Under that vast Hebridean sky | Frances Macdonald at Portland Gallery
Frances MacDonald, Storm Over The Strait of The Storm, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Portland GalleryIona, in the Western Isles of Scotland, has long attracted artists, keen to interpret the ever-shifting visual interplay between sea, sky and shoreline.
The tiny island sees ‘a lot of weather’: infinite possibilities are thrown up to landscape painters keen to capture unique moments of mood, light and colour as the waves chafe the rocky, white-sanded beaches, crowned by the craggy basalt backdrop of Staffa and the Treshnish Islands, under that vast Hebridean sky.
It was frequently visited by the Scottish Colourists Samuel Peploe and Francis Cadell, of course. George Houston and David Young Cameron created scores of etchings and paintings of the island. To that list you can add contemporary oil painter Frances Macdonald, currently enjoying a solo show – largely featuring oil paintings of Iona – at Portland Gallery, on Bennet St, St James’.
Macdonald, now in her eighties, is an interesting character. She runs a hotel in Cronan, on the mainland coast, where she has a studio overlooking the Jura Sound: on a good day she can see the Corryvrecken whirlpools. She makes frequent trips in her own boat to Iona: she has got to know its contours so well (particularly those of the North End beach) that she can paint them from memory back in her studio, recalling the play of light witnessed and absorbed on her latest visit.
As a young woman in the 60s, Macdonald had planned to go to Edinburgh College of Art, but when a cousin was made pregnant by a ‘bearded artist’ while studying there, her parents insisted she became a nurse instead. She is completely self-taught, then, and thus paints in a very individual manner, using only a small palette knife, however large the canvas she is working on (and some of them are huge).
The Impressionists are clearly a big influence: her paintings demand a close view, to study her impasto mark making, employing a multicolour palette of oils. Step back a few yards and the colours blend to form a representational vista. Standing in front of the triptych which forms the centrepiece of her latest show is an immersive experience. Go in close, step back; go in close, step back. It’s rather mesmerising.
Macdonald exhibits a new body of work every year, alternating between Portland Gallery (where she has been shown since 2000) and the Scottish Gallery, in Edinburgh. The numerous red dots on the walls attest to her enduring popularity with collectors wishing for a splash of Hebridean wildness on their walls. It makes you itch to pay a visit to Iona yourself: the Argyll and Bute Tourist Board should pay her a stipend.
Downstairs in the back room there’s a selection of land-and-seascapes in the gallery’s collection, by Mary Feddon, Jeremy Gardener, Ken Howard and John Maclauchlin Milne, including a 1937 oil painting of Iona by the latter artist. Frances MacDonald: New Paintings runs at Portland Gallery until December 22.