Heather, oil, shellac, ink, 2006		Rolling Hills , oil, shellac, acrylic, 2006
24.5 x 24.5in, 62 x 62cm		47 x 59in 120 x 150cm
Bracken Hillside, oil, shellac, ink, 2006		Winter, Drumochter Pass II, oil, shellac, ink, 2006
48 x 48in 122 x 122cm		23.75 x 23.75 in 60 x 60cm
Glen Geldie, oil, shellac, ink, 2006		Ben Uarie , oil, 2006
47.5 x 59in, 120 x 150cm		39.5 x 47.25in, 100.25 x 120cm

Price range: £1000.00 - 8500.00

WENDY SUTHERLAND

The Scottish painter Wendy Sutherland (born Brora, 1975) shows a range of the characteristically energetic landscape work from the Highlands which over the past ten years has established her as an urgent new voice in Scottish art.

The distinctive quality of Sutherland’s painting, which can edge towards abstraction without sacrificing any of its manifest commitment to place, may arise in part from the artist’s unusual working pattern. ‘I work best,’ Sutherland comments, ‘in the afternoon or evening as I feel more focused then.’  The kind of close focus to which the artist refers may be described as meditative.  It is the process of digesting an experience of landscape which follows on from energetic, physical engagement with it, suggesting that the earlier part of her day has been spent walking in the hills which so fascinate her.

If Sutherland has returned so enthusiastically to her roots around Brora in east Sutherland, where she now works from an old village house occupied over four generations by her family, she has come fully furnished with the skills of craft and technique for which art education in Scotland is so highly regarded; most importantly, she has come with an agenda to turn these to her advantage in her chosen mission.  ‘The highland landscape,’ Sutherland comments, ‘is for me a poetic subject.  My memories are an important source for my work.’ 

To integrate memories and impressions with an ongoing lively exposure to the countryside she knows so well. Sutherland deploys a whole range of processes from physically throwing paint and pigment on to the canvas to introducing shellac which can cause her fluent imagery to run and coalesce in new, surprising patterns as well as delicately drawing and rendering images.  A crisp horizon may loom hypnotically out of turbulent foreground abstraction.  In her approach to colour she is never afraid to take risks, overlaying angry reds with tones of tar and sulphur, tugging the viewer into sharing her full-blooded response to the elemental forces with which she identifies.

Comparison with some aspects of the approach developed by the painters of German romanticism in their treatment of nature may not be inappropriate here, as Sutherland clearly shares their enthusiasm for scientific observation pursued in tandem with a quest for the spiritual. For painters such as Caspar David Friedrich or Philip Otto Runge the impression of transparency that could be achieved with effects of light provided a metaphor for the revelation of a spiritual essence behind the material world. In his Theory of Colour, J.W. von Goethe explains how it is that ‘we love to contemplate blue not because it advances towards us, but because it draws us after it.’ So it is that Wendy Sutherland, still barely in her thirties but powered by an instinctive commitment to culture and place, brings a new freshness and vigour to the traditions of landscape painting in highland Scotland.

Biography

Wendy Sutherland was born in Brora, east Sutherland in 1975.  In 1997 she graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with First Class Honours, becoming a Master of Fine Arts two years later.  Since 1998 she has held six one-person exhibitions in the United Kingdom and Canada, including art.tm, Inverness (2000), Transit Gallery, Hamilton, Canada (2001), Artifex Gallery, Birmingham (2001), and Bonhoga Gallery, Shetland (2005).  Over this period she has also participated in some 35 group exhibitions, including Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (1997), Highlands and Islands Open (1998), Atkinson Gallery, Somerset (1998), McLellan Galleries, Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Art (1999), Timespan, Helmsdale (2004) and Stenton Gallery, East Lothian (1999-2005).  Wendy Sutherland is the recipient of some ten art awards including Queens Anniversary (1995/96), Landscape Award, The Royal Scottish Academy (1998), Judges Commendation, Highland Open (1998), Awards to Artists, Highlands and Islands Arts and Scottish Arts Council (2001) and Convenor’s Prize, Highland Open (2004).  Since 1999 Sutherland has undertaken public commissions for four venues, including Edinburgh International Conference Centre (1999) and UHI Millennium Institute (2005).  Now based once more in the village in east Sutherland where she was born, Wendy Sutherland has for some time identified as her primary goal an evolving interpretation of the landscape of the Scottish Highlands through a range of media and in this chosen field is already considered a leading figure. First exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery 2007.

Copyright © Francis Kyle Gallery. All Rights Reserved