The Glasgow Art Club

• Patricia Cain
• Sam Cartman
• Jack Frame
• Claire McGee
• Melissa MacRobert
• Kirsty Palmer
• Jim Ramsay

• Jane Roy
• Lara Scouller
• Blair Thomson
• Nafeesa Umar
• Alan Wilson
• Jessica Wolfson

Patricia Cain
Patricia Cain is a Glasgow based artist whose current work focuses on the landscape of Glasgow and in particular the River Clyde and its regeneration. Her work links landscape to the explicit and implicit modes of thinking that arise in the production of drawings. By experimenting with drawing conventions used in art and architecture as tools for logical and intuitive thinking, she closely observes how she makes her drawings and how connections are formed during the process. This takes her work in terms of process and subject matter further. These concerns have been the basis for her recently completed PhD entitled Drawing as coming to know: how is it that I know I make sense of what I do?, in which she investigates the experience of drawing as thinking. She has recently has been short-listed for New Contemporaries and the Rootstein Hopkins Award, and has been the recipient of the RSA’s Kinross Scholarship and the RGI’s Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Prize.
email: click here to email Patricia Cain web: www.patriciacain.com

Sam Cartman
Sam Cartman uses figurative and abstract aspects of painting with a view to evoking or triggering memories. The previous focus for his work has been the landscapes of Shropshire and the Lake District, but since moving to Glasgow, he has been concerned with the urban environment of Glasgow and the landscapes of the West Coast.
Telephone: 07768117064

Jack Frame
I have to walk for a long-time before I get there.
I have a habit of returning to the same haunts.
We skirt the M20, over the fence to the rhythm of the cars flying past to London or Dover.
We passover the boggy ground.
Dark soiled limbs protrude from the stinking mud.
Through the avenue, ascending towards the light.
     
We emerge from the gloom, greeted by the smell of wood preservative.
Smells like a kind of varnish.
The stench of more remains rooted in the earth. 
A bastardised relation of the subterranean kind.
Bruised and swollen like so many bones and flesh lying strewn over grass. 
The foundations for the gateway wrapped in bricks and mortar, like an upturned lung under a heavy sky.
The earth breaths. 
 
Dad reached through the wall, placed his hand on the ancient Yew.
And I knew he didn't want me to go.
 
Painting is a series of breaths. A mechanism by which we can begin to contemplate the eternal. A means of reaching through and touching the sublimity of time passing on our nervous system. This is the essence of a sense of place.
I think this may take a lot of walking!!!
email:click here to email Jack Frame

Claire McGee
My work explores the relationship between excess and control. The pieces depict the Revolutionary period in late-18th century France, where the world was said to witness the death of one era and the birth of another. However, the world portrayed is as if a new one was never born - the old simply died and continued isolated and separated, pointless and lost in its own grandeur and excess. Through disengaging from reality, a greater understanding of the limits of social order and the nature of power is achieved. Its symbols of opulent redundancy merely add to the overall sense of isolation and delusion. This is an opulent fortress within a fortress - a transgressive space. To the imagination, it is a perverse and carnivalesque world. This excessive world has become the bacchanal of the imagination, but only of the imagination. If we truly look at the figures, we can see that their pleasures, pomp and voluptuousness are purely superficial. They invite the viewer into this world yet remain disengaged from their surroundings - lost, even bored. Excess can only truly be understood in an environment of control. When the methods of control become one with the environment, control becomes omnipresent. When the institution becomes the new power, the balance of excess and control becomes confused and the rationale of modern thought is lost.
email: click here to email Claire McGee web: www.clairemcgeeart.com

Melissa MacRobert
At present I am studying on the MFA Art, Space & Nature (ASN) programme at Edinburgh College of Art. I graduated in 2007 from the Drawing & Painting department also at ECA. In 2006, I was in Reykjavik studying for 5 months at Listaháskóli Íslands/ Iceland Academy of Arts. The Icelandic landscape has come to heavily influence my subsequent work - through drawings, video installation and prints. I returned last year for a residency in the east of Iceland at Skaftfell Cultural Centre, Seyðisfjörður. This month, I will be accompanying Elizabeth Ogilvie as part of a group from ASN to Ilulissat, Greenland. This will be part of a project to highlight the International Polar Year.
email: click here to email Melissa MacRobert

Kirsty Palmer
A second year painting and printmaking student at The Glasgow School of Art, where she has studied since leaving school in 2006. Current work documents an exploration of form, texture and mark making with relation to the surrounding natural environment. The coastline, hills and forests of the landscape inform her work with the process of drawing remaining key. The shapes and patterns of natural forms found in these elemental spaces such as fallen trees or gnarled roots can be investigated and developed using a variety of different tools and processes.
email: click here to email Kirsty Palmer

Jim Ramsay
Studied Social Anthropology at Swansea University. Graduated in 1993. Then spent 5 years doing various jobs and painting portrait commissions (including one of Richard Woods the New Zealand Ambassador to France in 1998). Graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2003. Since then I have been living in Glasgow and working on my own practise as well as teaching part time at Glasgow School of Art. Recent shows and commissions include: Mural commission at Bothwell Church, (Still to be completed), Intermedia (with Ann Vance), Glasgow, November 2007, Glasgow Project Room, Solo show, Glasgow, May 2006, Urzula at the Gallery Pankow, group show, Berlin, October 2005, Market Gallery (Residency), Glasgow, 20th March 2004 until 17th April 2004, Compass Gallery, Glasgow, ‘New Generation’ (group show), 2003, Hunting Art Prizes, (winner of outstanding regional entry prize) Royal College of Art, London, painting, 2002.
email: click here to email Jim Ramsay

Jane Roy
I find it difficult to put into words my “artistic agenda”. I’m an intuitive painter who is grounded in observation. I prefer to work en-plein air before the motif but when I do work in a studio situation it is borne out of first hand observational sketches and experience.
In these larger compositions memory comes into play. The superfluous is filtered out as I try to capture the raw experiences of what it is to live in the world. This is where I find the tensions arising between the purely visual but also the human response which contains so much of the subjective experience. I find in the process an unravelling; there are layers of seeing – almost as if the here and now points beyond itself. There is a sense of dynamic underlying order within the melodies. The eye seeks out pattern and rhythms as well as individual accents. These emerge in the making of the painting whose marks speak for themselves. I like to attack the paper getting caught up in these marks, smudges and textures: what Rilke called the “external equivalents” for true experience intuitively felt.
email: click here to email Jane Roy

Lara Scouller
My art practice reflects my passion for drawing and my perpetual interest in nature as a vital and almighty subject matter. Having grown up in rural Ayrshire I see the surrounding countryside as a natural paradise and constant source of inspiration. I am particularly drawn to subjects that have a sculptural quality and I try to focus on their subtleties and distinct characteristics to create something, which encapsulates my initial urge to draw. When working in situ in the landscape I am confronted by the elements; the constantly changing light and the often unpredictable weather conditions. These atmospheric factors help bring my organic forms to life, forcing me to react quickly, bringing a degree of vitality and spontaneity to my drawing. I work in a variety of scales and media which enables me to react spontaneously and swiftly to the subject matter. There is an immediacy I achieve when using dry materials like pastel and conte, which I cannot get with other media. I studied drawing and painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, graduating in 2006. I was awarded the Royal Scottish Academy Landscape Prize at the annual student exhibition and was selected for the RSA John Kinross Scholarship (a three month residency in Florence) in the same year. In October 2007 I received two prizes from the Paisely Art Institute Drawing Competition; the Plein Air Prize (a residency in France) and Miller's City Art Shop Prize. At the beginning of this year I organised an exhibition of my work in Dundee at DJCAD along with three other artists who were also awarded the Kinross Scholarship. Later this year I will be showing new work at The John Davies Gallery, Gloucestershire, The White House Gallery, Kirkcudbright and The Green Gallery, Aberfoyle.
email: click here to email Lara Scouller web: www.larascouller.com

Blair Thomson
I am a full time painter, with a studio right in the city centre of Glasgow. Since graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 2002, I have had 3 solo shows, a residency at Cove, on the West coast of Scotland, and at Hospitalfield, and have been participating in a variety of mixed exhibitions. I have also been travelling to Japan to research and make work. I am fascinated by many aspects of Japan, such its old architecture, haiku poetry, sho calligraphy and artists such as Hokusai and Hiroshige. At the same time I am drawn by the expansive sea, land and hill-scapes of Scotland and particularly by the abstract rhythms and atmospheres of certain man-made structures within them, such as old piers, often in quiet yet elemental places. "Spacious fields of colour and spontaneous, graceful brushstrokes create an irresistible Zen-like calm. His inspirations come from his interest in all things Japanese, but the main source of his abstract imagery is Scottish landscape… bridges, crumbling piers and disintegrating shipwrecks." Article by Lucy Sweet, Homes and Interiors Scotland February 2004.
email: click here to email Blair Thomson web: www.blairthomson.com

Nafeesa Umar
My work seeks to portray the spiritual aspect, in which I view the world, and to do so in a way that allows others to reflect on the way they view it. As a Muslim my faith plays an essential part in shaping and forming my ideas for work. It is through deep contemplation and reflection of the world and its intricacies that enables me to produce work, which tries to highlight an appreciation for harmony, balance, proportion and beauty that the world is created in. Ideas of stillness, repetition, pace, time and duration are important elements throughout my work whether it is performance or sculptural the meticulous process of making is a meditative act in itself and allows me to enter into the spiritual realm of the divine. Through the construction of sculptural objects which are influenced by Islamic art, in particular geometrical design I begin to reintroduce the ancient arts but with a contemporary approach and understanding. I graduated in 2007 from the Glasgow School of Art in Sculpture and Environmental Art. Since then have exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in the SSA Annual open exhibition and the Travelling Gallery in Edinburgh ‘Re trato’ (group show).
email:click here to email Nafeesa Umar

Alan Wilson
"Love thy neighbour" said Jesus. Seems so radical. How do you translate that into one's art-life? Try painting pictures with truth and compassion I guess. Cervantes (or was it St John of the cross) said something like this, "Naked truth is still carried by the image of the night, the night of the mystic." Well, I am no mystic but the thought inspires me. I've tried to tread this path with a series of portraits (and recently moon-faces) which has been a project of mine for many years now. Fictitious characters that are about submerged stories and imagined histories: although most of them springing from real history. I am always after faces that are caught in thought. Wittgenstein wrote that, "The face is the soul of the body." That's why I aim for a silence in all my portraits: to get to the source of silence where everything is still so you hear your conscience. Only then does art meet one's inner life-the unfathomable questions with which God has burdened us to be occupied with!
email: click here to email Alan Wilson

Jessica Wolfson

email: click here to email Jessica Wolfson web: www.gis.uk.com/artists.php?studio=parnie&id=10