WORK OF THE WEEK | 26th October: JANETTE KERR | Approaching Storm, Foula Disappearing

The sea is so large and powerful that we hardly give a second thought to how it can make an island disappear. Janette Kerr’s vanishing Foula is fifteen miles west of the Shetland mainland, and the Atlantic can be wild that far north. Often fierce enough, if you are in it, to make everything disappear. To local Shetlanders it was the great bringer – fish, seaweed and useful flotsam were a lifeline – and ultimately it was a restless taker too. It is easy to understand how it has been such a long artistic and sometimes scientific obsession for Janette Kerr. I feel it too, the pull of my watery body to a greater water.

Kerr is scientific because she is as likely to collaborate with social historians, fishermen, oceanographers and a pinhole camera, as she is to explore the landscape through meticulous sketch studies. Unlike Turner, she really has been strapped to a mast in a storm. The hypnotic way the sea moves – six small waves, one big wave – predictable and unpredictable, dark, light and colourful - opens her work up to Kerr’s own brand of empirical art. She seeks, through experience, to understand something found beneath the surface and then to express the results through paint. Maybe all great artists do this.

The results of these investigations are seen in this week’s painting of the week, ‘Approaching Storm, Foula Disappearing.’ Kerr’s sea moves with the energy of excited atoms in a foam of white paint which bridges the canvas. Light occasionally breaks through, creating windows of blue and green illumination, and beyond is the black storm. Eventually there will be calm. This is nature and the north at its most raw. It is more than this too. It is also the weight of water, the pull of the moon and a search for connection.