A sublime darkness in the eye of the storm

The painter Tom Hovell Shanks is a genuine veteran of the Scottish art scene. He was born in 1921 and trained at Glasgow School of Art under Alix Dick, Walter Pritchard and Mary Nicol Neill Armour, graduating in 1950. Before enrolling as a full-time student at GSA, Shanks had worked as a designer in Templeton’s carpet factory. His experience as a carpet designer was to prove useful later in his career when he worked at the Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, which specialised in designing and making tapestries. He has also worked as a muralist, a set designer, as well as being a gifted and generous teacher.

Shanks is a prolific and highly respected artist, who is dedicated to watercolour. His subject matter is predominantly the Scottish landscape, in all its moods, although his range also extends to townscapes and foreign vistas such as Paxos, Florence and Lake Garda. Over the years Shanks’s work has evolved, matured and developed. His palette has extended and, importantly, the format of his paintings has become extensive and panoramic, so that now, in his 95th year, his work looks fresh, vigorous and innovative.

It’s clear that Shanks is most at home, and at his most experimental, when working with the landscape of Scotland with which he is most familiar. Typically, these are the predominantly sparsely populated areas of the west Highlands such as Skye, Eigg, Mull, Ardnamurchan, Lewis, Tiree and Arran. Shanks succeeds in conveying both a sense intimacy and awe. The grandeur of the landscape is rendered with a poetic lyricism that few contemporaries can match.

Watercolour is an ideal medium for capturing and expressing the changing light and weather patterns. Mountain and sea mean that the effects of wind, rain, squalls and mist are never far away. Lingering sunlight, filtered through water, coupled with reflections from the sea and the shadows of the mountains have inspired generations of artists. Many have conveyed not only what they see, but also what they feel. Such painting is as much internal portraiture as it is external representation.

With effortless craftsmanship, Shanks depicts and expresses a landscape of memory and experience. Such elegance is the summation of a lifetime’s observation and learning — painters such as Nash, Sutherland, Gillies and Redpath come to mind. From our own generation, his work is comparable to that of Frances Walker and Richard Demarco.

Shanks is at his best when capturing the darkness of storm and squall, rendered in precise liquid washes of ink and paint. He is an artist who, remarkably, gets better with age. His work deserves to be better known.

Until May 14.