“Love Hurts with Farewell” – Giles Sutherland ©

“2001 is the centenary of the birth of James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon), one of the brightest and most astute literary talents Scotland has ever produced. Gibbon was born and educated in Arbuthnott, a parish south of Stonehaven which lies between the Grampian mountains and the North Sea. Among its natives, the region, also known as the Mearns, provokes deep loyalty and affection. Visitors may, however, find its charms less obvious and more difficult to fathom…

…When the Marie Curie foundation decided to host an exhibition to celebrate Mitchell’s achievement (a talent cut short by his death a t the age of thirty four) they were probably unprepared for the depth of response such an open invitation would provoke. Shelagh Atkinson’s paintings are notable for their often oblique and unexpected parallels to Mitchell’s writing…”

Lewis Grassic Gibbons exhibition for Marie Curie 2001

“Once is Not Enough”- Ellen Galford, writer & broadcaster.

‘I’ve known Shelagh for a long time, but it’s only recently that I’ve actually seen her work. Every so often we’d ignore the nagging of our respective Muses [very Calvinist, those dominatrix girlies from Parnassus], down tools and get together for coffee. After which, no matter how bogged down I was, or how menaced by a deadline, I always came back to work fizzing with energy, stimulated, maybe even inspired.But it wasn’t the caffeine in the cappuccino, or a karate kick from the Japanese green tea. It’s what happens in conversations with Shelagh.And when I finally do get to see her work, I begin to see why. We talk about what she’s doing.What she puts in. What the viewer takes out.‘Pictures you can read’, she says.  Well yes. The way you’d read a set of inscriptions in a lost but teasingly familiar alphabet, or noirish thriller, or a very urgent letter found in a book that no one’s opened in fifty years or so. And once is not enough. Come back at it again from a different angle and the narrative moves on.What interests her is what she calls ‘the happy accident’. Mysterious things occur when she paints, or etches or makes prints and scans them through the computer, imploding the image or explodes it, reassembles photographed or painted fragments, layer upon hallucinatory layer. The process of processing takes over, carrying her [and us] along for the ride. when she gets there wherever it is, she’s just as surprised as everyone else.

Here’s what I like about Shelagh’s art:

1. Her weirdness and her wit.
2. Tantalizing landscapes not available on any picture postacard, spy satellite or package tour.
3. That willingness to live dangerously. Honest experimentation, no cant, equally free of the chi-chi and the couthy.
4. Powerful colours, textures [who’d ever think rustflakes could be as sensuous as crushed strawberries?], glamour where you’d never expect to find it – eg: a sardine from a fishmarket blown up into a gorgeously iridescent Leviathan.
5. Hidden history, some fortuitous agitprop [I’m particularly fond of yet another sardine, hung tailside up like the executed Mussolini, against the backdrop that just happens to be the old Panzer boiler house at Brandenburg Berlin]

Don’t expect this to be explained in any captions. There are stories here we’ll never know. Colour them in your own fantasies- or not. There’s more than enough here to play with, trigger dreams, imprint images that will flash back for months to come.

You don’t need words to have a conversation with Shelagh.’