can't Think of a Better Place To Be, oil on wood panel, 60 x 80cm My Path Joins Another, oil on wood panel, 60 x 80cm   Blue Sky Day, oil on wood panel, SOLD North Sea Blues, oil on wood panel, SOLD Excerpt from review by Ronald Forbes RSA, Into the Wild Exhibition, The Meffan, Forfar 19th September-17th October 2009 This is Helen Glassford’s third solo exhibition and a major statement from an artist who has distinguished herself from her student days in Dundee in the late 90s to the present day. In 1998 she won the Philipson Medal for Painting at the Royals Scottish Academy, the Highland Spring Purchase Prize, and the Cuthbert New Young Artist award at the Royal Glasgow Institute, where in 1999 she also won the Armour Award. In 2007 she was a runner up in the Jolomo Landscape Painting Awards. The title of the exhibition, “Into the Wild” is appropriate because we are led to inaccessible places that only the physically fit and adventurous of spirit can reach. In addition, there is also an unusual generosity in Helen Glassford’s paintings, because she is happy to share with us her intense sensations and personal observations rather than merely depicting visual detail. This is not ordnance survey topography, or postcard depiction: this is a search for the sublime. She experiences the moors and mountains of northern Scotland not only through walking, but also from rock-climbing in summer and ice-climbing in winter. Her experience of the sublime goes from awe and wonder at the beauty of her surroundings to the fear of the danger that is ever present when one grapples physically with the substance of our wild landscape. She re-lives and re-creates her experience in her creative process in the studio. These works do not usually depict an actual place or a specific viewpoint, but rather they attempt to create a universal truth, synthesised from the range of sensations that she has experienced. The ever-changing weather patterns and light conditions that the Scottish highlands offer are used to explore a painterly equivalent of the terrain and the sky. The paintings have gestural swirls of paint, from washes to dry scumbles that appear totally abstract when the viewer is very close to the work. Further back, hints of details of mountain, corrie or loch key up the image and provide a resolved totality that we feel that we recognise, and may even claim to know intimately, even though it is an image born in the studio. The titles often give a clue to this poetry of sensation –“Waiting for Clarity,” ”Luminous to the Last,” “Crisp.”