Landfall: Donald Urquhart
Until November 22, The Changing Room, Stirling

Drawings by Allan Ramsay
Until January 4, National Gallery of Scotland

When you look out of your window, you see a fragment of the world, enclosed and sectioned by the window frame. Your mind edits out the obstacles in the foreground and reconstitutes the view according to your preconceived notions of its entirety. Donald Urquhart, part of the team which constructed the award-winning shelter, An Turas, in Tiree, sees things differently.

Urquhart sees the window as well as the view, the urban architecture as well as the rural imagery, and the abstract as well as the figurative. All of these co-exist – without judgement or hierarchy – in his art, offering us a more objective way of seeing. He shows us how we shape and control the landscape, not only with ploughs and bulldozers, but in our minds as well.

The artist’s series of Interrupted Landscape Drawings are a literal exploration of the window metaphor, showing a rugged hillside segmented by blank vertical bands, drawn in graphite with consummate draughtsmanship. His Washed Sky series of prints, overpainted with a thin wash of oil, are like viewing a cloudy sky through a smeared pane of glass.

Span is a floorpiece consisting of five concrete slabs lying end to end over a collection of colour photographs of the rippling sea, arranged at jaunty angles as if they are lapping at the foot of the pier. Here is a sharp contrast of modern, minimalist form with familiar images of nature. But which is more real – the actual, real concrete or the ink on paper which represents the ocean?

The question is put another way in Three Paintings about Distance: the first two are meticulous renderings in white and grey oil of a foam-flecked ocean, the third is an entirely matt, baby blue colour field. Is any one of these images more truthful about the sea, and how we choose to see it, than the others?

A bit easier on the mind, and very easy on the eye, is the small display of drawings by 18th Scot, Allan Ramsay, on display downstairs at the National Gallery of Scotland. The Gallery owns 280 of the portraitist’s drawings, most of which rarely go on show, and this is a great chance to see 30 of the best.

Ramsay’s most beautiful drawings loom from the dark paper like ghosts in a mist, so the dim lighting of the cabinets is a positive feature for once. There are different sorts of drawings here, from quick compositional sketches to finished studies. The sketches are a whirlwind of spontaneity compared with Ramsay’s better-known works: in one, a hand is completely conveyed in seven quick strokes, while elsewhere he has worked for hours to get the modelling of hands just right.

The most refined of the artist’s tonal studies are in fact copies from works by the Neo-Classical painter Pompeo Batoni in Italy, but the indisputable star of the show is Ramsay’s famous red chalk drawing of his second wife, Margaret, looking down. This tender and unassuming work is successful as much for those areas left blank as for those softly modelled. Positively glowing with life, Margaret is a Mona Lisa for Scotland.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 09.11.03