Castle Art Show

Brodick Castle, though a traditional and vaguely romantic venue, is not the best place for a serious look at art. Its narrow corridors and furniture-filled rooms tend to be dimly lit and there is little space for large-scale works, which perhaps explains why there seem to be fewer of the island’s professional artists showing there now. Perhaps it is time to split the exhibition into two sections, keeping the usually smaller-sized works produced by amateurs in the Castle and offering a fresh venue for the display of professional work. Corrie Hall might do well.

Before a storm of indignation breaks loose, I will say the current show, running from November 13th – 17th, contained some very interesting work. John Knox always produces thoughtful studies, and his dark combination of heads drawn in charcoal and called Change & Fate, was deeply intriguing. Gus Smith has been on a voyage of discovery for some time, and his progression of geometric shapes had a very real sense of exploring relationships in terms of colour and tone. Henry Murdo uses natural materials, from elm, yew, oak and cherry woods to buffalo horn, in a way that stimulates a sense of the possibilities that lie all round us, while Tim Pomeroy’s two paintings, done when an injury had prevented him from working with stone, had all the quality of discovered poetry that we have come to expect.

Alannah Bailey is a fresh young talent, full of ferocity and vigour, working in acrylics to produce arresting, quite alarming images. She handles paint with rapid freedom and manages to stop short of the impulse to fiddle and improve that can be so disastrous. Her work lies on the violent fringe of observed society, at the extreme opposite to Masako Ritchie, whose control and beautifully judged refinement make every one of her pictures a collector’s piece to look at again and again.

Few people, I guess, had any idea that the roped-off area outside the café door was an art-work. A leaflet in the catalogue explained that Karen Rann, an artist in residence with the NTS on Arran, was using the site as a model for a large-scale work on the ‘island’ theme, where stone rises from water as if growing there. You can see Karen’s blog on natureofchange.wordpress.com, but it seems a missed opportunity that she did not feature as a major element in the exhibition. It would have been interesting to see sketches and photos. Let’s hope an opportunity for this can be found later.