Glasgow Girls exhibit decades of their work
From the day they entered the famous black Art Deco doors of Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh Building in 1981, Rosemary Beaton, Lesley Burr and Alison Harper found instant camaraderie and a shared sense of purpose in art.
While bonding over student hopes and dreams in this inspiring backdrop, they also pursued a passion for expressing in visual terms what it felt like to be a woman of their time. The figure lay at the heart of all their work and that fascination has endured.
They may all have gone on to follow different paths and spread their wings beyond Glasgow, but the friendship has endured.
All three work in different styles and have exhibited individually and in various combinations since the mid-1980s. The latest iteration of their friendship sees these three “Glasgow Girls” exhibit in London at the light-filled Art Pavilion in Mile End Park. The show ends tomorrow.
Its title, Resist Much, Obey Little, is from a Walt Whitman poem, To The States, which, they say echoes a commitment to striving for individuality while combining worldly responsibilities with making meaningful art.
For this exhibition, which they would like to tour, they have rounded up artworks encompassing decades of making and creating.
From early work, to recent paintings like Ancestors Protest, Beaton’s work thrums with colour and vibrant energy. Whether she is painting the human figure or the natural world, there is a joyous sensuality in all her drawings and paintings.
Burr also responds instinctively to colour, but takes a political slant to her approach to landscape painting. She is drawn to the drama and back stories which lurk in the land. The human impact on the Arctic has been a constant in her work following a spell as artist-in-residence by the Friends of the Scott Polar Research Institute.
Harper established an alternative art school, the Essential School of Painting in London in 2004. Her own work is zesty, sexy and poetic, laced as it is with personal imagery hingeing around what she calls “a desire to paint bountiful images of goddesses”.