Taking on the complex history of female art

Many moons ago, as a young undergraduate at Edinburgh University, an equally young female US student asked the lecturer why none of the Scottish writers we were studying were women. The reply, delivered in apparent sincerity by the stunned academic, was there were simply no women writers to study.

Such an approach was common in the 1980s and would have applied equally to female artists. Several decades on, things have changed markedly and for the better. Contemporary female artists are to the fore and teaching positions in art colleges have almost reached gender parity.

To underline this from both a contemporary and historical point point of view, the Scottish Gallery presents more than 80 works by 20 women. Some are better known than others and almost all will be familiar with names such as Elizabeth Blackadder, Anne Redpath, Victoria Crowe, ‘Willy’ Barns-Graham, Frances Walker and Joan Eardley.

But among these are the works of lesser known figures such as Lillian Neilson, Lily Cottrell, Winifred McKenzie and Mardi Barrie. Cottrell, born in 1896 and the mother of the first Principal of Stirling University, exhibited regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy.

Although her work is technically competent, by its nature it is also conservative with subject matter ranging from still life to landscape. As the gallery itself tentatively notes, Cottrell is “another overlooked artist whose commitment to family might have prevented a professional career”.

Cottrell’s predicament was a common one — familial obligations and societal expectations clearly negatively impacted the careers of many women artists, snuffing out talent, or at best, curtailing it.

Such restrictions have clearly not had so much of an affect on more contemporary voices such as Christine McArthur, Kate Downie, Hannah Mooney, Claire Harkess and Emily Sutton.

Downie is an exciting, deeply talented artist, who embraces new challenges and articulates fresh visions. Here, her documentation of the Queensferry Crossing, executed from the cab of an HGV while traversing the new bridge, gives an impactful contemporary edge to the show.

However, I reserve my most fulsome praise for the prodigious, tormented talent of Pat Douthwaite (1934-2002). Frequently homeless, impecunious and suffering from severe mental illness, Douthwaite’s lot was far from easy. Her complex, abrasive personality often made loving and helping her difficult, if not impossible.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the demons that raged through her, she was able to produce some powerful and troubling imagery, such as Village Taxi. At the time, Douthwaite was living in isolation in East Anglia and the transformation of the vehicle and driver from the innocuous to the grotesque, is quite remarkable. Women with Reptile, painted a few years later, is an abject self-portrait full, of dark visions and terrors.

Taken together, this collection presents a specific, sometimes conservative, take on the complex history of women’s art in Scotland.