Former pupils’ tribute to artistic inspiration

Arthur Watson, Ian Howard and Lennox Dunbar were all born within a year or two of each other in the early 1950s, and all attended Aberdeen Grammar School where they had the good fortune to be taught by Charles Hemingway.

At the teacher's insistence, his charges would attend Aberdeen Art Gallery where they were encouraged not only to look at the collection but also to write about it. Hemingway set all three on a long upward trajectory which resulted in them becoming both distinguished teachers and respected artists.

This lavish show is greatly enhanced by, and tailored to, an impressively revamped gallery, which can hold its own to similarly scaled European structures.

Under the architect Gareth Hoskins — who died in 2016, aged 48, before his vision could be realised — an entire level has been added to Alexander Marshall Mackenzie's Victorian building, allowing light to flood down into a central atrium.

The trio's work is displayed expansively, as befits the large paintings and robust sculpture. In a clever curatorial twist, each artist has been invited to choose works from the city collection that made a profound early impression. They are shown alongside a few examples of the Aberdeen artists' early work.

Dunbar's sculptural paintings have a common compositional logic. Ben Nicholson and John Piper provided the young Dunbar with much inspiration and their work is displayed alongside his work from the Seventies and Eighties.

The names of the older artists find their way into the titles of Dunbar's most recent works, all created in the past two years: Garden Walk (after Nicholson) and Evening Walk (after Piper). Dunbar compartmentalises his compositions so that his narratives, which often take the form of a journey, become layered and complex.

Ian Howard is the most philosophically and compositionally complex of the three, with a bewildering range of influences ranging from medieval and Renaissance iconography to Borges - and Paracelsus.

In Bird and Lupus in Fabula, painted in the 1980s, Howard reinterprets some of the myths and stories around St Francis of Assisi by inserting alternative motifs such as a dragon, which replaces the Wolf of Gubbio. Arthur Watson grew up in a part of Aberdeen largely inhabited by settled travellers. Their rich culture and oral tradition had a profound effect on his life and work.

Watson himself has a large repertoire of songs and ballads and the names of other exponents (Peter Hall, Jimmy MacBeath, Ewan MacColl), in many cases his "teachers", find their way into Transmission — a large circular wooden structure with a table at its centre, the musicians' names stencilled into the wood. The installation A Year-End Drinking Coat: with Woven Floor celebrates traditional craft customs featuring a symbolic, practical woven form that references classical and local culture.

This show, combined with the experience of the revamped venue and the city's rich art collection, is a must-see.

     At Aberdeen Art Gallery until January 28