Vibrant and talented artist puts Scotland’s poets in their place

When the Scottish parliament reconvened in July 1999, Iain Crichton Smith’s poem, The Beginning of a New Song, was read aloud: “Let our three-voiced country sing in a new world joining the other rivers without dogma, but with friendliness to all around her.” Crichton Smith is one of seven poets celebrated by Ruth Nicol in an ambitious series of large paintings of Scottish landscape, poetically entitled Three Rivers Meet.

The show’s title refers to a real place as well as acting as a convenient metaphor. Hugh MacDiarmid, the father of the Scottish literary renaissance, who grew up in the Border town of Langholm, claimed he could identify each of the town’s rivers — the Wauchope, the Ewes and the Esk — by sound alone.

Crichton Smith’s reference to the linguistic and cultural riches of Scotland is clearly part of Nicol’s frame of reference. But the artist reveals other aspects of the elegant metaphor: her family memories and the influential role of Sandy Moffat, the painter and teacher.

Moffat taught at Glasgow School of Art and has been widely credited with responsibility for the resurgence of figurative painting there. His painting Poets’ Pub (1980) is a composite group portrait of some of Scotland’s most celebrated modern writers. As well as Crichton Smith and MacDiarmid, the painting depicts Robert Garioch, George Mackay Brown, Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan and Sorley MacLean.

Nicol describes Poets’ Pub as the “driver” of her current project. She travelled extensively throughout Scotland, visiting the places most associated with each of the writers, where she absorbed the light, colours, landscape and genius loci through sketching and photography.

These powerful, immersive paintings are compelling because of their scale, their crafted assuredness and the way they convincingly convey the essence of place.

MacCaig famously spent his summers in Assynt, in the northwest Highlands. Nicol’s response is not to paint Suilven, the area’s most distinctive mountain. Instead she offers a panorama seen from the fishing port of Lochinver. Human habitation intrudes but most of the canvas is dominated by sea and sky.

Water, in the form of cloud, river and sea, is an important element in all of these works. In Strathclyde Distillery, Edwin Morgan it takes the form of the Clyde as seen from Glasgow Green. In Holyrood, Robert Garioch it can be seen in the banks of cloud above Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat. In Stromness, George Mackay Brown it is the town’s harbour and the Hoy Sound beyond.

Nicol’s approach is tangential, with unexpected, nuanced detail. Paradoxically, despite being a form of portraiture, these paintings are entirely devoid of people. They are, however, full of human presence.

They form a fitting tribute to a generation of leading writers. They show that in the right hands, the medium of paint is as valid and vibrant as it ever was.