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I Can't Think of a Better Place To Be,
oil on wood panel, 60 x 80cm
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My Path Joins Another, oil on wood
panel, 60 x 80cm
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Blue Sky Day, oil on wood panel,
SOLD
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North Sea Blues, oil on wood panel,
SOLD
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Excerpt from review by Ronald Forbes RSA, Into the
Wild Exhibition, The Meffan, Forfar 19th September-17th October 2009
This is
Helen Glassfords 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 Glassfords 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.
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