The Intimate Portrait
Until February 1 2009; Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

Gravity Always Wins: Spencer Finch
Until January 4 2009; Dundee Contemporary Arts

It appears that we’ve been spoiled here in Scotland, where exhibitions of British miniatures and portraits on paper have been a regular event at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. According to the British Museum, such shows have been scant over the years, and the last major show on the subject was in 1979, in New Haven, Connecticut.

So when our Portrait Gallery suggested a collaboration with the British Museum on portrait drawings, miniatures and pastels of the 18th and early 19th centuries, they were delighted to come on board, and amazed at the wealth of material put at their disposal.

The show has opened first in Scotland, and contains 200 works cramming the walls with fine detail. But this is far from the cramped and dingy space with dusky lighting that you might imagine; instead, it’s bright, inviting, and with the help of well-written captions, it’s entertaining to the end.

Every picture has a story, as visitors to the Royal Academy appreciated in centuries gone by. The annual exhibition drew thousands of star spotters, putting faces to the names they’d seen in the scandal sheets, and it also drew those who wished to be seen off, as well as on, the walls.

There is, for example, John Dowman’s 1792 chalk drawing of the Countess of Tyrconnel, her fulsome bosom and independent character emphasized by the masculine riding gear she wears. The married countess was a notorious royal mistress, and later left her husband to live with another Earl, finally dying of the cold aged 37. Her direct gaze in this drawing leaves you in no doubt that she is a woman who knows what she wants.

In Georgian and Regency Britain, drawing was considered inferior to painting by the establishment, despite its popularity among collectors. Artists were careful to separate this gentlemanly pastime from their professional activities as painters, Gainsborough refusing to ever accept money for his drawings, although he was passionate about the activity.

It is in works such as these, however, that we can appreciate the greatest spontaneity, and a sense of immediacy which is often missing from formal painted portraiture. It feels like you’ve just popped in for a look over Wilkie’s shoulder, as he works on his unfinished sketch of the Duke of Wellington. The painters Turner and Dyce are captured by colleagues as they work, unposed and unselfconscious.

In a show which is otherwise appealing, my one great disappointment is the lack of women artists. Drawing would not become universally encouraged amongst ladies until a little later, but there are some serious female artists of the period who are conspicuous by their absence.

Catherine Read was a Scottish pastellist who studied with the continental greats, established fashionable studios in London’s West End, and used print publishers to great effect to distribute her work. She’s not here. Angelica Kauffman, one of the founders of the Royal Academy, is present solely as the subject of a drawing by a man who was in love with her. Of 200 works of art, only 4 are by women, and these are all from the Scottish half of the show. British Museum, please note: you clearly have a gap in your collections.

Dundee Contemporary Arts offers something entirely different, although it has more in common with traditional painting than might first appear to be the case. American artist Spencer Finch explores colour and light in some very idiosyncratic ways, in a handful of large installations (and an accompanying show of works on paper in the Common Guild in Glasgow).

Traditionally, art is about translating what the painter sees into a careful mix of chemicals, which reproduce colour on a wall, or panel, or canvas. In the early days of painting, it took an expert to select and prepare each pigment to achieve the desired effect, and more recently much of this science has been prepacked into tubes of paint, but the basic process remains: artists must translate something seen or imagined into a visual poem through the medium of these chemical compounds.

Spencer Finch plays with this basic formula in ways which can create a whole new poetic language, but which more often than not are doomed to failure: the sublime just cannot be pinned down with the science of colour matching.

In Night Sky, the artist mixed paint to match the night sky in Arizona’s Painted Desert. He used four pigments, each of which he later analysed for their molecular structure. These molecules are now represented at DCA as a light installation, each bulb representing a particular atom. The effect is something like a shop’s lighting department, and nothing like the sublime desert sky which it represents with such exactness.

This, like other installations reproducing sunlight through a passing cloud, and the blue sky over a New Zealand glacier, contains within it the frustration of not achieving a real likeness; the frustration for the viewer of trying to imagine something far removed from what is before them; but also the poetry of turning it into something else.

Finch has a rare talent for combining fun with serious deconstruction, and poetry with ideas. These don’t quite come together in his new painting, made especially for this show, but after seeing the total of five works your appetite is whetted, and it’s a shame that more was not squeezed into the roomy DCA. Hopefully this is just a taster, and Finch can be tempted back with more of his quirky paravisual investigations.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 09.11.08