Issue 16
In Issue 16 we welcome three new writers, Astrid Bridgwood, Isabella Nicoletti and John Morrison. Astrid draws on her professional experience cataloguing John McLean's work to focus on a little known aspect: his sculptural activity. Isabella offers new perspectives on identity, drama and meaning in Phoebe Anna Traquair's image-making. John Morrison has been to the seaside to meet painter, David Cook, and explore his immersion in his immediate environment. Robert De Mey saw an old catalogue in an Inverness bookshop and it inspired an enquiry into the woman who brought Surrealism to Scotland, Gabrielle Keiller. And Roger Spence has applied himself to the early work of William Littlejohn, and how his distinctive approach emerged.
The Dada and Surrealist collection at the National Galleries is one of the finest in the world, and Scotland owes gratitude to Gabrielle Keiller, whose donation forms its basis. Robert De Mey writes an appreciation of Keiller's life and picks out twenty-five objects to illustrate the breadth and depth of her bequest.
The brightly-coloured abstract shapes of John McLean's paintings are very familiar to Scottsh art enthusiasts of the last fifty years. Less so, his approach to three-dimensional work. Astrid Bridgwood has spent months immersed in John-Mclean-Land; and she brings us up to speed.
David Cook lives and works right on the edge of land and sea in a wild and rather remote section of the North Sea coastline. John Morrison paid a visit and shows us how Cook can gain enough inspiration and variation from looking in different directions from his studio to satisfy a year-round painting commitment.
Isabella Nicoletti asks us to look afresh at Traquair's work, beyond the surface wonder and the extraordinary decorative appeal, to a world where femininity and masculinity elide and merge; a world which can be still; a fluid world in which spirituality and meaning are quiet but powerful currents.
Roger Spence has been brooding on William Littlejohn's life and work for some time and has finally got round to putting some facts and opinions down on paper. He underlines the importance of James Cowie, Ian Fleming, Talbert McLean and the art scene in Arbroath to Littlejohn achieving his distinctive breakthrough in 1961.