John Rank Gallery
“I have long been a practitioner, sometimes sporadically, sometimes, for brief periods, with intensity. I have maintained an interest in and an awareness of art and art history through reading, through the arts press and through visits to galleries and exhibitions large and small in the United Kingdom and abroad. This interest has been more than recreational. It has been informed, critical and scholarly in approach. I have also sought qualifications in art and art history over a protracted period whilst pursuing an unrelated academic career. This passion finally culminated in a master’s degree after retirement in 2007.”
Iain White, 2022
"The Woods of Caledon", is an old term for the native coniferous pine forests that once covered much of the Highlands of Scotland. This vast primordial forest has been reduced in area by both natural environmental change and by human activity, although still a significant element in the highland landscape, dominating it in parts of the East Central Highlands. The reduction, alteration and fragmentation of this forest has been called 'the biggest effect man has exerted on the history of the Highlands' and is regarded by some as an 'almost wonton destruction of the last extensive primeval forest which had no equal in Europe'. The artist, Iain White, first visited many of the remaining woodlands in the early 1960s and over the years has become familiar with their aesthetic, their ecology, and their history.
These remaining pinewoods invoke subjective aesthetic responses and possess a depth of meaning, an intentionality, a spirit, and essence, which goes beyond their physical and sensory properties. They are a conduit for the emotions and the imagination, while at the same time they communicate embedded narratives that encapsulate many aspects of the history of the Highlands. The works in this exhibition are inspired by memories of these pinewoods and in seeking to respond to these properties many owe a debt to the Barbizon School and the Sois-Bois sub-genre of landscape painting that developed from it through the nineteen and into the twentieth century. The works, both oil paintings and soft pastels, fall into approximately two groups: first, largely figurative, impressionist works that draw on real places, albeit with some latitude for interpretation and secondly semi abstract and often expressionist works intended to capture the essence of the forest.
THE LANDSCAPE PAINTER'S CHALLENGE:
The motif of a landscape painting is the content of the scene, the character of a portion of three dimensional space constrained within the two dimensions of the picture plane. This is both the "what" of the painting and the "where and when" constrained in space and time.
However, real places are more than space perceived by our senses. They are complex entities, each an amalgam of actual and imagined space and as such they possess emotional properties, an essence or spirit of place. Landscapes are a complex of such places and their connectivity, their connectedness in space and time. They are spatial constructs and have been described variously as palimpsests of history or as texts that need to be read. So, in the first case they capture a fragmentary narrative of change over time, and in the second if those fragments are read correctly they tell a story revealing an explanation of how and why the landscape came to be as it is.
In other words to understand and to convey the inherent complexity of any landscape requires the artist to engage not only with what is there, where it is and when we are viewing it, but also to address how it came to be as it is and why this should have been so. At the same time the artist needs to transcend these objectives and attempt to capture the emergent spiritual properties resonant in the landscape.
Of course, this presents a formidable challenge to the artist and not every work will or indeed can be as comprehensive in its engagement with its subject as the argument here might suggest.
Iain White, 2022