Finding the sublime at the end of the world

As a teacher of drawing and painting at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen from 1958 to 1985, Frances Walker was highly influential.

Despite being elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1983, Walker, born in 1930, has always been her own woman. As a student at Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1950s, her pursuit of line and tone in sparse, almost graphical, style went against the prevalent thinking, which favoured thick heavy paint in the French tradition.

She is attracted to wild places and compelled to capture their essence. In 2007, Walker was granted a James McBey Travel Award, which she used for an 18-day voyage to Antarctica, the South Shetlands, South Georgia and the Falkland Islands.

The fruits of this journey form Walker’s living bequest to the city of Dundee, and include etchings, oils on marine ply, lithographs and drawings. Her etchings Grytviken and Petrel depict the rusting ships that act as stark and derelict reminders of the now defunct whaling industry in South Georgia, with its strong connection to the city of Dundee.

Her delicate lines are an apposite medium for depicting the snow-covered, treeless, mountainous topography of the south Atlantic, the backdrop to these dramatic images.

Walker has experimented for decades but now favours elongated, panoramic formats. These are ideally suited to the vast scale of this landscape and what has been termed, in earlier centuries, “the sublime”.

In 1757 Edmund Burke wrote: “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other.”

It is certain that in these works, which confront the overpowering presence of land and sea, Walker displays a degree of astonishment, combined with awe and trepidation.

Frances Walker: The Antarctic Suite, MacManus Gallery, Dundee, until October 23