Ann Wegmuller, pictured at the Meffan Gallery in 2009, with her RSW Council Award painting, Shore Song

Ann guides me there, cheerfully noting aspects of the many paintings she has hung throughout the house. She painted most of them. As we walk through the lounge, I notice a neat stack of Elle Decoration magazines. It’s not hard to imagine the room being featured in one. It’s a model of balanced lines and subtle tonal harmony.

Ann says that, first and foremost, she likes her rooms to look good, and then she’ll fit herself into them. Comfort is a secondary consideration.

The care she takes about her home seems central to the way she wants to live. In the dining room downstairs two large circular bowls of Oxalis Triangularis sit on the wooden floor centrally in the full-height window. The plants make a huge shock of magenta-purple, the colour of vintage claret. Anyone who has grown these indoor plants will know that they worship the sun and will twist their delicate stems within days to face the light. Ann’s Oxalis are upright. She must frequently turn her bowls.

On the table, painted a cream-grey and made by Freddy, there is a bowl of cut maroon tulips, in an understandably slightly less ordered state; and in balance with it, a bowl of glossy purple skinned apples. Magenta, maroon, purple: I marvel at the effort and commitment required to acquire such an exciting colour combination, let alone conceive it.

On the sideboard, ceramics and table lamps are arranged carefully for colour effect, balance and harmony. I think that the fall of natural light on to the objects has been considered in the placement, and, I’m sure, the impact of electric lighting too.

There’s no sense on the surface of an obsession for order or cleanliness. No ostentatiousness, no preciousness, but Ann knows why things are where they are and can append a footnote to the idea or the object. Everything has meaning and provenance.

Ann Wegmuller, Waving, Waving, acrylic on board, 112 x 124cm, 1995

In the studio, a big room lit by windows south and west, she has designed separate areas for oil painting and watercolours, and spaces to sit and look, with easels placed for viewing rather than painting. She works flat on a table top in the centre of the room. There are neat collections of objects designed into what a conceptualist might regard as installations. Their beauty is individual and collective; groups of stones, shells, stained glass, and even beavers’ tree shavings and sand from Egypt have been picked for their personal appeal and then carefully contained to create a composition. They are part of Ann’s room scheme, and at the same time, props and inspirations for her artwork.

I may be overplaying this interiors description, but the way Ann organises her world seems umbilically linked to the way she considers her picture-making.

My final observation on the studio is her neat arrangements of books, notebooks, and paper reference materials. Ann knows where everything is, and she has it all organised such that it takes no more than thirty seconds or so to turn a thought into a reference held in her hand.

Ann Wegmuller, Off the Beaten Track, mixed media, 40 x 48cm, 2018

She starts at the beginning, conjuring up her eighty-year-old volume of Pictorial Knowledge, the children’s set of encyclopaedias edited by Enid Blyton. It’s a hard-back packed with black and white illustrations that explain the world. She was given it by her father as a present when she was in primary school. Little did he know about the seed that it would sow in his daughter’s mind. She loved the images, and noticed that nearly all of them had captions with full accreditations for paintings, etchings, drawings, and photographs. Ann quickly referenced that many were ascribed to ‘artists’ and that some of them had the letters ‘RA’ after their name.

When she went down the road to the shop to collect her weekly comic, The Dandy, the ladies behind the counter asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. And she knew. She wanted to be an artist. She wanted to have RA after her name, years before she understood what that meant or entailed.

This was the primary-school-age Ann Paton, growing up in Gourock in the 1940s and 1950s. For those less familiar with Scottish geography, Gourock is and always was the smart part of the Greenock/Gourock conglomerate. The work and the working class were in Greenock; the middle and upper classes veered to the west, where the Clyde was even more open and the peninsulas and islands of southern Argyll were embraced by ferries that operated all day every day to Rothesay and Dunoon, Kilcreggan and Innellan.

Ann Wegmuller, Winter, oil on canvas, 102 x 82cm, 2024

Ann was born in 1941, the oldest child of three. Her father ran the pharmacy shop in Kempock Street, and the family lived in a tenement, firstly in Shore Street and then in Kempock Street. Living in tenements in Gourock meant that she was marked by many of her classmates as “not one of us”. The shipping line owners, pilots and doctors lived up the hill and along the front with the view. It created an outsider status in her mind that was exaggerated because she was sent to the fee-paying Greenock Academy. Her parents had aspirations for her.

Their hopes didn’t include “artist”, and the alarm bells started ringing when they were called in to school for an interview with the Head Teacher and a child psychologist, because their child had handed in a picture depicting their garden being full of black daisies. They wanted to investigate what was going on in the Paton household, despite Ann’s innocent protestations that she didn’t have the chalkie crayons to put white on top of green, and she simply wanted the daisies to stand out.

Ann liked paint and colour, but she learned little from the Academy’s art teachers and it seems that it was her determination, rather than the school’s, that found her exhibited at the 1959 Greenock Art Club’s annual McLean Gallery show.

“I remember being thrilled because it was all adults. My parents wouldn’t go. My father said ‘I’m not encouraging this sort of thing. She doesn’t get it from our side of the family!’ So I went in and had a look at this exhibition.There was this chap, James Watt, who painted boats and puffers and things, and I’d seen his work before somewhere and I liked it. He was exhibiting on the same wall, and I was absolutely knocked out. This was wonderful.” Ann has the catalogue and it tells us that her painting was an oil: “A Tree at Sunset”.

Ann gets up again and is back quickly to hand me three small cards and a photograph. The cards are her mementos from three years attending Glasgow School of Art evening classes. The photograph, taken on the tenement back green when she was 17 or 18, shows a confident and fashion-conscious young woman, perhaps aiming to look older than she was, wearing a man’s jumper loosely and, perhaps, wanting to be part of the Beatnik world.

Ann Wegmuller, aged 17, on the back green of her house in Kempock Street, Gourock, 1958

“I was a Beatnik”, she says, “I had rope sandals, a copy of Jean Paul Sartre in my bag [a friend had said that ‘if you want to be a beatnik you need to know about nihilism and existentialism’]. I had a cigarette holder and cocktail sobranis (I liked the box). What more could a woman do!”

Well she could read Keats too, and did. But more about poetry in her life, later.

“I grew up in the 1940s which was really all black and white; the films, everything. Even the books. Suddenly, colour burst on the scene in the 50s… It was wonderful… People were sticking yellow formica and then red formica on top of an old wooden table…Blues that would knock you out. In the 40s we couldn’t have coloured plates… The government wouldn’t allow coloured plates, they had to be white plates. I remember my mother rushing out to a little shop that sold dishes, and coming back with blue Pyrex everyday plates and pudding plates…We couldn’t believe that we were eating off blue!”

Her memories of her teenage days are a mixture of confidence and anxiety; naivety and street-wise sensibility. At first she had her sister, Irene, as a companion in venturing forth into the world, but soon it was Ann and friends out and about. I ask Ann what was Gourock like for a 17-year old. Was it exciting and modern?

“Oh yes. Wonderful. Spanish holidays hadn’t started, so the Glasgow Fair came to Gourock. Only the people that couldn’t stay away. They went home on the bus and came back the following day. The paddle steamers were all about… My sister and I had five underskirts between two. We had the full thing, skirts coming out to here [she holds her arms wide], stiletto heels… We went with the fashion to the dancing… We had to …Everybody did it…Nobody would ask you up to dance if you weren’t.”

Ann Wegmuller, Party Frocks for Chelsea, gouache on paper, 40 x 40cm, 2014

What were they dancing to?

“Swing bands in Cragburn Pavilion in Gourock. But then, I got into jazz, thanks to American sailors arriving for the Polaris submarine. When my friend and I were both going to art school, there were two guys and we took them to the Greenock Jazz Club. What they made of it, I’m not quite sure, because while we were in the café one of them said, ‘you have to listen to Dinah Washington, Lionel Hampton’… Of course a lot of these were black musicians, and these two guys that we were taking to the jazz club were black guys as well…”

“I used to invite them to tea. My mother always rose to the occasion. My father freaked out quietly and said nothing… They were very polite. They came in their American hats… One of them, Eddie Morris was his name, wrote down a list of music I had to listen to, and he said ‘that’s the first time I’ve been in a white person’s house’. I think that with half of my records I’d have to say ‘thank you very much, Eddie Morris’, I didn’t know anything about them before his list.”

“My mother said ‘don’t go to Cragburn’. But my sister and I used to go together. We used to go to the balconies and have a look down, size up the talent, and also look for trouble – in order to avoid it. You got quite street-wise. You thought if there’s going to be a fight it’s going to be over there, so we’ll go over here. Stiletto knives weren’t banned then and it was a bit of a problem in Greenock. You watched. You got quite street-wise on the dancefloor.”

“We’d spent hours doing ourselves up. Eye make-up alone took an age…My father couldn’t say anything because he was selling it. We only had pocket money. We weren’t allowed free things. So if I wanted mascara and eye-liner, I had to pay the shop for it from my pocket money.”

The recordings are still stacked up next to Ann’s relatively antique ghetto blaster (two cassette players and a CD player!) in her studio, and music is a key part of her artistic inspiration. She can look at paintings and say “this one is Classical, this one is Jazz”.

She’s still aware of dress sense, but today it’s slacks and V-neck Scottish woollens. She’ll know the provenance. She says that she learned the importance of order, observation, memory and accuracy whilst working in her father’s shop. There was no room for mistakes.

Ann Wegmuller, Blackthorn in the Snow, oil on canvas, 80 x 100cm, c.2018

The ambition to go to art school was thwarted by what might seem odd circumstances today. Despite keeping accounts for a few years and being good at figures, she failed her standard grade in maths. That meant the art school wouldn’t accept her on the Diploma Course (maths was required for teaching) and her father threw her application to the non-Diploma year in the fire. She would have required funding. His attitude mirrored that of the school, who refused to support students getting portfolios together for art school application. The Greenock Academy didn’t produce artists!

She went on a hostelling holiday, met a young Swiss man, and within a short space of time was on a flight to Zurich. The destination was marriage, life as a Swiss hausfrau, and young children.

Ten years later, the couple decided to give Scotland a go. Freddy, a carpenter and joiner, found work in Crieff, and the family moved to Blackford in Perthshire.

As she moved into her mid-30s, Ann started to think about her passion for art again. She still wanted to be an artist, but she had hardly done anything for fifteen years. There hadn’t been time or money. Then she met and had a productive conversation with Oscar Goodall. Unbeknown to her at the time, he was Head of Art in Central Region schools.

She asked him for advice on how she might, even at her slightly advanced age, get into art school. He arranged for her to go back to school (at Wallace High School, Stirling) to produce an art portfolio, sitting alongside 16-year-olds, while she worked for another Higher (German was an easy option) at home. Goodall also made an introduction for her to James ‘Jimmy’ Morrison, who was at the time responsible for first year students at Duncan of Jordanstone (DJCAD), and that paved the way for her to start at art school at the age of 39 in 1980.

She arrived with a zeal for learning and working. Twenty years of missed opportunity condensed. She expected the teaching staff to teach and inspire. It was a disappointment. Alberto Morocco, David McClure, and Jimmy Morrison were all there but mostly behind closed doors. Some tutors seemed to spend more time in the pubs than in the studios.

From early in her youth up to today, Ann has always expected standards to be met. Her father told her to always question the words of the establishment. What people say should be what they do. She expects value for money, and she knows money is hard-won. She stood up for students’ right to learn, she challenged and demanded. She was voted student rep.

And when the internal pressure at the art school got too much, she headed off into the Sidlaws and sketched landscapes. She’s got the sketchbooks to hand. Right from the start she compressed nature into contained shapes.

Ann Wegmuller, Last Light On the Hill, oil on board, 92 x 96cm, 1992

With Alberto Morocco’s retirement, Alan Robb arrived in her second year as Head of Department, and Will McLean too, but Ann felt that her year was left behind with the old guard. And they were not supposed to teach her. Persistence and determination enabled one-to-ones with McClure and Morrison and in these brief encounters she gathered key information and guidance that seeded her thinking. This was especially true with Morrison asking her what her shapes meant.

“I’m also very aware of composition, thanks to Jimmy Morrison saying ‘that’s just a blob of something, I don’t know what it is. It doesn’t work.’ And I said ‘look at the colour’ and he said ‘it still doesn’t mean anything’.”

Here we have the essence of Ann’s art: meaning in abstraction. Her work carries weight. Her colours and shapes have a presence that few achieve. Each aspect of her picture has a provenance for her. There is a reason it’s there, and mostly she can articulate what it is, whether rooted in instinct or intellect.

Her subject matter was what she saw in the landscape, but never one landscape, one view. “I don’t like views of things… I know a lot of people like a view… A ‘view’ is a postcard sort of word.” No fast-grasped Morrison landscapes for her. She could draw, but that wasn’t her passion. Colour was always the starting point; colour as a means of communicating feeling. She learned arranging and composition as she progressed, but it was speed-learning. By the time she left art school in 1984 she had a firm grasp of what she wanted to express through paint.

She’d arrived in Dundee without much knowledge of art history. The idea of being a painter and creating was stronger than any ideas of adapting and developing a tradition. She didn’t follow any of her tutors or her peers. She lived too far away to go to the galleries in Edinburgh and Glasgow. She educated herself in contemporary art through books from the school’s library.

“I was in there every day… Perhaps not every day, but it felt like every day, in fact any time at all I went to the library. I grew up without any art books. I bought one or two in the 50s which I’ve still got… Tiny little things… Van Gogh, things like that, the usual stuff, but suddenly there were artists I’d never seen before… Jim Dine, the American artist; Rauschenberg, all these people… I used to take about six books at a time. Fortunately I had a wee car, so I could struggle to the car with my books and look at them at home. It was a kind of treat. Richard Diebenkorn was somebody I discovered in the library. I realised there were great artists in America and Germany that I hadn’t heard of.”

Ann Wegmuller, Auchterarder, Penny Row Back Yards, oil on board, dimensions unknown, 1990

In her studio, I scan her bookshelves, neatly organised into sections on Scottish artists, English artists, and international artists: William Scott, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Keith Vaughan, Diebenkorn…

Scott was also from Greenock, of course, and his work is all about colour and shapes; but she sounds warmer about Barns-Graham. She says she absorbs from everything, and laughs about the lesson she learned from once mentioning her excitement at seeing a Matisse exhibition to a journalist and then acquiring a tag ‘influenced by Matisse’. We agree: there’s hardly a trace of Matisse in her work. She picks up a stone, and it’s clear that she’s influenced more by the feel and look of nature’s work than that of a specific artist.

She mentions that when she was in Paris with DJCAD she saw paintings by the Fauves, Dubuffet, Clave and Nicolas de Stael for the first time, and she bought more books from the Pompidou Centre and lugged them back to Scotland.

Tim Neat ran the art history classes at DJCAD that Ann attended. She liked them, but she remembers him introducing the class to Belle Stewart and Sorley McLean, rather than any of his fine art picks.

Ann would have liked to have gone on from Dundee to a postgraduate course to widen her horizons outside Scotland, but it was not to be. One of her tutors, she tells me, had said to her “don’t pick a fight before it exists”, and there’s a sense that she was a thorn in the flesh of the establishment almost throughout her student career.

Energy, enthusiasm, and motivation were all at bursting point when she emerged into her new world. The question of returning to her role as a Swiss housefrau over forging a career as a professional artist was a non-starter. She wanted “to be able to really paint. Every day!” She would need to pay her way. Almost immediately, there was a fabulous opportunity. A huge studio – almost the same size as her current one – became available at a WASPS building, an old printing works in Tillicoultry. Lys Hansen and Peter Russell had been key in setting it up. They were still there and so were Fiona Strickland, Robert McNeill and Oscar Goodall. Hansen set the hard-working tone and Ann embraced it fully.

Ann Wegmuller, Glen Devon Burn, Winter, oil on board, dimensions unknown, date unknown

She was a determined lady. She immediately joined all of the exhibiting societies where she could show immediately - the Scottish Society of Artists (SSA), the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts (RGI), the Aberdeen Art Society (AAS) - and she pushed herself to be considered by galleries. She was a newcomer, but middle-aged, and a bit of an unknown quantity, but the spirit burned brightly, and the work was good: her landscapes were distinctive with their bold colours and strong atmospheres.

The Atholl Gallery in Dunkeld were consistent supporters. She’d gone to Hugh Goring to get her pictures framed, and then he set up Frames Gallery in Perth and she was very pleased to be invited to exhibit. But perhaps Chris Heinzel taking her on at her gallery in Aberdeen was her biggest early success. She’d cold-called the Scottish Gallery and had six pictures exhibited, two of which sold, but they didn’t pursue it, saying that her work looked too much like William Burns’. She didn’t know who Burns was and was unfamiliar with this work. Just like the Matisse tag, it’s hard to see the reason behind the reference.

She started selling, but it was never quite enough, and even a rent of £47 per month was a challenge. As the 80s progressed, another opportunity came up. The poet, T.S. Law, had moved to the local community and his son, John, committed to collecting and publishing his work. He employed Ann to transcribe his father’s typewritten sheets to a computer and then to publication. She got involved in selling the books, which led to involvement in the Scots Language Magazine, Lallans. Its simple single thistle cover was a little passé, to say the least, and Ann took on the role of “art editor”. It was voluntary for three years or so, but she insisted that the artist whose work was on the cover would get a payment of £100.

She shows me the Law book. It’s a substantial tome. “Yes. I’m the only one who has read everything that he’s written.” She illustrated Chapman magazine as well as Lallans. She was hanging around with poets as much as artists at the time, though she remembers being in Sandy Bell’s in Edinburgh with a literary group, spotting Bet Low there, and taking the opportunity to talk art and Gourock with her (Note 1).

She went on demonstrations, Hamish Henderson sitting beside her, to get the Jake Harvey McDiarmid sculptures erected in Langholm. She continued to stand up for what she thought was right, and to be a thorn in the side of the establishment. Letters to The Scotsman berating the anti-Scottish bias of the National Galleries were the tip of an iceberg that included local political activism as well as commitments to the rights of Scottish artists and writers.

And she and Freddy moved to Aberuthven. An old church was up for sale. No running water, no other services, just a big hall and a balcony. They put a huge steel structure inside the building and Freddy and their son, David, did the rest: beautiful flooring; panelled walls, tongue and groove; a handsome kitchen, storage, cabinets, tables…It was featured on a television home and interior show. They moved in 1990.

Ann Wegmuller, Winter Garden, Ochil Hills, oil on board, dimensions unknown, 1986

Ann’s studio is on the old balcony. And we sit down in the window seats to talk about her art.

She learned how to draw at those GSA evening classes. She learned about colour and composition as a mature student, and she had her own vocabulary from the time she sold her first painting at her degree show, a small oil called ‘Pink Field’.

We talk about preparation. She likes to get herself into “a mood”… “Until I can get into that… until I can get a good run at what I’m doing, I can’t paint. When I can, then I’ll do it very quickly. I need to paint every day.”

Ann doesn’t plan much. She shows me a sketchbook and it’s packed with small thumbnail rectangles drawn in pencil, with shaded shapes pressed into the block. I ask her if she used them as a reference point as she paints and she says, “no”. She has no sketches, photographs, or any other props, and she never has.

However, the thumbnail compositions she produced when she was at art school were arrangements of right-angled blocks and ‘The Pink Field' is a slightly modified version of those abstract shapes. The tree-shapes and the title produce a landscape conception that otherwise would have been an essay in colour blocks, a kind of subdued-Rothko, where the substance is entirely colour harmony, the shapes providing the relative weight and heft of the individual notes.

The landscape perception is underlined by Ann’s use of a dark strip of colour across the top of the painting. Whatever its colour, and it was rarely blue, it gave the viewer a signal of horizon. This was a common feature of her early work.

She says that she has a tendency to paint summer pictures in winter and vice versa. There are symbols of fully-clad and bare trees here. There are no overt pinks in ‘The Pink Field’ but right from the start of Ann’s career, she’s telling us what’s in her mind. She’s telling us that she’s seen pink fields (on trips from Dundee to Aberdeen) and she’s imagining herself in their midst, the soil of the Mearns, the ploughed fields…

Ann Wegmuller, The Pink Field, oil on board, 30.5 x 34cm, 1985

She also started as she meant to continue with two-planes: aerial and horizontal. As mentioned earlier, Ann paints on a table. She’s above her subject-matter. But as she progresses a painting, she’ll put it on an easel and sit at the far side of the studio to consider it. She’s looking from perspectives at ninety-degree difference, and probably most angles between. The result combines map with view, abstraction with a sense of place.

She made no notes on her trips through the Mearns, but she held the feeling of being there until she wanted to refer to it. She’d seen the colour of the earth, the way that the same colour can look different when seen from different angles and with different light; the field patterns too, they’re big, with the enclosures for the farm, its buildings and the in-by field; they were all logged and ready for future reference.

There’s another Wegmuller trait that was there at the start. Her lines are where different colours meet. The composition is made with paint. There is no under-drawing, perhaps not even a preconception of constituents or their arrangement.

She starts with a colour, a single tone, and then harmonises, and continues to add. She might have underpainted the whole of the ‘Pink Field’ pink, but it’s not rare for her original intention to be superseded.

Sometimes, in the process of working on a painting, it seems to her that another painting appears, and she says to herself that she has two paintings in one, and one of them will have to go. The anomaly, the one that wasn’t intended, can often be kept and be recognised as what Ann calls ‘a key painting’. The walls of her house are scattered with such works, and she generally doesn’t want to put them up for sale, because she knows they’re source material for new images.

Ann Wegmuller, Here it Comes, oil on board, 66 x 79cm, 1993

“I got a lot of pictures out of that” is a constant refrain, and she’s mostly referring to places: driving through Glen Devon to and from Tillicoultry, a week’s holiday in Poolewe; rock pools in Gigha; the shore line and the Argyll hills as seen from Gourock. The small collections of rocks and shells, shoreline glass and wood, can often trigger resonance: She points to details in a picture: “That’s Islay and there’s Auchmithie, and all the beaches…I know where they all are, these stones, and where they came from.”

“I realise that every time I’ve been somewhere and I haven’t sketched much, I’ve still got in my head lots of pictures. I just start painting until I run out of images. Every now and then another one will appear. You’re doing something else and suddenly Poolewe, a picture of Poolewe, will appear and you think ‘Oh! I’ll just put that aside’”

Music is a factor too. It triggers ideas and moods and atmospheres. When she’s been listening to a particular piece of music whilst she’s been painting, she’ll go back to it before she starts on the picture again. She tries to get back into the mood she was in when she had to stop.

“If I’ve had a biggish break, I come in to the studio and I think ‘Where am I? What was I doing with this?’ I don’t want to touch it because I don’t want to spoil what I’ve got.” There are a number of works in progress and Ann looks at one: “I don’t think this will have a horizon, hopefully. This one [mounted on the easel] was half-done and I thought ‘Well, I’ll finish this one. You can see it’s partly realistic and partly not, which means it’s two paintings and I’m going to have to make a decision, either cover it all up or start again’.”

And when there are longer breaks between painting, which has been the case recently as she prioritised caring for Freddy, she says that she always goes back to “the beginning”. I’m unable to get her to define what this is, but perhaps ‘The Pink Field’ is a part of the answer.

She says that she can often find herself painting a picture she feels she might have painted already. And if she still has the completed painting, she’ll know where it is and she’ll find it, bring it out, and compare it. She worries that I might think she’s formulaic. She doesn’t like the idea: “Formulaic, I think of as people who paint things over and over again because they sell”.

I think of musicians who keep referencing the same ideas, using the same harmonic language, and re-presenting signature motifs. The giants of the musical world all do it, and their listeners wouldn’t want it otherwise.

Ann Wegmuller, Landing Places I, oil on canvas, 80 x 100cm, 2011

Ann lives with a retrospective exhibition of forty years of work hanging all around her. I think that this must influence, even subliminally, her ongoing practice. She must be absorbing ideas and instinctively thinking about variations and developments. She doubts this and says she’s often not conscious of the paintings all around her. They’re part of everyday life. Recently, however, six of her paintings have been bought by Cromlix House Hotel and are on public display there. She is thrilled by the hanging on deep red and dark green walls, and she’s suddenly aware of the potential of reviewing and refreshing her work at home by emboldening the colours on the walls.

If your language is distinctive, your colour sense assured, your instincts unchanged, your compositional skills matured, it’s not surprising that your output is recognisable.

There is a well-trod path from ‘The Pink Field’ to the unnamed painting on the easel in May 2025. The subtle changes along the way reflect experience, knowledge and expertise. She’s seen so much more and she knows how to bring more to her picture than she did forty years ago.

The vocabulary that emerged from art school had a range of colours that were generally more sombre, and the solid blocks were perhaps a little more contrived than their successors of today. As her practice has developed, her tool cabinet has added her distinctive hoops; open (C) and sealed (0) enclosures; aerial boat shapes; various shading techniques; crosses, dots, gradations.

Ann Wegmuller, Landing Places II, oil on canvas, 80 x 100cm, 2011

Ann doesn’t use them in any formulaic way, but they are her vocabulary. The spontaneous thoughts that she has are expressed in this language. She might think that she needs something in a specific position in the picture and she’ll think of something that feels comfortable. It’s in her established vocabulary, she knows what it’s going to do to the picture; the effect it will have on the colour harmony and the compositional balance. So she does it: she adds a solid block of pale yellow with white dots, for example.

The dots? “Yes, that must be these stones [she gestures to one of her studio assemblages]. I did think of that.”

Or she adds a hoop-like shape, filled with solid colour, framing it with a different colour and texture.

“I think I did the outer one first and then I thought I need to ‘lead in'… But that would all be done quite quickly, not planned…”

Dots are stones. The hoops are rocks or hills. The open enclosure is the view at Poolewe. The aerial boat shapes are the curraghs she became fascinated about after a trip to Islay.

As with so many of her sources of inspiration, serendipity was at play. Ann’s dancing evolved from jive and swing in Rothesay and Cragburn Pavilions to Scottish Country Dancing across Scotland. A Dundee country dancing group was short of a female dancer for a visit to the Islay Ball and she got the phone call. Their trip was the stimulus for a fascination with the ancient history of the west that has incorporated the way people lived, their boats, and importantly, their religious heritage, from stone symbols to the lives of saints.

Ann Wegmuller, Souls at Sea, oil on board, dimensions unknown, 2011

Ann Wegmuller, Small Rock Pools, Gigha 3, gouache on paper, 37 x 37cm, 2002

There has always been human presence in Ann’s paintings, though never any humans. But after Islay, she did a series of pictures of saints. That formed a full solo exhibition at the Meffan Gallery in Forfar in 2011. She turns to a box on the studio floor and knows immediately where she can find her reference book, which is neatly tagged with written notes, files on the origins of saints’ names, stories about them, and other material she thought might be relevant.

Crosses and piers were added to the language store after Islay. I marvel at the connectivity between the way Islay’s sailing hunter-gatherers and the incoming Irish saints might communicate through visual means, and the vocabulary that Ann uses today. The currents run deep in the waters of Scotland’s west coast.

The symbols and shapes and colours that Ann holds in her head might be seen as the material that a still life painter would arrange and re-arrange. I ask Ann whether she might see it that way, and her response is instant: “no”.

She uses her vocabulary to articulate feelings. Each element of her work has meaning. Sometimes it has a lightning-rod attachment to a particular reference. Sometimes it’s taste; that elusive, instinctive refinement of experience and emotions. Ann looks again at one of her studio set-ups: “These are stones from Islay. I’ve got stones everywhere. I once asked a Buddhist monk: ‘why on earth do I collect stones all of the time?’ And he said ‘you’re earthing yourself’. And I thought, ‘No, I just like the look of them!’”.

Ann Wegmuller, Sea Forms, Spring, oil on board, dimensions unknown, 2007

We’re looking at paintings that have oranges and yellows foremost. Ann calls them “ochre coloured seaside paintings”. She’s got so many seaside inspirations I wonder whether these are attached to a particular place. “I suppose it’s an experience. It’s how you feel when you get there. I love empty beaches. I like haar coming in. I like the shapes changing. I never put people in it at all.” She always thought Cellardyke was the best place for rock pools and then she found some in Gigha. Now its Gigha that is in her mind every time she’s drawn to put herself in that rock pool world.

“I’m mostly painting things I haven’t seen. I put Gigha rock pools on some of the watercolours, but what I painted was just a feeling I got from looking into these wonderful rock pools, and the colours that they had.”

Ann started painting with oil paint on canvas. That was her passion. Going to an art shop and buying beautiful colours was a massive thrill early-on. For her “the production of an oil painting is something that requires effort, concentration and a period of time.” Her methods are traditional, but on the table are “these oil sticks that are quite useful. You can work quite quickly… She shows me the lines and shadings she produces with the sticks.

Watercolours arrived in Ann’s life via the providence of her sister, who gave her a present of a bundle of beautiful paper passed from her neighbour – he worked in a paper mill that had closed. “It was the most wonderful watercolour paper that just soaked up the colour.” From then on, she’s worked back and forth in blocks of time between watercolours and oils. They can’t be intermingled. “If I’m in the middle of a lot of watercolour, I can’t just switch to oil; they’re totally different techniques.”

She’s never made her schoolgirl RA ambition, but she values her RSW letters (Note 2) as much as she might the RA. Peter Bourne and Marj Bond nominated her and she was elected in 2001. In 2023, she was invited to be a member of the RGI, another cherished set of letters.

Ann Wegmuller, Sea Forms, Summer, oil on board, 81 x 81cm, 2007

For quite a few years, she used watercolours to respond to country walks she took with her friend, the artist Janet Melrose. She was always frustrated that she couldn’t get things down on paper as quickly as Janet. Janet, like Ann, used codes and symbols. Often, they had similar ideas. Ann remembered one specific time that “Janet said ‘did you see that wren or a robin?’ and I said ‘no’, and she said, ‘well, its flight path is like that’ [Ann motions a wave with her hand], and I realised that when I was looking at Janet’s picture lines, they are bird’s flight patterns, and I can tell which bird it was by the way it flew. She stopped doing birds; she just did the flight pattern.” Ann has lines that look like roads on maps.

Ann’s watercolour work feels more experimental than her oils; freer. “Colour is easier with gouache. I’ll think ‘Oh! Look at that pink’ and I put a huge big splash of pink on, and then I think ‘what am I going to do with that?’ I put bits of shocking orange into the pink and suddenly the orange takes over and the pink has been pushed aside. And you can have a picture that’s half-blues and half-pinks-and-blues-and-oranges, and you think ‘something has to be done about that’. You have to decide which direction it’s going in. You can’t have it all, it’s too much.”

Ann Wegmuller, Breaks in the Cloud, Lewis, oil on board, 60x60cm, 2014

But often the watercolour paintings would have a more capricious completion. “When I started watercolours, and ended a session, I thought ‘well, I enjoyed that painting’ and I used to leave them on the floor to dry and I would come back a couple of days later and I would think ‘Oh! I quite like that.’”

“Oh!” is always the operative expression that ends Ann’s process. When it’s finished, whatever the medium, it’s got that “Oh!” factor.

“Oh!” arrives when the composition is completed, the colours and shapes are balanced and in harmony. Each new element added to the painting is contributing to the composition’s direction. The decisions on colours, placements and shapes relate intuitively to what looks right. Ann is inside her imaginary landscape trying to capture a range of feelings and experiences and settle them into an order that looks good in itself.

“Each element is where it should be. If it gets out-of-kilter… I can use a mirror, look at the reflection, and say, ‘Oh! That picture is sloping to the left’, or something similar, and I’ll quickly put something in.”

Ultimately when she arrives at the “Oh!” Factor, is it her just saying “that’s balanced”?.

“That’s balanced and the colours are right. When I’m painting I’m not really aware of thinking about shapes and colours, it’s intuitive”.

Chopin wasn’t thinking about the process. He was just writing away, naturally.

“And then he does a few corrections. Music and abstract art are very closely linked.”

Ann Wegmuller, Traces on the Land, Lewis, gouache on paper, 54 x 74cm, 2014

The difficulty with her pattern of working in watercolour and oil sometimes meant that she got out of sync with gallery interests.

“Maura at Gallery Heinzel, she’s lovely. She’s asked for two pictures every so often and usually they get two watercolours taken straight from the RSW show. But then they said ‘we don’t want watercolours, we want oil’.” So Ann started creating a portfolio of work in both idioms that could be used whenever galleries want different things. “I don’t date my paintings. I have my own little records, but you can’t just keep giving every gallery new work, so I said ‘it’s new to you’ and I made sure it was well-spaced.” She has enough in stock to keep all of her gallery offerings fresh.

“I ended up just painting and then somebody like Tony from Kilmorack Gallery would phone me up and say ‘Ann! Everybody is so depressed up here’; and I said ‘I hope you’re not depressed’ and he said ‘I’m depressed. Everybody’s so depressed. So we need some colour. We need some colour. Get me some colour.’ So I said ‘OK’, and I had all my Gigha rock pools, about six with bright colours... So I said ‘I can give you six, when do you want them for?’, and he said now. He said ‘I’ve phoned a carrier for you and he’s coming tomorrow.’ Fortunately I had the paintings. And he sold them. He said ‘I knew that’s what people wanted, they’re all depressed…especially in Beauly about wind-farms.’ It was good to have a pile of paintings that I’d done. And he only takes about six paintings at a time. I had a big show with him in the early days and he was just starting out. We used to compare our churches.”

He’s got a beautiful space.

“Beautiful, isn’t it!”

Ann Wegmuller, Shore Song, gouache on paper, 72 x 78cm, 2009

“Oh”, I say to Ann, “perhaps that’s it”. Have we balanced everything? Well enough for a magazine article. No sale planned. We have. We’ve finished. “Well in that case”, I suggest “we need a title”. For Ann, the titles come at the end. When she’s in a literary mood she writes lists of titles in a book. And when a painting needs a title, she can review her list of options and select the most appropriate one. Then she’ll tick it off, so that she can’t use it again. So let’s try it.

She consults the list and says “How about: Frames of Mind?” That seems apt. It reflects what she does: she captures the contents of her mind in paint. We agree: Frames of Mind, it is.

Roger Spence

Note 1: Bet Low had been born and brought up in Gourock twenty years before Ann, see art-scot issue 3

Note 2: Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour