Dawn, night, the ebb of tides; they are the rhythms that set Jane MacNeill’s changing palette.
Connection: ancestral, genetic, collective and personal. It is something we share. When at Orkney’s Hoy, it is instinct to wonder at that great mass of water and rock, and remember the people who have sat in the same spot, possibly five-thousand years ago. In an outdoor church like this, latent memories are ghost-felt from toe to crown. It is easy to feel a presence. Jane MacNeill captures this connection in these wonderful works which, like a Rothko, say a great deal with an apparent simplicity, but they are far from this. They are painted, sanded down, thought about and painted once again... many times over.
I have known MacNeill’s work since her graduate show over twenty-years ago. Back then she created gold-haloed-angels which existed in an ethereal dimension as well as our own. More recently, MacNeill painted birds, the ones around her home that she made eye contact with, and these also brought worlds together, connecting us to bird existence. MacNeill’s mountains do the same. They are portals into the deep, silent, calm memory of a mountain and of water. When I look at them, I sense something of what they have felt, a deep slow time. This is a rare achievement.
The forty-six paintings in this collection are mostly from Orkney and the Western Isles. There is the feeling of being on the edge of something. Dawn, night, the ebb of tides; they are the rhythms that colour Jane MacNeill’s changing palette; one evening-blue moment, followed by a night-blue one and then the yellow ribbon of dawn. A painting is a two-dimensional object, but the world an artist paints has four, and time is the hardest of these to grasp.
Tony Davidson, Director of Kilmorack Gallery
