Art reviews: Bet Low | Jess Holdengarde

Jess Holdengarde: Glimmer, Stills, Edinburgh ★★★

In 2010, for a show at Inverleith House, Scottish contemporary artist Karla Black chose to place her own work in dialogue with selected paintings by Bet Low. Low’s work surfaced again in Alice Strang’s important 2015 exhibition for National Galleries of Scotland, Modern Scottish Women, and in a show by Lowlands Artist Collective for GI in 2021. Now, a solo exhibition at Glasgow School of Art to mark Low’s centenary brings a much wider range of her work into the public eye.

Low was a contemporary of Joan Eardley and Ian Hamilton Finlay at GSA, graduating in 1945. This show, beautifully curated by GSA’s Jenny Brownrigg and Andrew Parkinson of the Pier Arts Centre, where it travels next, is a chance to understand the shifts in her practice, and the different artistic voices she employed throughout her career.

After finishing art school, Low began a teaching course but left to work with Glasgow Unity Theatre, painting sets and helping with publicity. Her artistic work seemed to spring from that community, and from the European influences of refugee artists who spent time in Glasgow such as Josef Herman and Jankel Adler. She worked in black and white with strong lines, in a range of media from ink and oil paint to linocut, capturing the life of Glasgow, political protests, back court singers, and the life of the theatre, both on and off the stage.

Clearly, she had both a sense of humour and a waspish eye, drawing the great and the good schmoozing under the chanderliers at the Edinburgh Festival Club in 1947 (the year of the very first festival), and the long faces and black duds of The Sabbath, Wester Ross.

She was also an active participant in the DIY culture of the arts in Glasgow at the time, joining the Clyde Group of Writers and Artists, organising exhibitions on the railings of the Botanic Gardens in the 1950s, and opening the New Charing Cross Gallery with fellow artist John Taylor in 1963 as a platform for contemporary work. Display cases of archive material help convey a sense of these endeavours.

Meanwhile, her own work was undergoing a shift. She had already demonstrated an aptitude with colour in her early paintings such as Portrait of a Man Smoking, done when she was 21 and now in the collection of National Galleries of Scotland. Now she turned her hand to abstraction, making luminous, densely coloured paintings inspired by rocks, water and light, each with its own palette of colours. These are, perhaps, still, her most ground-breaking works.

In 1967, Low and her husband Tom MacDonald bought a cottage on Hoy, Orkney, and the landscapes of the islands informed much of her later career. She returned to a more figurative style of landscape painting which reduced contours of hills and coastline to their essence, less simplication than purification, then illuminated them with carefully chosen colours.

In paintings such as Misty Sunset, she captures the qualities of light with a simplicity which is deceptive. In Calm Water (at Mill Bay, Hoy), she takes the technique still further, with smooth, flat shapes of reflected hills and the path of moonlight depicted by a solid strip of gold leaf.

A painting called Horizon is simply that, no more, no less: panels of water and sky bissected by a dark line. In the Hoy Hills (Orkney) traces the passage of rain and light over the flanks of mountains. The islands of Fara and Rysa, which she could see from her window, became the delicate backdrop for still lifes.

The 1980s brought another shift, and Low began working in pencil, focussing more directly on capturing light in works such as Moon over Wood, Night Sky and Moonlit Bay. Using the ground of the paper as the light and applying shading using delicate vertical pencil strokes, she created a different kind of luminosity. The effect is simplicity, though the process is anything but.

Low’s work, in its various forms, has a beauty, freshness and clarity which lend it a certain timelessness. It’s hardly surprising it has caught the eye of various contemporary artists. It is to be hoped this show will help bring her achievements to a wider contemporary audience.

Orkney surfaces again at Stills, where South African artist Jess Holdengarde includes in her solo show a journal and photographs from Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s time there. The Barns-Graham Trust supported Holdengarde’s recent residency in the Varzasca Vallery in Switzerland, where the key works of this show were made, and the artist’s relationship with landscape seems to have been an inspiration.

For Holdengarde, who now lives between Glasgow and the Isle of Lewis, process and materials are key. Their sustainable analogue photography practice uses plant-based developers made from foraged materials such as berries, heather and seaweed. Images created on Lewis are developed using plants and river water from Switzerland.

Not unlike Bet Low, Holdengarde is drawn to rocks, water and light. However, these elements of landscape are placed in dialogue with the human body. Sometimes, there is deliberate ambiguity around what we are looking at. The three large-scale images in the series “Surface Tensions” bring together elements of the two: skin and stone, a hand caressing rock.

There seems to be an unwritten dictat around contemporary art shows at the moment which says: thou shalt be immersive. Holdengarde has added a soundscape with field recordings and music, an intermittent, flickery film and a projection through water from the ceiling which doesn’t quite reach the floor. These are less successful than the images, which have a clarity of form even when they are being ambiguous.

To make sustainable analogue pictures is to work with imperfections. There is a certain muddiness, and that’s okay, as long as there’s a clarity of purpose. Apart from the undeniably powerful title image of light on water, the other pictures feel intimate, a visual language which is at least partly private. Holdengarde’s show seems to want to address our present moment of crisis, environmental, economic, but is less clear about what it wants to say.

Bet Low: An Island On Your Doorstep is at the Reid Gallery, Glasgow School of Art until 8 February, then at the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, from 1 March until 7 June; Jess Holdengarde: Glimmer is at Stills, Edinburgh until 8 February.