Some people make a point of going to church at Christmas. I go to three churches before Christmas and they’re all within a few miles of each other, which is most convenient as all three are now art galleries. Also, at this time of year the visitor can look forward to mince pies, mulled wine or simply as many chocolates as he can eat!
At the Tore Gallery on the Black Isle, Christine O’Keeffe has a number of well observed watercolour studies of woodlands, full of energy and atmosphere, and some less successful ones of flower heads. Catching the Light a study in watercolour and ink is the stand-out here and is offered at £410. Indeed her landscapes, another of which is showing at the Inchmore Gallery a few miles west of Inverness, are altogether more competent and not a little experimental. The pricing structure at both Tore and Inchmore is sensible, dare I say affordable, but at Kilmorack, near Beauly, there’s a smaller number of more established artists who are presumably content to wait for lottery winners to come browsing. Here, Kirstie Cohen’s unbearably cold evocations of mountain tops with swirling snowstorms are the pick of the bunch, at between £1200 and £1300. Powerful paintings like hers deserve to be hanging above a chief executive’s desk on the top floor of a city centre tower block, offering a kind of ultimate contrast. Kilmorack are also showing a couple of small interiors by Eugenia Vronskaya, but they’re very dull and significantly overpriced.
Gwen Black’s gallery at Inchmore is the best laid out of the three, offering maximum wall space and arranged in rooms so that visualisaton of most domestic circumstances is made easy. She has several of her own works on show currently, displaying at least two recent but quite different creative streaks. Notable are her multi-media studies of girls’ emotions, in each of which she uses the arresting iconographic image of a figure looking straight at the viewer. Gwen’s studio is here too and, apart from being her own workbase, it’s where she holds regular tuition classes. The very excellent Cyril Reed was a guest tutor here not long ago and some of his life drawing sketches are offered, unframed at very reasonable Christmas present prices. Apart from his draughtsmanship being quite exquisite, it’s what he leaves out that makes the difference.
Christmas exhibitions at all three galleries run throughout December. Meanwhile in Inverness city, the Castle Gallery is showing mostly unsold works from the last couple of years. Sadly, one or two of their regular artists are in danger of losing credibility. Here I must single out Jonathan Shearer, whose exhibition centrepiece is a large, roughly painted mountain view lacking detail, atmosphere, brushwork skills and compositional interest, for which the gallery are seeking £3690. His small, very rough sketches are priced at an exorbitant £650. Quite frankly, they’re having a laugh. Shearer is capable of so much better than this but neither he nor the gallery are doing him any favours.
