17 June 2025
Douglas Erskine
Ahead of our Summer 2025 edition of The Art Edit, Scottish art writer, researcher and collector Douglas Erskine discusses his favourite lots from our 25 June auction.
Douglas Erskine is a regular contributor to the online art magazine art-scot, which he also co-edits. Works from his collection have been loaned to major public exhibitions; most recently, he was a lender to An Island On Your Doorstep, the centenary retrospective of Bet Low’s work.
Bet Low is an artist of rare integrity. She had seemingly boundless creative energy which found form in work which moved from social realism in the 1940s and 50s towards abstraction in the 60s, then to landscape. She’s perhaps best known for her images of Orkney, in which she distils an almost tangible sense of place into a sophisticated visual language which is entirely her own. In all of this, her regard for technical discipline in art was unbending.
Stones Under Water is a typically strong example of Low’s work from the early 1960s. It holds its own as a confident if relatively modest essay in abstraction, though Low has not surrendered her interest in something distinctly human-centred. She has built up a robust, pleasing formal arrangement, suggestive of abstract art, but this picture has its roots in the stuff and substance of life as we know it.
Here, Low gives voice to our shared response to the phenomena of the natural world. She summons the experience of peering down into a riverbed with quick horizontal laps of her brush, suggesting the fast-flow of water slipping over stones. The picture shows what might be her greatest gift – her ability to realise artistic equivalents for the lived experiences which stir the senses. In Low’s hands, raw sensual experience is refined until it finds a wonderfully taut expression inside a picture frame.
An Alasdair Gray drawing is unmistakable. The strength and strangeness of his utterly distinctive line – perhaps too controlled to be called “serpentine”, but far too intuitive to be merely “precise” – lets his imagination loose on paper or canvas, invoking Faust in his study, Saint Jerome in his cave or Jonah in his whale.
Gray’s pen summons the graceful and the grotesque on a grand scale, but his quick, unpretentious portrait drawings have something of his brilliance on full view. It’s fascinating to note that the quality of Gray’s markedly original line does little to impose on the personality of his sitters. Sharp and stylised as his line may be, his portraits of friends excite feelings of genuine intimacy – very often, an Alasdair Gray drawing appears to show a real presence arrested in a moment’s glance.
As Gray’s portrait of Mary Bliss shows, the quality of his line allows him to eloquently describe the quirks which characterise a real human presence. He is at once mercilessly incisive – note Mary’s bottom lip, bulging rather inelegantly in an unguarded moment – and also totally sympathetic. We’re left feeling that Mary’s naturally benign expression, wrought all over her face, is authentic. The drawing might have been executed quite speedily and it might now look a little rough round the edges, but it stands up as a strong example of a frighteningly keen eye and a magnificently capable hand conspiring together.
Gray made several drawings of his friend Mary Bliss around 1960. After one evening spent drawing, despite a lingering sense that Mary was perhaps less than enamoured with what he’d produced, Gray indulged his modus operandi and, out of the blue, proposed marriage. “She sensibly refused”, he later reported.
Beatrice Huntington was a remarkably good portrait painter whose work, taken in the context of Scottish art, shows an unusual and sincere engagement with Modernism. In the 1910s and 20s, she experimented with Impressionism and Cubism, successfully drawing on the character of each to create portraits which stand up as singular artworks of real merit, not peaky pastiches.
By the time she painted her portrait of Wilhemina in 1933, Huntington’s enthusiasm for Modernism had cooled. But the legacy of intense experimentation is plain to see in this picture’s strikingly unusual palette – she uses a bolt of turquoise to give form to the nose and isolates the lips within a field of small, very deliberated-placed patches of mint green and dark gold. Huntington’s palette shows how she mixed ingredients of a very distinct Modernist manner into the creation of a direct, expressive, beautifully naturalistic-looking portrait.
Unfortunately, little is known of Wilhelmina, though we might surmise she was no shrinking violet. Huntington paints a confident and self-possessed young woman, seemingly undisturbed by the whirl of summertime around her. For all the coolness of Wilhelmina’s expression, the picture carries a lively sense of atmosphere which radiates warmth, and seems to strain against the picture frame.
William McCance, an intensely individual talent, was one of very few Scottish artists to dive headlong into the Avant Garde in the interwar years. His finest paintings have a dazzling integrity which stands up alongside the best in European art of that time, yet much of his work feels almost intimate in character. McCance did not live exclusively from the sale of his art – much of it, therefore, has a freshness and freedom which suggests private, personal experimentation.
With this in mind, McCance’s small clay sculptures figure as some of his most compelling creations. Their place in his body of work is not clean-cut. In a sense, his figurines have a very public face – they were shown in exhibitions and they appear in many paintings, including some of McCance’s most important works, such as Hiroshima (Atom Horizon) of 1947. They make an appearance in a few of his most serious “Vorticist” paintings, where McCance’s approach to form aspires to a three-dimensional state – here, the painted presence of his clay figurines gives greater weight to the sort of physicality McCance was out to capture.
But Rhythmical Figure, which appears in much more contemplative still lifes – one of which is offered in this sale – has another face too. McCance clearly developed a deep attachment to these works, perhaps for the way they loosened the flow of his creativity, or perhaps for his pride in them as artworks in their own right. Indeed, Rhythmical Figure stands up a striking piece of work – squat and dumpy yet also beautifully formed, and rough and gritty in texture but inscribed with lovely lyrical details. Either way, these figurines remained part of McCance’s studio throughout his life. Taken together, this collection of sculptures would appear so inspirational to McCance that they might as well have had a talismanic power.
