Ruth Nicol’s landscape paintings are among the most distinctive in contemporary art. In the last of his series on the Junor Gallery, Alan Riach talks to the artist about her work and exhibitions.
Alan Riach: Ruth, we’ve worked happily together for some years now on the “Landmarks” exhibition with Sandy Moffat and your association with Sandy goes back further. Could you tell us first how you came to painting originally?
Ruth Nicol: I was a late starter.
I decided to go to evening classes at Edinburgh College of Art, and it was there that the very talented George Donald told me the essential thing: “You have to believe that you’re an artist. Nobody will believe you if you don’t believe in yourself.”
At the time I was working at Standard Life Bank but gave it up to study full-time for a BA Hons degree at ECA, graduating in 2010, and I’ve been a dedicated artist ever since.
Alan: Dedicated.
Ruth: Demented! Ever since.
Alan: And how did your friendship and working relationship with Sandy come about?
Ruth: It started with deep admiration of his work. I kept coming back to the Scottish painters in the library, and finding references to Sandy’s work. So many of my peers were working in different areas, but they all came back to some reference to Sandy Moffat. He inspired and encouraged and energised so many people, not least through his work as a champion of others through the Royal Scottish Academy.
If he had only painted, if he had only befriended and encouraged John Bellany, if he had only worked as a teacher, any one of those things would have been so valuable – but he did all these, and more.
His writing, essays in catalogues and journals, for example, and his academic rigour, were vital. He’s a national treasure, a hero.
And then I was at a John Bellany exhibition in the Open Eye Gallery and Sandy was giving a talk, and questions came up about Bellany’s palette, his changing style and the decisions and changes he had made in his painting, over his career.
Sandy was on the stage and knocked the critical questions back politely. But I was frustrated at the intensity of criticism and I stood up and said that criticism of this kind was misplaced. We learn from artists, whatever they do. Nobody present could cope with such brutal, personal criticism. Sandy noted my Bolshy attitude. And we’ve been friends ever since.
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Alan: What sort of work have you shown in Beth Junor’s Gallery in St Andrews? Were there particular themes associated with the exhibitions?
Ruth: I was involved in two exhibitions. First, there was “Landmarks” with Sandy and yourself. What was so wonderful about that was how we worked with Beth, exhibiting the paintings and the poems, the portraits and landscapes and the words, there on the walls, somehow singing together.
Beth was committed to the intellectual ideas behind the exhibition. She invested that commitment in presenting artists’ talks, poetry readings and conversations. And Beth herself is such a vitalising person. The second exhibition I had there was entitled “East Neuk”. This was made up of landscapes of Fife, where I used to go with my mum and dad when I was a wee baby. I had thought of giving Beth an exhibition I had ready, “Leith in Spring” (which was shown in the Open Eye Gallery and the Line Gallery in Linlithgow) but when I was on the train home I thought, no, I should make new work. So the “East Neuk” show came about in a sense inspired by Beth, inspired by the gallery as well as by the landscapes of the East Neuk itself.
Alan: Why landscape?
Ruth: No idea! When I was about three, I’d been drawing houses, over and over, and when we went down from Glasgow, where we lived, to Leadhills, on holiday, everything changed. I remember noticing how different things were – the roads were different, the lampposts, the hills, trees. And then in Fife there are houses with red roofs – you don’t see that in the west, so that fascinated me.
When I was studying, in second year, my art teacher, Iain Patterson, took us out into the landscape in a Ford Transit van, maybe eight of us, all around the beaches of East Lothian. Not only scenic landscapes but the nuclear power station as well, cement factories, the industries, the social world, these places people live and work in. It was on that research trip that I had the first sense that I was going to be a landscape painter.
Alan: The Holyrood painting shows our parliament in its own landscape. Sandy and I were talking last week about how landscape itself confers a kind of identity on the people who live in it, “an awareness of self and country”. (“The Radical Road”, The National, Monday, December 21, 2020).
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Ruth: The Parliament painting came about as part of the “Three Rivers Meet” project. The exhibitions that came from that were a salute to Sandy’s “Poets’ Pub” with its multiple portraits, now in the National Galleries. I wanted to paint the landscapes of the poets. I painted Iain Crichton Smith’s Bayble in Lewis, MacCaig’s Lochinver, MacLean’s Skye, George Mackay Brown’s Orkney, Edwin Morgan’s Glasgow Green.
But Robert Garioch was the last one and I love his poems, satiric, wry, politically engaged but oblique, angled, sometimes humorous but incisive with political comment, and I wondered what he would have made of the new Parliament.
The viewpoint is beside Garioch’s old school, beside the Burns monument in Edinburgh, the view looking over the Commonwealth graves, with Arthur’s Seat in the distance, that volcanic terrain. All life comes from the earth. And we evolve within the landscape we inhabit. And there was the new Parliament in that terrain, central.
Alan: How would you describe the politics of art? There are plenty of people who don’t want art to be political, or who would prefer politics to be kept out of the arts. How does that strike you?
Ruth: I don’t know how you can take politics out of art. Whatever you’re painting, it’s all political. Any person, people, the islands, the climate. Politics is just how we structure ourselves to deal with the big issues. And art is at the centre of that.
Ruth Nicol’s website is at www.ruthnicol.scot
The Junor Gallery as was is to become a Vietnam Nail Bar but hopefully a new Junor Gallery will open in St Andrews in 2021. Meanwhile, visit online at junorgallery.scot
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