Art reviews: Michael Wilkinson | Spectra | A Weather Eye

Spectra: Scotland’s Festival of Light, Various venues, Aberdeen ****

A Weather Eye, McManus Gallery, Dundee ****

Something has to be up when The Modern Institute - Scotland’s leading commercial contemporary gallery and something of a temple of cool – starts showing paintings of vases of flowers. And sure enough, the copious text which accompanies Michael Wilkinson’s new work describes it as “a kind of meta engagement with the [still life] genre”.

The artist has photographed vases of flowers – chrysanthemums, lilies, lisianthus, a single dahlia – against a blank linen canvas framed in aluminium, then painted them in a photorealist style, leaving unpainted areas to represent the “blank canvas” in the composition. He has blended in hints of fluorescent colour to emphasise the effects of light (he calls this “fluorochiaroscuro”, which he appears to have trademarked), in order to “render somewhat uncanny” the “conventional, even conservative, subject”.

It seems that considerable effort has gone into arguing that Wilkinson is doing something new, conceptual and “meta”, and not simply doing what the best still life painters have done for centuries: experimented with trompe l’oeuil and added unusual colours to the palette the better to reproduce a living flower in two dimensions.

The enterprise, however, does require a degree of skill, particularly in capturing the fall of light and shadow to help to create the illusion. This is competently done, though it feels more like an intellectual exercise than one which is borne out of any particular enthusiasm for the subject.

The results are intriguing rather than unsettling, an engagement with still life as a concept rather than with the philosophical and political ideas which are part of its history. The handling of colour is careful and (dare I say it?) conservative and, for all their ironic knowingness – perhaps because of it – these paintings are representations of representations of flowers rather than capturing the essence of living ones.

Aberdeen’s Spectra Festival, described as Scotland’s Festival of Light, brightened the dark nights of the first weekend in February again this year with an ever-expanding programme of light installations in the city centre. In the past, Spectra has drawn heavily on international makers sound and light works which travel the world from festival to festival. This year, while still hosting several of these, there’s more of a local flavour.

On the sloping descent into Union Terrace Gardens, pulsating green and blue cubes each flashed out the unique heartbeat of an Aberdeen citizen who had also provided a sentence about their relationship to the city. ‘The Matter of the Heart’ is a project by Manchester-based Idontloveyouanymore, and is not the first artwork to draw on the uniqueness of heartbeats, but it is intimate and sometimes moving, offering us snatches of people’s stories: one person wrote simply “Aberdeen saved my life.”

In the graveyard of St Nicholas Kirk, Stevie Thompson of South Shields-based Custom Fibre Optics created ‘Mycelium Network’, an intricate blanket of tiny lights mapping paths on the ground among the plants and gravestones. It had a sense of intimacy, too, of light being used to highlight what is already there hidden beneath the ground.

In the Sculpture Court at Aberdeen Art Gallery, young Glasgow-based artist Council Baby was commissioned by Spectra to make ‘Fit D’You Know About The Bon Accord’, an impressive, large-scale video installation made to look like a stained-glass window, on which the Celtic goddess of rivers, Divona, morphs her way through the history of the Granite City. Council Baby’s streak of subversive humour makes it sparkle; Divona even briefly wears a tracksuit in the local football colours.

St Nicholas Kirk became the canvas for ‘Voyage’, a dreamy animation by Edinburgh-based designers Double Take, which anticipates the arrival of the Tall Ships in Aberdeen in the summer. Northern Lights, in Union Terrace Gardens, commissioned by Aberdeen’s Look Again, consists of five AR works by five artists working with project lead Craig Barrowman, and ranging widely in mood from Christiana Messina’s poetic reflection on the selkie myth to Jonny Mowat’s delightful ‘Shire Dwellers’, who include Buttery Billiam, named for the city’s favourite pastry.

Of course, there are big international works, too. ‘Sky Castle’, by Australian designers ENESS, is a maze of inflatable arches where visitors trigger changing colours and sounds as they move through them. It’s impressive in its monumental, Stonehenge-like quality. Lucid Creates’ ‘Futures’ is an avenue of shifting lights which – by accident or design – illuminate in the city’s football colours, red and white. Studio Vertigo’s ‘End Over End’ is perhaps best described as a giant, rainbow coloured, illuminated slinky.

The danger with large-scale sound and light installations is that they’re fun for five minutes: the kids run about, you take a selfie for Instagram and everyone moves on. Sometimes, of course, that’s all that’s necessary. For me, the more impressive aspects of Spectra are the ways in which it has helped bring back to life parts of the city centre which had become no-go zones, and the ways some of the most interesting works invite an audience in and engage them for a longer time.

Meanwhile, the simple subject of weather has brought a treasure trove of paintings out of the store rooms at Dundee’s McManus Gallery. This fascinating group of about 30 works – mainly paintings – spans more than 100 years, and every imaginable weather front, offering a chance to see work by well-known artists, and a few we should know better.

Some of the most impactful works remind us of the potential of the Scottish weather for inspiring superb expressionist paintings. Duncan Shanks’ ‘Sunburst, Clyde Valley’ (1979-80) strikingly captures four-seasons-in-one-day weather, with a hilltop illuminated by the sun, while the valleys around it are sunk in darkness. John Houston’s ‘Sunset Over Moorland’ (1973) is resplendent yellow, glowing with light. Jon Schueler’s ‘Storm at Sea Remembered’ is really a study of the sky, focussing on the ever-shifting colours of West Coast clouds.

Alec Grieve’s ‘Sunset on the Tay’ (1921) is a moment of reflected calm, inspired by Whistler’s Nocturnes. Stanley Spencer’s ‘The Ferry Hotel Lawn, Cookham’, is a calm summer day made disconcerting by the artist’s use of shadows and a huge folded napkin. John Nash’s winter scene is a reminder of the vivid shapes snow can highlight in a landscape. Stanley Cursiter’s ‘Rain on Princes Street’ (1913) is a rare Futurist-inspired work by the artist, a daring patchwork of faces and umbrellas.

The Colourists are here too: F C B Caddell on Iona on a day of turquoise seas and shifting clouds, and J D Fergusson with a moving late portrait of his wife, Margaret Morris, ‘Full of the Warm South’ (1953), conjuring a time of youth, sunshine and fruitfulness, though by then both would have been advanced in years. John Maclauchlan Milne, sometimes called the Fifth Colourist, is represented by a bold, monumental landscape of the Larig Ghru.

James Morrison features twice, with a fine painting from the Arctic, and ‘The Wood in Winter’ (1981), an unusually stark black and white composition. And Tim Knowles’ a drawing made by attaching pencils to the branches of a tree, is a work, if you will, created by the weather itself.

Michael Wilkinson at The Modern Institute ends 5 March; Spectra: Scotland’s Festival of Light run ended; A Weather Eye ends 31 May.