MORTON KAISH, catalogue essay for The BUTLER Institute of American Art, Ohio and New York's NATIONAL ARTS CLUB, 2017

Beach Walk by Morton Kaish.

Distinguished. Professional. Admirable. Esteemed. If this makes MORTON KAISH sound like an old master, think again. His relish for blazing rapturous color, vigorous brushwork & intricate handling, produces paintings that radiate joyful exuberance; their glow and energy that of a young painter. 

Kaish loves color. "I try to surround myself with buoyant, optimistic color. "We artists sit here with a palette filled with color. For heaven's sake let's use it!" 

Sea Garden 

The results are romantic but never sentimental. He is by his own admission "a glass is half-full guy." This is especially evident in his landscape and flower pictures, 30 pictures from 30 years 1986-2016.

The flowers are not your usual formal 'arrangements' but a compression of color and texture which began in Ireland. "We went there in 1979, staying in remote Donegal to paint the emerald landscape but it rained day after day! So I ran out, picked wild flowers, put them on an old chair." 

That Irish chair has stayed with Kaish as one of his key motifs. The flowers change - he adds a passion flower here, a hollyhock there - but the chair stays. "Being an artist leaves you in charge of the world," he told me. "You can re-order it however you want!" 

Chilmark. 

His other love affair is the coming together of sea and sky over a coastal landscape. "For me it's magical." It began on his honeymoon in Provincetown in 1948, and continues to inspire many dramatic paintings. 

Chilmark 2001 captures loose sweeps of tumbling coastal grasses beside quivering clumps of delicious wild flowers. "I wanted it to move," he explains. And it does. A big 6 ft 'Sea Garden" shows an intense stormy sky, set beyond pale cliffs while a flood of unique blooms cluster round a triumphant red hollyhock ?  spire. This, he says "takes a Chilmark moment to extreme. Our friends had this dream house on Martha's Vineyard with the Atlantic Ocean as backdrop." Wild Irises and West Wind 2012 are instances where one can actually feel a fresh breeze off the water. 

The Seattle Arboretum inspired another series of massed fields of flowers while a Manhattan allotment awash with hollyhocks is immortalized in Hollyhock Cantata. Kaish sometimes uses a combination of acrylic & oils, as in The Visitor, 2006, a rare vase arrangement which includes star-like spiky blue flowers amid pink & yellow roses as a single bee hovers. Another close-up, Lilies and Roses 2006, celebrates his daughter's favorite flowers. 

Kaish can do big and bold too. In 1998 he began to focus on a cherry tree, but rather than elegant or fragile, he set about giving it majesty. A single Cherry Bud, with scrumbling light over dark to create transparency, makes an impressive 5ft statement. New Day enlarges a tree stem while the major eye-catching Delicate Balance 1989 is nothing short of fierce. 

Morton is an accomplished printmaker and he employs etching and collagraph to create  assertive angry plants, like Iris Bound or Steel Thistle Rising 2002. Monotypes return him to upbeat Hudson Summer or a single happy Spring anemone. 

Landscape and flowers are just once aspect of Kaish's armory. This year's beautiful photogravures of giant magnolia blooms found in California, demonstrate that he continues to live an enviable creative life of travel and adventure.  

CLARE HENRY, former art critic Financial Times & The Herald; curator 1990 Venice Biennale. 

New York, November 2016. 

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO Edinburgh FESTIVAL ART? from ArtWork's 200th edition Sept 2017

ARTWORK isssue 200, September 2017 

THE EDINBURGH Art Festival (EAF) has the opportunity, and responsibility, to make Festival visual arts better than ever before. With a reported budget of £735,969, this year's EAF presentation for the Festival's 70th anniversary was lukewarm, mundane and disappointing. Moreover, after 14 years, it has become too selective, with aesthetics getting in the way of inclusivity.

The Edinburgh Festival is above all about inclusion: an all-embracing, exciting, delicious spicey mixture.
Edinburgh's three week bonanza is no place for a narrow, clique-ridden, élitist presentation. No place for spotlighting primarily obscure, out-of-the way conceptual environments or self-indulgent videos accompanied by esoteric, art-speak text which no self-respecting visitor will ever read.
The average tourist expects and requires an easy presentation of all available exhibitions and events so they can visit easily.

Unlike the Fringe, Edinburgh's art world is not big. It is however a broad church, ranging from the traditional to the cutting edge, from painting to sculpture and installation, from national galleries to commercial galleries, small workshops or studios. This is what visitors come to explore.
Funded as it is by public money, it is not for EAF to sit as judge and jury, deciding what sort of art should be included in their bespoke guide, which reduces our National Galleries and Museums to 'partner' level while excluding the prestigious 175 year-old Scottish Gallery, the Royal Scottish Academy, the Fine Art Society (dating from 1876) plus completely omitting many galleries young and old.
EAF's charges – £1000 for a mention in their brochure – are bad enough. “Too much for little return,” one director told me. But their selection process is scandalous. Yes, decide on quality, on high standards, but not on style, on category. It's also hugely detrimental to Scotland's art world.
Once the pop-up shows and events fade away after their few days in the sun, stalwarts like the Open Eye, who provide an exceptional standard with no subsidy whatsoever, are left to help artists emerging, mature and old.
When did all this happen? Who allowed it to happen? Why no uproar?
EAF began as a homegrown, loose amalgam of unpaid volunteers who had the simple, obvious idea of tying the visual arts together via the galleries while encouraging a use of new spaces: churches, libraries, warehouses, etc. The printed programme was small, cheap. Everyone chipped in.
I have heard many and varied complaints. Costing £165,700, the EAF commissions programme (excepting Paterson's Chessels Court structure) was also especially poor.
The visual arts are slowly sinking at Festival time, crowded out by comedy and gimmicks. It was not always so. In the 1980s art exhibitions featured on the front of the official Edinburgh Festival brochure. Can someone please tackle the festival director and, as was the norm, get the National Galleries back in that brochure?
The vast majority of visual art events, unlike concerts, plays, gigs etc, are free. Tourists, visitors should throng these open, ticket-less venues. Surely it is not too much to ask for a cheap, small, easily-available-everywhere list of all exhibitions? I'm told this could be done for as little as £2k. With a total budget of £735,969 – bloody hell, as a friend said, two thousand is very small beer.
CLARE HENRY

KATE DOWNIE at the SCOTTISH GALLERY: Anatomy of Haste

I still calculate work in feet & hands. Stables & jockeys still measure their steeds in hands. My mother could accurately measure a yard of fabric from her nose to her outstretched hand.  I can stride across the grass and give u some square yards. The human body was a useful tool and tied to the land. 

KATE DOWNIE takes this one step further, by using our body as  "a poetic metaphor and handy travel guide around this collection of paintings, drawings and prints." 

DOWNIE's catalogue for her FESTIVAL show at the SCOTTISH GALLERY contains her own explanation as to her subject. "I am inspired by the ingenious & ubiquitous acts of engineering amidst the seas, mountains, & the envelope of air: concrete, asphalt, steel, glass & plastic, the modern stuff which humans have constructed." 

Yet Downie is a landscape painter. So how does that work? In an excellent essay novelist Sue Hubbard explains Kate's use of line - all journeys are linear, whether along a road river or a drawing board!

And Downie, a superb draughtsman, has always had a superb use of line. These black lines: of bridge, tower, pole, road signs, are for me her chief characteristic marks, a skeleton structure on which to build, be it a crowded city centre in Japan or an American road network. Most of the pictures here are robust oils, with some ink drawings too. And there are also a series of very loose Chinese ink & watercolour sketches of the Lofoten islands, off the coast of Norway  

I was interested in a set of screenprints made with Ros Lawless at GPS are particularly relevant here. Their experimental graphic exuberance and calligraphic quality comes from a combination of her Chinese pen technique learned in China, plus Downie's love of long train journeys, 1000 miles in Norway (see her image (Trondheim) 

or just from Edinburgh to Oban. 

To get a "bigger bolder view" she decided to tape acetate sheets onto the train window and draw images in black line on the acetate as the scene sped by. 

These acetates were then turned into the dominant silkscreen design on top of a blurred background from slow shutter speed film of yet another journey shot in autumn on the way to Oban. Thus 2 journey overlap, their superimposed imagery playing counterpoint as in jazz. 

Downie is well known for her love affair with the FORTH Bridge & now with the Queensferry Bridge, has been following the building of the new bridge. 

Downie is a constant traveler - near & far- 

and some of my favourite images are her Cross Country pen drawing from a British train 

plus her minimal 'Kyoto Shinkansen (Spinal Cord)' which she equates with travel in Japan. 

EDINBURGH FESTIVAL: Highlights

MUST SEE HIGHLIGHTS 

British REALIST Painting in the 1920s & 30s, GMA 2. 
Congratulations to Patrick Elliott who put this show together, with a proper catalogue, well labelled, explained and above all something new to see. The show has not been on since April, is not a re-hash, not misleading. You may not love all the work, indeed you may hate some, but there is plenty to look at, admire, think about. Enough here to recommend a visit. 

Brockhurst 1939 

 Brockhurst epitomised the brushless, hard-edged, tight, polished realist style with its intense detail, scrutiny & accurate, wonderful draughtsmanship. 

 James Cowie, one of 8 Scots here all superb. 4 Glasgow trained. 

Cowie's 2nd wife Alice

Meredith Frampton, detail,  1928 

There are 93 works by 58 artists, many unknowns, only 9 women, (who could not vote.)  Most painters were born at end of Victorian era or on the turn into the 20th century. All endured the First World War. 

The wonderful James McIntosh Patrick 1907-1998 was famously from Dundee where he lived, taught, and painted.

Stobo kirk 1939 by Partick

SNPG  has a good cross section of historical HILL Adamson 1840s photos, a great opportunity to see a range of famous, pioneering work.  

DOUGLAS GORDON's conceptual piece, BLACK BURNS, is problematic for some but worth examining. Here lies their hero: shattered, riven, fallen, almost destroyed. Not just an imperfect man, human, with feet of clay - but a man divided.   

Director Christopher Baker arrived 5 yrs ago, when all the restoration/re-building/mess had been project managed by the former director James Holloway. Baker has got all the fun of commissioning new portraits for the collection ... ... 

MORANDI at Ingleby Gallery. - Only 2 pix to see here  but both stunning. 1 characteristic Morandi still life & a huge Hugonin oil.  For 30 years James Hugonin has made just one painting a year, always following a structure of thousands of small marks of various colour on a grid,  Subtle, understated, elegant. He works from a notebook, almost like a musical score. Here he echoes the tones of grey in the Morandi pix

Tony PATERSON   - and the bag! 

Josef KOUDELKA'S landscape photographs at the SIGNET LIBRARY.   Special. In an elegant Georgian setting. Till 27th August. 

I will address the disappointments later. 

Meanwhile more pix to enjoy from GMA 2