Peter Green: The Workmanship of Uncertainty

The Scottish Gallery, 16 Dundas Street

Edinburgh, 0131 558 1200

www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

Until 1 Oct Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm; Sat 10am-4pm

THERE is something rather gratifying in the notion that one might hit one’s artistic prime in one’s eighties. Tempus might fugit, but at least there’s something to look forward to when you get there. The mild caveat being, of course, that not everyone can be a Peter Green, the master printmaker and teacher whose 60-year output – including some stunning new work – is the subject of a new monograph and exhibition at the Scottish Gallery.

Green is a master of the abstract, the flowing movement of forms across his prints indicative of a creative approach to the representation of the natural world that has been honed over many years. For that is much of what Green’s art is about. Ever since, as a young jobbing printmaker, he got off the bus in the Rhondda Valley on an illustration commission for the National Coal Board of Wales, Green has been captivated by the notion of the juxtaposition of the real and the natural.

His early works bear the hallmarks of the 1960s obsession with graphical forms, hints of Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash that were gradually to recede as Green’s style strove to maturity. His work is held in public collections including the V&A, yet he is not as well known as he should be beyond the art world.

Green was born in 1933 and spent a peripatetic childhood moving around the churches of England with his parents before signing up for technical college at the age of 15. The technical rigours were quickly put aside for the more attractive allure (there were girls, he says) of the art school upstairs and Green embarked on a National Design Diploma that would see him circumvent a foreign posting in his national service for more productive time spent as an army printmaker.

Demobbed, he applied to Brighton College of Art in 1955, learning the tools of his profession – and significantly, the techniques of printer-less printing which were to become his stock in trade – before graduating with the teacher’s certificate. After further education at the Institute of Education at the University of London, he threw himself into secondary school teaching in East London for some years, instituting a school printing press on which his students produced small books by day and working on his own woodblock prints by night. But some scant years later he was ‘burnt out’ and took up a post as head of art teacher training at Hornsey College of Art, before moving on to become an influential dean of art and design at Middlesex University. In all this, his teaching practice – hugely important to him – majored strongly on finding ways to demystify the art and craft of printing, of simplifying techniques and communicating the joy of printmaking to his students.

Green’s style has changed in many ways over the years although it is always recognisably Peter Green. In the early days, he worked from his own drawings to produce prints of bold structure and colour. These were the days of the Welsh prints, with their colliery scenes contrasted with the natural environment, a substantial number of which have recently been bought by the National Museum of Wales. In the 1960s he worked for London Graphic Arts, producing a huge number of big bold “1960s prints” for universities and hotels, office blocks and open plan buildings, many of them American.

His latest works are alive with colour, a result, he says, of working on the printing with his wife Linda Green, for whom he has worked on a number of textile commissions for St Judes, the print making company which numbers Angie Lewin, Mark Hearld, Emily Sutton amongst its artists, and a collaborator in this exhibition. But Green eschews the label artist, as he recounts in the new monograph on his life and art by Nathaniel Hepburn published by Random Spectacular, the publishing arm of St Jude’s. “I’ve never said I’m an artist. I’d feel an idiot if I said that,” he says, modestly. “I like the idea of being a printmaker; it seems like a proper job, you know.”

North East Open Studios 2016

Various locations around Aberdeenshire

Until 18th September

www.northeastopenstudios.co.uk

It’s doors open in over 200 local studios in the North east of Scotland this weekend as the annual NEOS event – a celebration of Aberdeenshire’s artists – reaches its conclusion. There’s something fascinating about seeing an artist at work in their studio, not least when studios in this context can be anything from disused train wagons to garden sheds. There’s the odd whisky distillery in there too.

The open studios this year will feature 232 artists, 70 of whom are new to the event, and new categories covered include Heritage Crafts – from corn dollies (Something Corny) to willow coffins (courtesy of Naturally Useful in Forres). Elsewhere there is everything from woodwork to ceramics, silversmithing to painting, and mixed, multi- and digital media.

A flick through the extensive directory shows that many studios are exhibiting multiple artists. If you pitched up at Durnhill Farm in Portsoy on the north coast, for example, you would find Lone Wibroe making stools and chairs from materials she picks up in her native Danish woods, and Lin Acoustics, who hand-make and repair acoustic guitars. Inland, down in Alford, ceramicist Beth Bidwell is exhibiting her fine hand built sculptural vessels in her own house alongside painter Sara Gallie. There is much variety to be found.

Interestingly, too, some artists are offering workshops, so it’s a good idea to check (and for opening times) by picking up the directory from various shops and galleries around Aberdeenshire, or look on the NEOS website.