THE SHETLAND TIMES REVIEW 13/06/2003
'Exhilarating show at museum gallery'

ENTER the Shetland Museum Gallery in Lerwick at the moment and you will enter a world dominated by the colour blue; the colour of heaven, of peace, of coolness, of restfulness, but not always. Blue in the hands of painter Ruth Brownlee means storm, surging seas and surf. She is a prolific artist of Shetland landscapes and seascapes, but particularly Shetland skies.

Skies are a speciality and I don't know if she's a regular weather watcher but these paintings bring out lots of skies I've seen. Like the artist Constable, the sky becomes a pre-eminent feature in the work. It sets the tenor of the whole composition.

It definitely influences the work on show; 28 relatively large pieces under the title 'Northern Elements' and that northern feel is crucial to the understanding of this exhibition.It's not calm blueness but heavy turbulence, brooding blueness which people from places south wrongly associate with dourness. Here it's simply exhilarating.

These are mixed media pieces on board but the labels don't fully cover the reliance on acrylic media with which you can add so much. It's a very versatile paint. It can work like impasto oil or thinned gouache and bits can be mixed into it.

Texture, I suppose, is paramount. Ruth Brownlee has an intuitive feeling for texture alluding to nature and all the works demonstrate this.Easting, Unst for example has a wonderful scraping of yellow-green paint mixed with sand. The subject becomes the medium through which it is portrayed. Likewise the criss-cross brushwork of 'Breaking Seas, Eshaness' shows a turbulent surf while in the top third of the painting the sky glows pink.It's what lies beneath that often affects the final surface.

Sometimes this PVA gessoed effect of the underlying texture can get in the way. In the sky section of Sea Mist on Papa Stour the crinkled surface breaks up the horizontal features in the seascape disturbing its structure. The effect works best, however, in a piece like Storm at Noness where the underpainting complements the angularity of the waves and the uneven horizon. The effect is awesome and exciting. A ghost of a headland is visible in the distance.

Even when Ruth moves inland the grass and moorland become as turbulent as the sea. 'Reawick Moors' and 'Deepdale, Sandwick' both have a breadth and strength that belie their modest size. 'Clearing Skies, Shetland Moor' was one I also liked a lot. Its blueness is arbitrated by becoming darker and then much lighter in the same sky, while below a gently curving hump of land is formed from ochres and greys. It's very elemental and austere.

I suppose a churlish critic might object to the visible lack of jollity, of bright colours, of a bonny Shetland summer's day. But I'm not one of them and you're more likely to recognise Shetland here than anywhere. There's almost a feeling of obsession here. An obsession with darkening skies, turbulent seas and brooding panoramas that to some might be a negative feature. But get onto Ruth's wavelength and you enter a very personal vision of her world and a distinctly positive approach to painting.

'A Yell Walk' takes us through a complex composition, the dark hills forming a black curling ribbon some distance ahead. Perspective is an important feature in a work like this. Here it is rather ambiguous. You're not quite sure where you're heading. How far away is that headland? It's raining, it's getting dark and the whole effect is pretty disturbing.

In contrast, 'Spring Growth, Fladdabister' gives us a landscape which opens out suggesting sunlight glimpsed on the moorland ahead which, despite the darkening sky, is uplifting. The quality of the painting here is excellent. It's spontaneous and in some areas quite delicate. Ruth might deny it but I think she's quite minimalist in her approach. The elements are few and simple, the colour palette limited and the subject matter well contained within Shetland's boundaries. It makes for what I'd call the "classic" Brownlee picture. A square format comprising three sections of dark, variegated blue sky, darker sea and below all that a broad stiff-brushed surf. Late Winter Gale sums that up. I challenge anyone to count the number of blues. There is so much tonal variety within a very limited palette. There's that Scottish quality in the painting, not dourness but a solemn acceptance of the inevitable dominance of weather that determines the outcome. That awkward reviewer might ask where all those calm seas are? But violent seas are more dramatic and Ruth Brownlee is nothing if not dramatic in her treatment of the subject.

You come away quite breathless at the turbulence, chaos and surging. Sharing this space with Ruth is Frances Wilson from Unst who has a glass cabinet full of her quite individual ceramics. Her textures, like Ruth's, imitate nature, especially the rugged nature of that most northerly isle. The rock-like bookends and vases decorated in a lovely oxide finish are particularly impressive.Natural colours abound; there are some lovely blues and browns, the glaze dribbled or slipping down as in the fine jug with its beautiful curling handle like a treble clef. Together with its small, similarly handled dish it will now adorn some lucky person's home.The rockpool dishes have been seen before but are a recognisable feature of Frances' work. Their scratched, gouged and patterned surfaces are finished off with a stunning rockpool effect of glazed clay pebble and drowned in glazed and molten glass. A newer departure seems to be the purely white porcelain dish with embossed pieces and trailed slip. These studies in texture work much better for me than the spherical forms with (or without) creatures. Again the northern elements of textures and earthy colours dominate this collection.It's a fine show and I urge you all to get along to the Shetland Museum Gallery before 20th June to see it.

Peter Davis