Frances Walker: About life and living
December 2009
by Mae McKenzie Smith
That Frances Walker has achieved great distinction as a painter and printmaker in Scotland and far beyond, while also being an inspiration and continuing influence to decades of students, is no mean feat.
Since first meeting Frances 40 years ago I have constantly been impressed by her output as an artist and her complete dedication to her work. Talking with her recently, I quoted from another great Northern woman artist, the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, who wrote in 1897, “In art one is usually totally alone with oneself”. At which Frances revealed the title of her forthcoming show and monograph, Place Observed in Solitude. In Frances’s case this covers a very wide range of places.
A little girl, a pupil at Lochmaddy School on North Uist, once said of her recently-graduated young art teacher, “She is a lady with wellies and long blonde hair who digs clay from the hills and brings it into the classroom”. More than 50 years later, the physical description of Frances Walker has scarcely changed and the energy and enthusiasm to explore and elucidate the traces of the past – as in the use of local clay to make their pots by the ancient North Uist wheelhouse communities – has certainly not diminished.
It comes as no surprise that as a young graduate of great merit who gained many awards while a student at Edinburgh College of Art, followed by distinction in her teaching qualifications at Moray House,she should have confounded the expectations of her tutors by rejecting seemingly more prestigious opportunities in the Central Belt and heading off to the Outer Isles for her first teaching job. To quote Frances, “From an early age I had always felt the lure of the Islands”.
Frances was born and brought up in Kirkcaldy where she says that as a child she was “always drawing”. At the age of six, when asked the perennial question by the visiting school doctor, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, her mother and other adults present were astounded when she quickly responded, “I want to be an artist”.
The inspiration for the distinctive drawings and paintings of the West Coast, so closely associated with Frances, began in childhood when her family spent many holidays visiting her uncle in Oban. There, with the revelation of the wild places, the glistening white sands, the big skies and the distant islands, came the dawning of her quest to “discover Scotland”.
When she began her studies at Edinburgh College of Art in 1947, her ambition was further awakened by the influence of Sir William Gillies, an inspiring artist and lecturer. The young student was greatly impressed by his example. His legendary painting expeditions throughout Scotland, his rural landscape compositions, his emphasis on draughtsmanship and technical ability and his complete dedication to his work all laid the foundation for Frances’s strong and abiding commitment to her métier.
Camp 165 in Caithness
In 1948 help was still needed in many areas of civilian life. Frances found that she could combine exploring her country while responding to this demand by helping with the harvesting of a crops through Scotland, and even into England and Wales. A particularly memorable episode was the celebration of her 18th birthday at Camp 165 in Caithness. This was where all the high level German prisoners of war had been billeted – indeed some who did not want to return to a divided Germany were still working there. National Union of Student camps followed, as far away as East Anglia, the Liverpool area, and at Annan on the Solway. Frances says, “I always wanted a knowledge of my own country,” and this, combined with hitch-hiking and hostelling far and wide was her opportunity to do just that.
Her curiosity aroused by an article in the Scots Magazine, she discovered the tidal island of Oransay, off Colonsay, where for many years thereafter she spent fruitful long holidays. Many other island have followed, all of them providing source material which has helped to shape her work and nourish her fascination with these unique locations.
Her subsequent love of travel was encouraged when she received the Andrew Grant Travelling Scholarship in 1952, awarded each year to a student of exceptional ability at Edinburgh College of Art. This was followed in 1953 by the Carnegie Scholarship from the Royal Scottish Academy. The possibilities for extensive travel suddenly opened up. In the ensuing months, hitchhiking and staying in hostels again, she made her way – filling sketchbooks, diaries and canvasses – through 99% of the countries of Europe, from Iceland in the North, to Greece in the South.
Among her many tales of those adventurous days, one of my favourites if of her arrival in Venice. Having headed there from Yugoslavia, she emerged at the railway terminal wearing her heavy great coat, purchased in the Co-op sale in Kirkcaldy, and sturdy zip-up boots, lugging a kitbag full of rolled-up canvasses, a travelling easel and her ex-commando rucksack. Three of her fellow students from Edinburgh, lightly clad, sun-bronzed and glowing from a winter in sunny Italy, came loupin up the platform to meet her. John Houston, David Michie and Molly Langlands stopped short at the vision which confronted them. John, also a Fifer, greeted her, his familiar accent very comforting after months of pidgin English, with “Jings, Fanny, how much stuff have you got there?”
The four young artists piled into a vaporette on the Grand Canal, babbling away in Scots and swigging from a bottle of Slivovic which Frances had pulled out of her rucksack.
Mad Scots drinking on the Grand Canal
Returning to Edinburgh months later, Frances was amused to find that word had travelled ahead of her. On bumping into Anne Redpath, the doyenne of Scottish painting, she was hailed with curiosity about the mad Scots drinking on the Grand Canal, Frances giving away paintings for her keep and sleeping on top of stoves to keep warm in the Jugoslav winter.
From Venice, Frances and Molly left for Austria and Vienna. There she recollects an encounter which had a profound effect. Having managed to rouse the shuffling, old guard at the Albertine, he opened the gallery especially for them. He unbolted the shutters and removed the dust cloths before leaving the girls on their own to pull out paintings from the storage racks; in particular, for Frances, the Spring of Breughel’s Seasons.
To this day she exclaims with awe and incredulity, “You could TOUCH them!” A privilege unimaginable to us in the 21st century.
From Vienna it was a short hop to Munich where they were introduced to their first autobahn, “a huge road compared with the wee windy roads in Fife”. They also had the sombre experience, on a dark, gloomy day, of visiting Dachau, causing Frances to reflect in an impassioned letter home on the kind of engineers and draughtsmen who could use their inherent skills for the evil of turning their fellow human beings into soap, compared with the spirituality left to mankind by the Rembrandts and Van Goghs she had recently been studying.
Switzerland followed, with its significant collections of contemporary paintings, before she headed to the Low Countries and home.
Home meant her terms at Moray House to get her teaching qualification, during which time she was elected a professional member of the Society of Scottish Artists. a formal recognition of her natural ability as a draughtsman and her position as one of the most interesting young painters of her generation.
From 1955 till 1958, Frances lived and travelled around the Western Isles as the sole visiting teacher of art for Harris and North Uist. An era when electricity was just beginning to arrive on Harris and was non-existent on North Uist. This was a spell when she could reflect and gain insight into the distinctive landscape of the island. A period of being alive in particular surroundings and gaining a sense of the physical space and the human beings whose existence made an impact on the world around them.
She says, “My work has a lot to do with people and their environment, also about me in my environment. In all my work there is frequent evidence – often ancient and long lasting – of man’s changing influence on the environment by occupation of the landscape”.
Duncan Macmillan said of her, “In the landscape that Frances Walker explores so lovingly and where space and time are so grandly visible, the individual life seems just a glimpse. It is her awareness of this tiny human dimension and her ability to set it meaningfully in this wide framework that gives such poetry to her work”.
A “wee red phone box” on Islay
In 1958 Frances began to think that her future might lie in Canada. The prospect of working in the remote areas with the Inuit people was very appealing. During her summer holiday that year, a telephone call to “a wee red phone box” on Islay, in the nick of time, saved this treasure for Scotland! The call asked her to phone Robert Henderson Blyth, head of painting at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen. He invited her to take up a lecturing post at the art school (salary £8 per week!).
After weighing up the drop in salary against the opening being offered, when there were very few women teaching in schools of art, Frances decided to accept. Thus began a lecturing career of 27 years in Aberdeen.
Her former students speak of her with great respect and affection and of the happy relationship she quickly developed with them. Many are now highly-regarded names in the Scottish art world. One of them, Will McLean RSA, speaks of how much he appreciated the rigour of her teaching. The stringent criticism spiced with wit and humour. There was “no hiding place” in the life class when a foot was described as “Clyde built”, or an arm “lost in the mists”, and where being too proud to wear his glasses brought forth, “Put your specs on, Willie!”.
Nevertheless, at all times there was the evident support and encouragement so vital to emerging artists. “Remarkably,” he says, “we did not realize at the time that this support did not come to an end on graduation, but has continued quietly behind the scenes throughout our painting careers.”
Frances’s modest demeanour and immensely agreeable and caring personality has ensured her a large circle of loyal and loving friends; and to her credit, many of this ‘family’ come from the ranks of her former students.
She remained a prodigiously prolific artist. This was acknowledged in 1970 when she became only the 14th woman in 144 years to be elected to the Royal Scottish Academy. By this time there had been 320 men. Many other recognitions have followed, including an honorary doctorate from Heriot Watt University.
Frances uses a wide range of techniques to translate aspects of reality, to explore recognisable forms and to integrate her visual discoveries. This practice of seeing – as distinct from merely looking – needs constant cultivation, for to see is to understand and this can only truly be achieved after long and concentrated study. Many people paint landscapes and succeed in depicting their subject, but fail to even approach making Art.
A thatched cottage on Tiree
Frances does not like to be called simply a landscape painter. She is constantly concerned to expose the structure, anatomy and dramatic origins of the land she is revealing to us:
“In spite of distant fish farm cages and seaborne plastic debris, these coastal glimpses at the meeting place of sea and land reveal not so much the changes, but the enduring, unchanged images that survive down the ages – like the still remaining unfenced machair used as common grazing for centuries, shore rocks and rock pool clefts, the beaches and sand dunes and the sea in all its moods – a place of continuing mystique and fascination for ever and for everyone.”
Like all important artists, she opens our eyes and broadens our perception of the world around us.
In 1979 she acquired as her island home one of the last remaining thatched cottages on the island of Tiree, where for part of the year she lives and works. By living on this island of great, gleaming beaches and wide seabird-filled skies, open to wild winds – as well as having its legendary status of the highest sunshine record in Britain – conscious of the changing light and moods of weather, she has been inspired to produce a substantial and on-going body of work.
Her island work is complimented and contrasted with the inspiration she finds drawing from windows in Aberdeen and other similar locations. Looking over the slated rooftops, spires and trees of a northern cityscape, where seagulls nest on the chimney tops, Frances has frequently used the device of framing a scene in a window. After all, in our Scottish climate, much of our view of the world is observed from our windows.
Standing in her Aberdeen kitchen, Frances pointed out the joy of the nearby slated roofs, the sun hitting the autumn treetops and the birds outlined against a clear blue sky. She noted, “the framing of an scene in the window reinforces the lines of the actual physical frame on the finished work”.
Frances took early retirement from Gray’s in 1985 to have more time to pursue her own work. The move was partly encouraged by the arrival in Aberdeen in 1974 of an important facility – Peacock Printmakers workshop. Now as Peacock Visual Arts it continues to be a place where visual artists from the UK and abroad come to develop their skills. At Peacock, Frances has been able to evolve and diversify in a huge variety of techniques: etching, lithography, screenprinting, and making monotypes and colographs are all methods she has mastered to reveal her vision to us.
A vast triptych of ice floes
A few weeks ago, Frances took me into her studio to view the work in progress. As a longtime admirer, I was completely taken aback by what I saw. Stretching the length of one wall was a vast triptych of great ice floes and Antarctic space, so atmospheric I was stunned by its breathtaking beauty. She had thrillingly captured the magic of these frozen waters.
She spoke enthusiastically of the modest Norwegian ship she had travelled in with her fellow passengers from 22 different countries. She had spent 18 days in a tiny, cramped cabin for two with “a great window” on her most recent journey of discovery. When a brief space of 10 years opened up for visiting Antarctica and South Georgia, Frances leapt at the opportunity to explore yet more remote areas. Surveying this wild landscape, with her usual sensitivity to human traces from the past, revealed the still visible evidence of the buildings and huts of the ancient whaling trade and the early Antarctic explorers, such as Shackleton and his crew.
This spellbinding journey has not only resulted in some powerful new work, but has kindled in Frances the intention to sail “round the top of the world“, from West to East and back again. Now possible as this region becomes, alas, more ice free.
Quite a year ahead, one might think – yet Frances continues to draw, paint and make prints daily, as has long been her practice.
There is a New Year treat in store for citizens of the North-East, for Frances’s Antarctic works and many others will be shown in a major retrospective exhibition with video at Aberdeen Art Gallery, from February 6 until April 10.
From March 13, Peacock hosts its own show of many of Frances Walker’s drawings and prints, with a webcam link with South Georgia. This will be followed in November with a show at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh.
Some time ago Frances wrote, “Although painting is an isolating occupation, you are, by painting, making a very positive assertion that you do not want to die – yet. For painting is about life and living”.
Mae McKenzie Smith, an adopted North-Easter originally from Glasgow; mother of three, grannie of four, ex-art teacher. No history of literary achievement, but keeps polishing her vocabulary by being a slow solver of quick crosswords.
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