Victoria Crowe on the personalities behind 30 years of portraits

Take ground-breaking Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing. When Crowe was commissioned to paint his portrait for the SNPG, a mutual friend offered to set up an informal introduction over supper. Laing turned up drunk and tempestuous.

“He was one of my intellectual heroes,” Crowe says. “I expected this amazingly grave intellectual person, that I would fall at his feet and listen to him. And, of course, he shambled in pissed and wouldn’t shake hands, and was really very difficult. It was almost like he was setting these tests, saying: ‘I can be really hard, I can be an absolute so-and-so, do you want to to work with me or not?’”

During a week of sittings for the portrait at his London flat, Laing, whose controversial work helped shape modern understanding of psychiatric illness, alternated between silently meditating “with his eyes open”, and being “hilarious” company. “He was bloody difficult, but he was wonderfully difficult,” Crowe says. “He made you move into a different kind of creative space, so that was wonderfully, rewardingly difficult.

“That’s the wonderful thing about live sittings,” she muses, sitting in her studio at her home in the Borders village of West Linton. “I can never understand why people want to paint from a blooming photograph. You’re living that person’s life for a few instances, you’re finding out so much about them, learning so much about their decisions and the traumas that they’ve lived through. It’s just a wonderful privilege.”

Beyond Likeness is the first exhibition dedicated to Crowe’s portraits. Bringing together these works – 54 paintings and drawings – for the first time confirms both the importance of portraiture within her practice and the significance of her contribution to the genre. In August, the show will run in parallel with A Certain Light, an exhibition of her latest work at the Scottish Gallery. Next year, she will be the subject of a major retrospective at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre.

In the foreword to the first monograph on her work, published in 2012, Scottish Gallery director Guy Peploe wrote that Crowe had “quietly emerged into a pre-eminent position in Scottish painting”. Her work has a quiet but assured presence, much as the artist herself does. It doesn’t put itself forward; in time, its importance becomes clear and we notice – with some surprise that we hadn’t noticed before – that she is one of our most important painters.

Born in Kingston upon Thames, and trained at the art school there and at the Royal College of Art in London, Crowe has built her career in Scotland since arriving in 1968 to take up a teaching post at Edinburgh College of Art. Her work is infused with the landscapes of Scotland, particularly of the Pentlands and the Borders; one of her best known bodies of work is her sequence of paintings A Shepherd’s Life, documenting the world of shepherdess Jenny Armstrong, who was her neighbour in the hamlet of Kitleyknowe, shown to great acclaim at the SNPG in 2000.

Crowe’s paintings are not easy to describe. They weave together elements of landscape and still life, layering places, people, objects, works of art, and imbueing them with significance. Beautifully executed and contemplative in tone, her works are rich in resonance; in a sense, they are about what lies beneath the surface. More than once, in our conversation, she talks about the importance of subtext. Not surprisingly, her portraits seek to show not only a sitter’s appearance but something of his or her inner world – that which is beyond likeness.

Often, the sitters are people she sought the chance to paint because she was interested in their work and ideas. Looking back on them, she sees a map of her own inner journey, “a thread of thoughts that had taken [me] along the road of self discovery”. Raised Catholic, she came to reject institutional religion, but the search for meaning, for the transcendent, remained: “I suppose I’ve always been searching for some kind of thing which goes beyond the here and now and the casual nature of everyday references.” Painting, she says, is a bit like meditating: “I’ve tried to do yoga meditation, and I realise it’s just the same as what I’m doing when I’m working!”

It was her interest in the inner life which drew her to psychoanalyst Dr Winifred Rushforth, whom she painted in Edinburgh in the early 1980s, after attending her dream workshops. “She introduced us to Jungian psychology, to the importance of dream and myth and memory and a richness of inner life which is so important to artists and creative people. She was this immensely strong person, even in her 90s she was intellectually and spiritually so strong. She was a very impressive woman.”

MEETING Rushforth led her on to seek a meeting with poet Kathleen Raine, whose writing touches on her deep interest in myth, mysticism and spirituality. “In her poetry, in my mind anyway, she took up this thread from Winifred Rushforth’s ideas. She had this great sense of a continuing thread of unspoken philosophy, since Plato, and that the natural world was very much a mirror of this, that our responses to the natural world are very important, for our own wellbeing but also for our understanding of all these other things.”

Raine was a reluctant sitter. In the portrait, she refuses to meet our eyes. Crowe found her difficult to get close to, but came up with the device of a mirror placed behind her capturing elements of her memory and imaginative world. “She was very, very powerful, but at the same time she didn’t like to be looked at, there was a distancing. There were a lot of contradictions I was coming up against, and I could only really resolve them in the background to that painting.”

Other pictures have a very personal connection, such as her portrait of composer Ronald Stevenson, a neighbour in the Borders, who gave piano lessons to Crowe’s son Ben: “He didn’t just teach Ben how to play the piano, he taught him this incredible love of music, a completely different thing.” Stevenson is painted in his cottage, where a portrait of Hugh MacDiarmid on his wall places him in a lineage of Scottish creativity. “MacDiarmid used to live further out on the same bus route, they used to meet and go into town on the bus. It brought me close to all of those stories and aspects of Scottish poetry.”

Beyond Likeness also includes portraits of Crowe’s husband, Michael Walton, their children, and a number of self portraits done at key times in her life. “November Window Reflecting (Self Portrait)” was begun in 1995, a few months after her son Ben died at the age of 22 from a rare form of oral cancer. It seems to harmonise contrasts in a more striking way than ever before – indoors and outdoors, light and dark, night and day – around a vase of lilies, a gift following an exhibition at the Scottish Gallery, the last of her shows which Ben attended.

“That was really about that transitory time between when he was there and when he was not there. I am just a shadow watching all this stuff going on, and there is quite a lot of stuff going on, quite firey things happening. Ben’s death was a big watershed in my thinking. I became more aware of this short continuum, this very very transitory path and the importance of time. The portraits of Emma Tennant and Callum Macdonald were both painted within a year of Ben dying, and I notice that the painting of the background is hardly there. I remember at the time painting, thinking this is ephemeral, this is almost disappearing. I think a lot of the paintings around that period were very much to do with ephemeral things meeting immovable forces.”

Her mature work goes on to harmonise the physical and the metaphysical with greater confidence. From the 1990s, she kept a studio in Venice, and that city – itself a palimpsest of the past, substantial yet dream-like, full of light and reflection – began to permeate her work. In her later portraits, she finds new ways to explore the inner worlds of those she paints, from Scots-American composer Thea Musgrave to Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh physicist behind the discovery of the Higgs-Boson.

In 2017, she completed an ambitious portrait of Sir Timothy O’Shea, then principal and vice-chancellor of Edinburgh University, who is also an eminent academic in the field of artificial intelligence. The long-form painting brings together the worlds of indoors and outdoors, public and private life, and aspects of his work, including the prototype robot, Valkyrie, designed for Nasa to walk on Mars. “I thought it was great that she was a woman,” Crowe smiles. “She’s really quite sexy, she’s got this white leather trouser suit on.”

SHE admits she was concerned about what she and O’Shea would talk about as he sat for the portrait. “But it was fascinating, he has boundless enthusiasm. We had long conversations about what is consciousness, what is free will, what is the mind as opposed to the brain, about (the differences between) artificial intelligence and human consciousness. I found that so fascinating, I think that’s why I had to make the picture bigger.”

Her most recent work has shown a deepening interest in music. A series of paintings responding to Schubert’s Winterreise, some of which were shown at the Scottish Gallery in 2016, were used in Winterreise: A Parallel Journey, a performance in 2017 at Snape Maltings and London’s Wigmore Hall in which a film of the paintings was projected in large format behind opera singer Matthew Rose and pianist Gary Matthewman.

She says that’s something she’d love to do more of. “I think it’s because music is abstract for us, isn’t it? It’s always been a dichotomy, that I draw so much but I also think of my paintings as abstract paintings in a way. Music has this other dimension that is still a mystery to us. It’s probably not a mystery to musicians because they’re hearing the notes and the tone, but to us it’s transcending something, isn’t it?”

Victoria Crowe: Beyond Likeness is at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery until November 18. A Certain Light is at the Scottish Gallery, August 2 to September 1