Heartlands 20th century Scottish Landscapes

by David Patterson

Amid all the showmanship and media hype that has surrounded the current crop of Britpack artists, there are times when it has been tempting to think that painting as an artform has died.

And then you come upon artists such as James Hawkins, whose enthusiasm for paint and its limitless potential is infectious, and that notion is immediately put to rest.

I first came across James’ work in the late 1980s when he had a number shows with Andrew Brown at Edinburgh’s ill-fated 369 Gallery. His work then was sparser, more calligraphic in feeling, the landforms implied with great broad sweeps of the brush, and where the bare canvas or paper had as much to say as the marks themselves. Having part responsibility for suggesting additions to the City of Edinburgh’s Art collection, we took one of his works to our selection panel, but without success. In hindsight, I’m glad we waited

Nevertheless, James’s paintings lodged themselves into those deep recesses, and when I was asked to curate our 1995 Festival exhibition, which we devoted to the theme of 20th centaury Scottish landscape painting, I pulled out his file once more and tracked him down to his remote Highland studio on the shores of Loch Broom.

It was a clear, crisp January day when I pulled up – James was working in his studio on a large canvas, with others placed about waiting for further attention, or stored in racks. I had seen slides of his more recent work, but at that time he was beginning to introduce wild almost florescent colours into his paintings. Anyone who has tried it knows how difficult it is to control such brilliant colours on a small scale, but here he was working on huge wall sized canvases. Colours oozed like syrup over the surface, where they were moved around, dragged, pulled twisted scraped and scrumbled until they satisfied his intentions (albeit momentarily). Then came another assault hard on the first, and more energy expended. Then a time of reflection and looking sometimes for long periods. Other paintings were in various stages of completion, put aside for the time being. A small heater barely took the chill from the air, yet a sense of urgency permeated the space.

James’s work is about Scottish Landscape – not the dour, driech, Spartan Highland moor, but the sparkle of a mountain stream, the languid depth of a loch on a clear day, of a river in spate, of steep craggy outcrops, of fearsome climbs and descents. Here is Nature at its most potent, unaltered by human touch, unexpected, primeval, majestic. He works from memory, the paintings borne out of long walks in the Highland Landscape. These times immersed in the wilderness are crucial to his output. He never takes a sketchbook, but rather journals the trip after he returns to base. His wife Flick is his constant companion, providing from her own scientific training a greater understanding of what they have seen and experienced.

Hawkins begins each new work by staining or washing the complete canvas, usually with a representative of each primary colour, for example Yellow ochre, Cyan blue or Crimson. On the colour ‘field’ he then layers curtains of colour and form with holes through, as an essential, see-through ingredient. In this way an images is built up little by little. Tool making has become a very important part of his way of working. As well as a burgeoning selection of brushes, palette knives and cement working tools, he has taken to cutting mount card, MDF or plywood into shapes that enable him to spread the paint in a particular way and with quite individual results.

The water’s edge is a recurrent theme in James’ recent work, those intimate corners where silent pools reflect the surrounding vegetation and the sky above, where the Lochside birches and Pines dip their branches, and rocks disturb the peace. Here he reveals his full repertoire of marks – paint is stretched in waves across the surface, colours flow and mix together, overlaid by the sinuous forms of twisted branches and wiry grasses. Other views are perhaps less easy to recognise at first, where the artists has seemingly flirted with abstraction. These works have an echo for me of Turner at his most adventurous, where figures and forms emerge from an enveloping maelstrom.

Above all there is throughout James’s work an abiding and enduring sense of celebration of beauty and of Life. And that, in this present climate, is a very rare quality indeed.

David Patterson

City Arts Centre Edinburgh

December 1998