After studying at Edinburgh College of Art, painter Fionna Carlisle was awarded a post-graduate scholarship to travel to China, which launched a distinguished international career. A fellow student at the ECA Andrew Brown founded the 369 Gallery in 1978, dedicated to young Scottish artists, including many ‘Grandes Dames’ – Pat Douthwaite, Lil Neilson, June Redfern, Caroline McNairn and Fionna Carlisle. The 369 was the first British gallery to take part at the Chicago Art Fair, leading to shows in New York, Europe, the Far East and ‘Contemporary Scottish Painting’ in Moscow.
Since then, Fionna Carlisle has had numerous group and solo exhibitions and important commissions, with work held in prestigious gallery and corporate collections. Her vibrant figurative studies and landscapes have always expressed a bold, distinctive style, as one of the pioneering ‘New Scottish Colourists’.
This show takes us on an inspirational journey, from growing up in Wick, to Edinburgh and Crete, where she lives and works for part of the year. With a golden luminosity, Caithness Thistles – the spiky purple and green Flower of Scotland – evokes childhood walks with her mother and grandmother along the cliffs to the outdoor swimming pool, ‘The Trinkie’.
In the New Town, Edinburgh, a tall vase of yellow flowers – daffodils, gladioli, narcissus – is displayed in a townhouse on Northumberland Street, a composition embodying characteristics of Matisse’s still-life studies, focusing on a decorative pattern of precise colour and contour lines.
Edinburgh’s urban village of Stockbridge has gentrified over the years into a cultural Hampstead/Notting Hill hub of bars, restaurants, bookshops, art and design; a memory of ‘Danube Street ladies’ and Tiffany’s nightclub haunts this scene with the wild expression on the dancer’s face with exaggerated Lulu Guinness red lips.
A delightful nude sketch Lily in the Bath probably dates from student days in Edinburgh. Just like the intimate portrayals of women bathing by Bonnard and Degas, this is an immediate snapshot moment, delicately sketched in charcoal for posterity; today, zapped on a smartphone to share on Instagram.
Lively nightlife is witnessed too in To Loulouthi at El Mondo’s bar in Xania, Crete, in which a couple tentatively eye-up each other, as a guy attempts to sell a bouquet – Loulouthi is the Greek word for flowers. You can almost feel the heat and hear the rhythmic beat of music in this jazzy painting.
The subtle sense of movement through the arm gestures and physicality of these partygoers is also captured in Anterastes, taken from a sketch of a cabaret singer in Prague. Anterastes is the name of an ancient species of cricket found in Greece and Turkey, perhaps reflected in the woman’s antagonistic, protective hold over her male escort. In the foreground, a figure theatrically covers their face with a Munch-like silent scream.
A dramatically-atmospheric scene of wild waves and wind-tossed palm trees in Xania Storm, comprises an electrifying colour palette of purple, green, aqua and orange as the tempestuous sea crashes against the ancient stone walls of the pier. This storm was experienced during Fionna’s first winter living there – a warning that Greece is not always about summer sun.
‘Fionna Carlisle is a naturally gifted painter, her heroic determination has an Olympic dimension for she spends half the year on the island of Crete, where her art soaks up sunlight. She paints people, flowers and landscapes – all spring from the same source whether it’s the dark, sultry or the sumptuousness of sunflowers.’ – Julian Spalding, (Museum director, art critic and writer).
Fascinated by the contrast in colour between Crete and Majorca, she experiments with sunlight shimmering over a Majorcan Landscape. With Kokoschka-esque expressionism, spontaneous, staccato swirls of peach, pink, green and blue paint flow like ribbons and rivers, the floral foliage jungle camouflaged against the craggy sandstone terrain of the mountain.
Portraiture has also been central to Fionna’s career, with important commissions including Energy: North Sea Portraits (Scottish National Portrait Gallery) depicting the close-knit community of oil rig workers, and The Art of Intelligent Ageing, (University of Edinburgh), to commemorate scientists, academics and politicians.
Professor Peter Higgs (1929- 2024) was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the Higgs Boson particle and outstanding research to understand the Universe. As Fionna recalls, ‘I was thrilled when Peter asked me to paint his portrait and we used to meet frequently for lunch at our favourite Greek restaurant in Edinburgh’.
Carlisle’s approach to depicting a likeness of her sitter is clearly about knowing and understanding the person, under the skin.
‘Fionna Carlisle does not paint from photographs. She paints from life. And if you will surrender your sense of who you are, she will capture you as she sees you, not at this moment in time, but at this point in your life, with all that you have seen and known and done, woven into the strokes of her brush’. – Allan Little (BBC News correspondent).
A current project, Women with Form, to be accompanied by a film documentary, features portraits of crime writer Val McDermid, playwright Jo Clifford, tennis champion Judy Murray, blues queen Maggie Bell, and the singer Barbara Dickson, which is on show here for the first time.
This cool, confident lady in red, wrapped up in a glamorous black coat, looks directly at the artist (and us), her head tilted with a slight wry smile and quizzical expression.
‘There’s a similarity between fine art and music, it’s about expression – you feel that you have to express yourself, to sing and play or to paint if it’s in your heart’. – Barbara Dickson
This is a joyous celebration of Fionna Carlisle’s dynamic career, illustrating her signature style: lush landscapes evoking the spirit of time and place, figurative studies bursting with verve and vitality, and portraits reflecting a quiet emotional sensibility. A Grande Dame of the art world indeed.
With thanks to Vivien Devlin for this review.
