Peacock is delighted to present Cliff Path, produced in collaboration with artist Frances Walker (CBE, RSA), to celebrate her 94th Birthday.
In 1981, Walker captured the unique landscape of Orkney in the form of a plein-air drawing. Some forty-three years later, the drawing Cliff Path is – transposed as an etching. In direct collaboration with skilled printmaker Michael Waight and through her masterful use of line and colour, Walker reanimates the tension of the approaching squall and its rapid switch of light – a moment of suspension in the resulting phantasmagoria.
Orcadian artist Erlend Brown wrote the following introduction for Walker’s Orkney exhibition in 1983:
“The Parish of Birsay, in Orkney, is open to the Atlantic. Sea-gales lash its shores in winter. The pounding shapes and reshapes an ever changing sculpture of rock and sand. Frances Walker arrived in the relative calm of summer when the light is long and the sea rhythms more predictable.”
“As resident artist at the Birsay Field and Arts Centre she was able to explore an area from Marwick Head, (Kitchener’s ‘HMS Hampshire’ sank off this headland in the first world war) to the small tidal island of the Brough of Birsay with its ruined Viking settlement. The area offers much to excite a visual response.”
“Having frequently visited and done much of her work in the Western Isles and lived and taught art there, Frances Walker did not find the environment an alien one. Cliff, rock, sand, seaweed, stone and the many greens of grass and weed were noted in sketch form or as finished drawings. This visual information enabled her to return to Aberdeen to continue her creative output in painting and printmaking. Her commitment to producing a substantial body of work from two relatively short visits, has been impressive.”
Courtesy of Peacock + Worm.