As a painter, Helen Glassford brings a softness to her work, which nudges its way into the visual memory of the beholder.
Her abstract landscapes reveal a deft touch and are possessed of a lilting approach to colour and tone. Everything in its place and a place for everything.
As a newish gallery owner and curator of her own art space in Newport-on-Tay, Glassford brings the same gentle yet deft approach to showing art. Her latest exhibition in the Tatha Gallery, a former hotel perched on the banks of the silvery River Tay, is called The Newport Circle. As the name suggests, it takes in a virtuous circle of 11 artists with a link to each other and to this small Fife town which faces directly onto the city of Dundee.
All of the artists have left their mark on Glassford and a generation of other younger artists, many of whom - like Glassford - attended Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) at the tail end of the 20th century. The artists in her circle game are Joyce Cairns, Grant Clifford, Doug Cocker, Richard Demarco, Ronnie Forbes, Marion Leven, Will Maclean, Dawson Murray, Alan Robb, Frances Walker and Arthur Watson. Not all were Glassford's tutors, but all had a connection to Dundee and the surrounding east coast, and have contributed to what Glassford calls the "energy and vision" currently transforming the city.
"There is no razzmatazz within this group," says Glassford. "No need for constant admiration or acclaim. Their practice is rooted in distant history and culture. I think of them as the hidden circle of European art, like the stone circle of Easter Aquhorthies in the north east of Scotland."
A gifted painter, who was a runner-up in the prestigious Jolomo Landscape Painting Award eight years ago, Glassford is not exhibiting in this show. She is there, however, in the circle, she says, as a "curatorial presence". She arrived in Dundee in 1995 to study at DJCAD. After gaining an initial degree in fine art, she went on to study for a masters degree and never left. Her experience of being taught by artists such as Forbes, Robb, Maclean and Watson left an indelible mark on the way she approached art - and life.
"I came to Dundee from Carlisle," she explains, "and went into second year, having already studied for a year at the Cumbria Institute of the Arts. It was a great period in the college's history, with Alan Robb at the helm in the school of fine art, and I met all these influential artists. There was a real thoroughness and depth of context on offer. The technical help was there and the support network was immense."
Having been a self-employed artist for 15 years, Glassford decided she wanted to find out more about the business of art and to share the fact that there were so many talented and influential artists living in the immediate vicinity. This led her to setting up the gallery, which celebrates its first anniversary as this new exhibition opens. Sitting directly across the Firth of Tay from the nascent V&A building, as a hotel it served passengers who caught the ferry over from Dundee in the days when there was no rail or road bridge to speed their journeys. It takes its name, Tatha, from the Gaelic word for the River Tay, but it is also the Sanskrit word for "thusness", or a sense of being.
As Glassford celebrates Tatha's first anniversary this month with a personal tribute to some of the most influential artists of a generation, she is also looking forward to a new era. "We are currently building a restaurant bar/bistro with rooms," she explains. "So we're bringing back a little bit of what it used to be. The gallery has the most amazing views over the river and we are hoping that by creating this added dimension, we'll give people time to come here, enjoy the art, have a nice meal and slow their own pace of life down."
The Newport Circle, Tatha Gallery, 1 High Street, Newport-on-Tay (www.tathagallery.com, 01382 690800) until May 16
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