Alan Cameron — A Legacy | The Torrance Gallery Sunday Journals — No. 18
Sometimes an exhibition begins with the work. This one began with a person.
Over the past few months, I have had the great pleasure of getting to know Alan Cameron through his widow, Ann. From her stories, photographs and memories, a picture has gradually emerged of someone rather remarkable: an artist, architect and landscape architect, certainly, but also a man for whom creativity and an appreciation of beauty seem to have permeated almost every part of life. An aesthete.
Cameron, in his studio, Coburg House Art Studios, Leith
The more I learned, the more I felt that simply putting a selection of Alan’s work on the walls would not be quite enough.
We wanted to celebrate the man behind it.
That is where Alan Cameron — A Legacy began.
Antonio and I visited Ann to spend time with the collection that remained in Alan’s estate. There is something quite different about choosing an exhibition this way. We were not selecting from a newly completed body of work or asking an artist to produce something for a particular space. We were looking through what remained of a lifetime of making and deciding which works might, together, begin to tell something of the person who made them.
Cameron, sketching for a commission of a view in the Ettrick Valley, Scottish Borders.
Alan worked principally in pastel and was a master of the medium. His subjects ranged across the landscapes and towns of Scotland and Italy, two places whose very different climates offered him entirely different palettes of light, colour and atmosphere. His work is recognisable and figurative, but never merely descriptive. He was interested in the essential character of a place — its form, texture, colour and, as one description of his practice wonderfully puts it, its temperature.
Pentland Hills from Longniddry, Alan Cameron, Pastel, 120x100cm
It was only once we had hung the exhibition that something became particularly apparent to me. Alan was extraordinarily good at skies.
That might sound like an oddly specific observation, but look around the Garden Room and they really sing. Brooding skies, shifting skies, skies carrying weather in from somewhere beyond the edge of the picture. Some are luminous; others almost seem to press down upon the landscape beneath them.
September Hills, Alan Cameron, pastel, 70x90cm
And this is where his command of pastel becomes so apparent. Pastel can be an unforgiving medium quickly getting muddy, yet Alan could use it to create skies with extraordinary depth and movement — building colour, atmosphere and light while retaining the immediacy of the pigment itself.
The sky tells you where you are.
A cool Scottish landscape feels unmistakably different from the warmth of Italy. You can almost sense the weather, the quality of the air, whether rain has just passed or whether the heat has been sitting over a town all afternoon.
Alan also had a remarkable compositional sensitivity. Roads, rooflines, trees and stretches of water seem to fall naturally into place, giving even his most atmospheric works a quiet sense of structure and balance.
Perhaps his architectural background helped. Alan understood structure, proportion and space, but he also understood that a place is experienced rather than simply measured. His training as a landscape architect must surely have sharpened that sensitivity further: an awareness of buildings within landscape, of what sits beyond them, and of the way weather and light alter everything.
Catalogue cover, York to New York, presented by Ibstock Brickwork Design Centres, 1986
Always beautifully framed, alongside the pastels, we have included a small number of Alan’s pen drawings online. They offer another glimpse of the same eye. Elegant, economical and assured, they strip away colour to sepia tones and leave the quality of his draughtsmanship exposed.
Carrubbers Close, Alan Cameron, Ink and Wash, 52x73cm
One of Ann’s stories captures that confidence rather brilliantly.
For a wedding in St. Andrews, Alan was asked to create a picture of the celebration as it was actually happening, with the finished work to be presented to the bridegroom later that same evening. I love the audacity of the whole thing. Alan and Ann spied the ceremony from the organ loft. Ann instructing Alan to capture the colours of the guests correctly, knowing that later they would look for themselves in the picture. While the guests were eating, drinking, talking and dancing, Alan worked fervently somehow distilling that important moment quickly enough that it could become part of the occasion itself.
Cameron working on 'live' commission to celebrate a marriage, St. Andrews
It is difficult to imagine a better demonstration of an artist’s eye at work: deciding in real time, under pressure what matters, what can be left out, and how a fleeting moment can be made permanent.
It is also a lovely reminder that Alan’s skill was not confined to carefully considered landscapes. There was spontaneity there too, and a willingness to trust his hand.
The more I have learned about Alan, the less inclined I am to separate these things neatly into artist, architect, draughtsman or designer.
Ann’s stories reveal somebody whose aesthetic sense seems simply to have been part of his character. It extended into gardens, homes, clothes, food and the pleasure he took in the world around him — a true bon vivant. Being creative was not something that began when he sat down to work and stopped when he put the pastels away.
Cameron's easel and materials set out in his Victorian greenhouse, Scottish Borders
That, more than anything, is what we wanted this exhibition to communicate.
Alan Cameron — A Legacy is not intended as a comprehensive retrospective. It is a selection we have made from the works remaining in Alan’s estate, chosen with Ann and with an increasing sense of responsibility towards the story they collectively tell.
The Torrance Gallery has now been entrusted with exclusive representation of the full estate collection, so this exhibition is really only the beginning.
We are also working on a catalogue dedicated to Alan’s life and work. Our hope is that it will allow the exhibition to continue beyond the few weeks these particular works are on our walls — bringing together the pastels and drawings with photographs, memories and some of the stories that have made us understand why Alan was so loved and admired.
There is, inevitably, only so much of a person that can be communicated through the things they leave behind.
But standing in the Garden Room surrounded by Alan’s landscapes, and hearing Ann and friends speak about the man who made them, I feel we have been allowed a rather special glimpse.
