In June 2024, Roger Spence visited Kilmacolm to meet Rosemary Beaton in her home studio. She set aside her summer gardening and imminent grandmothering to talk about a life of drawing and painting.

It’s a stone’s throw from Windy Hill, the house designed in 1900 by Charles Rennie Mackintosh for the businessman and art collector, William Davidson, to The Pond House, a spanking new architect-designed house, built during lockdown for Rosemary Beaton and her husband, Paul.

From the drive, a long and seemingly unbroken brick wall could suggest a functional public building, but once inside, natural light pours into the house through huge windows and skylights, and the views are of nature, big trees, long country vistas, and in the foreground a precipitous drop, thick with garden shrubs, cascading via two small terraces to a dark pond.

The back wall of the house is a gallery space where Rosemary has the chance to review her recent work and a few older pieces, alongside work of artist friends. Guests are privileged to enjoy a Rosemary Beaton solo show on Scottish soil, something that’s strangely not a regular public occurrence.

Rosemary’s public profile is usually prefaced by acknowledging her remarkable success in winning the National Portrait Award as a student at GSA in 1984. She had two paintings in the National Portrait Gallery in London by the age of 24, the winning entry (a portrait of Paul) and a commissioned painting of broadcaster, Sir Robin Day. The following year, Agi Katz of the Boundary Gallery in London mounted a five woman show called ‘The Glasgow Girls’, with Rosemary strongly featured, and the tag stuck: a Glasgow Girl.

Actually, Rosemary was born in Greenock, grew up in Bishopton, and apart from a short spell in a small Dumbarton flat and house in Ayr, has lived most of her life in Bishopton and now Kilmacolm. She regards Inverclyde as her home and I’m sure she values those few small miles that distance the rolling, rich farmland and grazing moors in which Kilmacolm is embedded, from the urban sprawl that extends west from Glasgow to Paisley and Renfrew and ends in Linwood and Johnstone, just over the hill. Her world is one where the Clyde is wide and the hills are constants in the distance.

The house was featured in Homes and Interiors Magazine soon after completion, and two years on, it offers the frisson of novel and bold design. Round every corner there’s an image to behold that shouts of a designer’s conception, yet, straight away, one has a strong sense of a family home. It’s partly down to Rosemary’s natural warmth and ease, but she clearly knows and feels what a home should be, and she and Paul have the capability to combine it with beautiful aesthetics. Windy Hill and High Sunderland come to mind.

The studio is a clever extension to the building. It marks the end of the development, but stands apart from the rest of the house. There is a break in the brick wall that admits us to paved space, and a panorama over the garden, before we turn left into a square–ish room with the aforementioned brick walls on two sides, near full room height windows on the other two sides, and two large skylights. She has neat shelving systems against the walls, with finished paintings stacked in degrees of archive history, whilst recent work and works in progress sit on easels and lean against furniture and walls. In the centre of the room is open floor, often the location for her painting, as she works on large canvases on the flat tiles.

In my bag, I’ve a copy of Rosemary Beaton (Sansom & Co), 2018, 192pp. It’s a handsome book containing hundreds of plates of the artist’s works and essays by Clare Henry, Sandy Moffat and Alison Harper. There are very few words by Rosemary Beaton. She speaks through her art, which is well reproduced, and highlights her drawings, mostly of people, with many men and women portrayed naked. Throughout the survey the insistence on finding the humanity in a subject is striking. She portrays through transmission of small gesture, sensitive reading of body language, and instant improvised choices that focus on one element and pay less regard to another; and then she adds dissonance in colouring and unusual vantages. It’s a world devoid of pomp and circumstance, a fascination with all aspects of humanity.

In the margins, I had written Pat Douthwaite, Egon Schiele, Anda Paterson, Lys Hansen (note 1). I had also read the press articles and the occasional commentary on her, without recognising the human story in this most humane of artists. Hearing Rosemary Beaton’s voice was my mission as I sat down in one of the studio’s two seats. Rosemary served a strong coffee and we were off!

“I grew up in a tenement on Trafalgar Street in Greenock with my mum, dad, and two brothers. I went to school in Greenock until I was seven. My dad was a ship’s engineer and my mum was a nurse. My dad worked on a ship in Devon for about ten months and we all lived close by in Westward Ho! while he was working there. For the whole family this was a bit of excitement, a venture into the big world away from Greenock. When we moved back, we moved to Bishopton. I was brought up in Bishopton from the age of eight. We still had ties to Greenock as my dad returned to work there, and my grandparents stayed on Lyle Street and St Lawrence Street. I feel coming to Kilmacolm, I’m almost back home, you see the Clyde every day. Inverclyde is an incredible place to be. The views are remarkable. The landscape is inspirational…”

Rosemary’s artistic interest came largely from outside the family home, but there were two small seeds that, in hindsight, were key: “My mum said that when I was younger I was always bored, and she would put down some pencils and paper, but I remember that I had these colouring books that were quite magical. Basically they had a black image on the white paper, but once you put the water on the paper all of this colour came alive. It was lovely.” An interest in drawing started here, and a fascination in colour, and especially those bright, almost fluorescent, pigments released in the magic colouring books.

There were other factors: “My Granny Gillen also had quite interesting old-fashioned paintings that I was drawn to, mainly landscapes and big forest-type images. I would think: ‘wouldn’t it be great to go into these landscapes?’ In my young child’s head I was looking at paintings and wondering how I could get inside them.”

And meanwhile, there were social and political issues to consider and address. “It was tricky growing up with a Catholic mother and a Church of Scotland father. In the West Coast it still wasn’t hugely acceptable. It was actually called a mixed marriage in those days, which was crazy. Did that play into my work later on?, I think it definitely did.”

Perhaps the young girl who was handed the pencil and paper to avert her boredom was already showing artistic talent. Rosemary says that she had some rudimentary skill, but nothing above average.

“I think co-ordination comes with a belief in what you’re doing, and I gathered that belief in the life class at art school. I didn’t have much skill at 14 but I worked hard. My teenage drawings were the usual mix of ‘old utensils with reflections’: dull still lives. It never really interested me, the whole still life thing, but I had a really inspirational art teacher, Clifford Ulph. We’re still friends, he came to my 60th Birthday party last year, and he’s been a constant support for nearly 50 years.”

“While I was in sixth year I went to life drawing at Paisley Arts Centre. It was here that I first started to draw the naked body. Also at this time I volunteered at Erskine Hospital for disabled ex-servicemen. I used to play dominoes with the old men and was fascinated by their worn faces. I was always drawing them.”

“A lot of my family are in nursing. My mother was a nurse, my aunt was a nurse, my brother ended up being a nurse too. I thought about it, but I really wanted to go to art school. At the time, I thought ‘that’s maybe quite a selfish thing to want to do’, but I got in, which was incredibly exciting.”

“I think it’s far more tricky to get in to GSA nowadays because you have to show a very adult way of working. In those days you were coming in straight from high school, at 17, and basically only doing what you had been given to do at school. I didn’t really have much external influences with the exception of drawing at Erskine Hospital, and maybe that’s what got me in.”

“In my year there were a couple of students that were a wee bit older, which was nice. Margaret Hunter was one of them. She was probably about 35 when she graduated and then she went off to Berlin to study under Baselitz. But for the most part people were my age. My best friend at art school was Mary McLean. To me she was exotic because she was from Edinburgh. Everybody else was Glaswegian or from this area, with some people from the islands. It all seemed very local. Nowadays the art school is very international. It was a different place in the early 80s.”

How did Rosemary compare with her art school peers. What was her technical ability like when she arrived?

“I probably thought I was at zero when I saw everybody else. But people develop at different rates. I’m a hard worker and was very capable of putting in a lot of hours in those days. I was inspired and really enjoyed my art school life to the full. I didn’t have to go back and cook for a family, look after elderly parents, or work. I stayed at home, and I didn’t have to give my mum and dad any dig money. We got grants and travel money; it all seemed very do-able, very easy. I would spend all day and most of the evenings in the studio at GSA.”

There was no formal training in drawing.

“Most of the students drew all sorts of things in the studio but for me the best part of the day was the life drawing class. You got your coffee at 4 o’clock, and life drawing was at half past four, and you worked till 6 o’clock. The tutors would come in and whoever was assigned to that day would saunter around just to make sure that the model was okay. They would maybe say something to a few people, and then leave so for the most part we were left to our own devices.”

“I think that in those years there was quite an excitement and buzz in the life room. There were quite a few students like me who were in the life room a lot: Mary MacLean, Maureen Finn, Lesley (Burr) and Alison (Harper); but I was probably the one who would be in all week, because for me it was actually time out. I would be having to think about my painting quite hard during the day and thinking what I was doing, building up certain things… and then it was ‘fantastic, it’s 4 o’clock’. For me, it was like an extended coffee break. And I would go in and just draw and not think.”

Was Rosemary totally relaxed in drawing at a very early stage of art school.

“Completely… Yes… I do remember one particular tutor who came in and said, ‘Do you like what you do, or the way you’re drawing?’ and I thought, ‘Well, I don’t know, I wasn’t thinking about it.’ I didn’t want it to be over-gestural, but I wanted to have a confidence in my hand-to-eye co-ordination, so a lot of the time I wouldn’t look at the paper, and I would be drawing blind. Maybe I was trying to get that energy. It was always about energy. And the idea of the portrait was always there early on. Some students didn’t put the head or face in their drawing. When I went back to teach at the Art School, I would say, ‘why not do the head?’, and some students would say, ‘well, life drawing is about the body’, and I would say, ‘how can you have a body without a head?’ For me, the life drawings were always portraits. It was about getting the energy of the person, trying to get that on to the page, and I think that nowadays when I go out into the landscape it’s the same thing: trying to get the energy of the landscape on to the page. It’s not about drawing it exact or painting it exact; it’s about the feeling of working in an environment that you are challenged with, but also feel probably quite content in…even if it’s raining.”

The tutors in Painting and Drawing at GSA at that time were Jack Knox, Sandy Moffat, Barbara Rae, Geoff Squire and Jimmy Robertson.

“I love Jack Knox’ s drawing. It is always fun-based. A lot of his painterly work was quite serious in the 80s. His drawings of baskets of pears and bicycles spring to mind. I didn’t see any drawing of Sandy’s. Sandy’s work was always big and painterly. Barbara Rae was a draughtswoman, multi-media, inks and charcoal, things like that. Barbara had little colour in her work in those days. It was much more muted than it is now. Jimmy Robertson was a natural painter. I love his paintwork. But I chose Barbara as a tutor because she straddled drawing, painting, and working from life. However, I don’t ever remember seeing Barbara doing a life drawing, as such. I recall a lot of the time Barbara was away on sabbatical. I used to go downstairs and get Jimmy and say, ‘Can you come and help with my painting?’ And then he would laugh and say ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake Rosemary, why didn’t you choose me as your tutor?’- as he was climbing up the stairs yet again. The tutors were always walking about the studios and always delighted to see what you were doing.”

It seems strange, but perhaps telling, that the most natural draughtsman and tutor at GSA at this time, Geoff Squire, doesn’t feature in many of Rosemary’s recollections. However, he seemed to have been keeping an eye on her progress because when, in third year, she decided to submit a portrait to the National Portrait Gallery for their annual award, “Geoff very kindly let me borrow a beautiful gilt frame that would fit my five-foot painting. He must have been very keen to see me do well.”

At twenty years old, Rosemary was able to draw people completely naturally, gather their natural gestures and reproduce them in an instant. Presumably, that fed in to her winning the National Portrait Award in 1984. Her painting of Paul had a fresh, natural feel.

“That’s what the judge said. It was a fresh approach and very different to the English style of portraiture at that time. which was maybe kind of tight. Anthony Green: that kind of tightness about it. My portrait was a bit more fluid and I was always conscious of angles, the positioning of the model and where I was… I honed in on Paul and the angle he was sitting at with his legs… it’s quite a bold angle.”

Rosemary never used an easel in the life room; she was most at ease low down on the floor. She went to informal music gigs where she could draw musicians from the floor or a side-stage vantage. Some portrait painters can spend much time setting up their subject, thinking about angles and lighting. My impression is that Rosemary didn’t calculate anything. She just had a natural feel that set an interesting way to do it.

“It doesn’t mean to say that it’s not tricky. Nothing ever comes easy: you’re looking so hard and you’re reacting to what’s in front of you with a timeline. I’m always aware the sitter could be bored out of his brains sitting there posing, and I’ve got to think ‘I’m going to have to give him a break in fifteen/twenty minutes and I’ve got to get it down quickly’. When you’re working with a model it’s always the case. My calculation in working with life models is ‘right, I’ve got half an hour and if it’s a really difficult pose: I’ve got two minutes’, so you’ve got to work quickly and to a time frame.”

It’s always been a key element of Rosemary’s success: her ability to work at speed (note 2) And her drawing speed was obviously noted. Everybody knew that she could do it faster and get a result. Everything was intuitive. It was relaxed. It was easy.

“Not easy, but relaxed. Relaxed and maybe in the zone… While I was still at art school the BBC came to look for a fast draughtsman or -woman and I was chosen to be in a short film called “Paris” which was a beautiful drama set in Glasgow. It was about two retired ladies who come together and were reminiscing in the Mackintosh House. I had to draw these two well dressed women because they were talking about art and women of the day. The camera was focused on my drawing. If you get a few seconds in a film, that’s quite a long time. I can’t remember how long the conversation was: a minute or two minutes, but I suppose that’s quite a long time in filmic terms, so the camera did a hone-in on me and I had to draw very, very fast; complete the two figures, and then it honed out. I’ve put the cameo appearance on my website so people can have a wee look.”

National Portrait Prize success, film profile, immediate commissions to paint the Lord Provost, London Gallery representation, ‘The Glasgow Girls’… as Rosemary graduated, all the signs were that she would be following in the footsteps of Messrs Campbell, Conroy, Currie, Howson and Wiszniewski.

“Nobody had it easy in the 80s if you wanted to make painting your career. You either had to earn enough money to look after a growing family like the men did or look after kids full time and paint when you were able. Like the women did. The New Glasgow Boys worked hard, but they didn’t have to think of the childcare aspect, whereas my female student friends and I did. My artistic days would have been nowhere near as long as their working days because I couldn’t work nine to five in the studio. I had to look after our four kids. I always felt driven and managed to paint all the way through, whilst bringing up the kids. I had help from Paul and my mum but I had no time to do all the other important career tasks like build relationships with galleries, etc.”

What was driving her? A need to paint? A need to make money? Celebrity…?

“It wasn’t about making money for me. I think that the Glasgow Boys knew they had to make money, they were all having young families as well, and I suppose for the most part their wives were looking after the kids. They might say otherwise, but I don’t think so. I think nowadays, women and men can try and make equal time for childcare. Back in the 80s that was still not the case although I know of some artists who did - Helen Flockhart and her husband, Peter Thomson, for example.

Life changed with marriage and the arrival of her first child, but painting changed too. The innocence and immediacy of her people subjects was overtaken by a sense that she should use her painting to make a statement. She has talked about Sandy Moffat’s influence here: “Sandy was incredibly calm. His ideas about sending an important message to the viewer were important to his students and I loved his bold stance – big canvases, loud colour…” (note 3). Injustices; Catholic/Protestant tensions; and various other hot topics of the day were filtered through Beaton’s empathetic lenses and came out shouting.

“My painting did change quite dramatically, I think. When I came out of Art School I was certainly working on quite a few big political pieces about the Northern Ireland peace process, and that would have been about ‘98, and I worked in oils on a pretty large scale at that time, even with young children about. There were always rooms in the house that I could use and tidy the work away, but the strong smells, turpentine and that kind of stuff, is not really conducive to picking your toddler up quickly, so I switched completely to acrylics when the kids were quite young. It took confidence to do that, because at one point all the large-scale work was in oils. Most artists weren’t really experimenting with other types of paint. And then I met Bert Irvin, who made large scale paintings in acrylic. He was a breath of fresh air. He had a wonderful exhibition at the Third Eye Centre, so joyful it just blew me away. And I thought, it doesn’t have to be oil paint to be serious. I could be serious in acrylics. I think that really changed my approach to working. I could pick my kids up with acrylic hands, they would dry in a minute, so it was easier and quicker, and I loved the fun aspect of it all, and I enjoyed the layering. With the oils it would take a bit of time, with acrylic it didn’t.”

Irvin’s Third Eye show was all about huge canvases splashed with broad strokes of bright colour, bold and radiant. Rosemary added Irvin’s big impact concept to those she’d already absorbed from Sandy Moffat, Stephen Campbell, and others, but she applied it in the same way as Currie, Howson (and Moffat at that time): taking on politically charged concepts.

“They fascinated me. It was interesting. I think my whole work with figuration has been about injustice since those early days and telling stories that need to be told. I think that’s why we paint, isn’t it? I think that’s why we write, why we sing: we try to make sense of the world that’s around us.”

“I worked on a series of paintings about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. A lot of my work based on this subject was very poetic. This one we’re looking at now, a young girl in a flower (Learning the Merits of Dialogue and Compromise) - you wouldn’t particularly look at that and think it was a political piece. You’ve got a sliver of the red sky above, which is synonymous with the troubles in my work, and then you’ve got this gentleness of the flower opening up, and this very young girl, and she’s trying to open her mind as the flower does gently. The meaning behind this is to wake up and compromise. There has to be some sort of compromise for people to go forward in a peace process.”

The merits of dialogue and compromise had been with her throughout her entire upbringing. She’d perhaps unconsciously been observing and nursing afflictions caused by religious schisms, bigotry and hatred for many years, and she knew the cure. The more that I look at Rosemary’s work and think about the artistic choices she’s made, the sense of nursing is everywhere: quick and dispassionate analysis of a subject; constant cheerfulness in the face of adversity; empathy with people in all walks of life; a wish to enrich the ordinary, and to find positive outcomes for her subjects, herself, and her viewers.

Words helped in the conception of the political works and continue to do so. Rosemary writes as part of the creative process, setting text sometimes in poetic lines and sometimes in prose, although she won’t necessarily offer these alongside the painting. “I like to write sometimes when its quiet in the studio - it helps me focus on what I really want to say. The poems are always short.”

A White Flag for Ulster and Stars in Heaven are two paintings based on the troubles . In White Flag she positions the woman boldly centre stage with the Irish tricolour on her breasts and the man is held in her grip almost falling out of the canvas. The white sheet that was wrapped around the frame has long gone now.

“In Stars in Heaven I wanted to tell the story of a young woman, Bernadette Martin, who was killed by the IRA in her boyfriend’s bed. The palette is limited and the figures are linear and tender.”

Rosemary’s reaction to hatred and violence was to put aside the bombast, empathise with women, stress the softer side of people, to be gentle and introduce a little humour. She’s nursing the patient in distress, accepting the facts and looking to ameliorate wherever she can. She presented it always via bold image, strong message, and angular colour harmonies. After the Ulster series, she moved on to hostages, which were huge news at the time, and applied the same approach, cutting through the anger and the squalor to touch the shared humanity, to humble the machismo.

This is her way of drawing viewers in to her pictures, inviting them to explore the emotions, and sense for themselves the pain and the pleasure, with the darkness contrasted by light and colour and hope.

“I read Brian Keenan’s An Evil Cradling. It’s an utterly remarkable book. He tells a story in it about his captors giving him an orange in his cell, and he can’t eat it because he wants to look at the colour. For me, that was so gripping: what would it be like not to see any colour? I did a huge painting based on that colour orange.”

“I read Jill Morrell, and John McCarthy’s Some Other Rainbow. It wasn’t nearly as powerful as An Evil Cradling, but it gave you an insight into that awful time they had together. Things like that were influencing me, and injustice certainly creeps through in a lot of the work.  Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal was inspirational to me in the earlier years and this idea of things being beautiful but evil at the same time appealed.”

Rosemary understands that seeing the positives in negative situations has a flip side that recognises pain and failings behind surficial warmth and beauty; comfort and order. She wants to understand the people and the situations that are her subject matter, and she wants the viewer to engage in such a way that you have an understanding too, and one that goes well beyond the slogans of power that envelop the news media.

“This also brings to mind a particular exhibition that Alison Harper and I were invited to be part of - 500 Women - in London.  This was a series of works in response to the femicide in Mexico at Ciudad Juarez, a lot of women were going missing, a lot of women were murdered and very few people were being brought to justice. I got hooked on the injustice, I was working it through… my work has been about feminism probably throughout my career. This seemed a topic that I could get my teeth into, that I was enjoying and yet the process was challenging.  We were each given a picture of a missing woman, and I tried to do a portrait of this missing woman and it wasn’t working at all, and in the end I put the photograph away. I couldn’t use it. There was nothing artistic coming out of it that was helping me to create a painting for this particular exhibition.”

With the photograph and the images of dead women set aside, Rosemary worked to try and find a different angle, one in which the women’s lives might be seen almost as triumphant, empowering; and one that avoided the sordid nature of the source material.

“I was in the studio so much at that time constantly trying to paint her, or images of her. I turned to a more poetic vision of her being part of the landscape. After Fruit of the River I came into the studio and thought, ‘Right, I’m not going to paint any more dead women, they’re coming back to life as Goddesses’ and that was a bit of fresh air. I probably said that ‘I have to get out of this, things have to be more joyful, things have to be more upbeat, a bit more cheeky’. I think humour has always been part of my work, anyway, in and out over the years, so some of my work started to be a bit more humourous.”

“In Fruit of the River, for the most part the colours (all acrylics) in the painting are quite seductive, they’re quite gentle, they’re bringing you in, they’re not harsh, you’re not not going to look at that given the subject matter. The painterly techniques are quite soft, there’s a bit of monoprinting in there, and if you took an aspect of it in close up, you’d say that’s very abstract, but when you stand back, you see it all comes together. I leave the fruit very deliberately twee, as opposed to being abstract, just to bring us back into the natural world, as opposed to the world I’m trying to create in the painting. Basically, this woman, based on an image I’d drawn previously, is seeping into the river and becoming part of the landscape, her breasts are multiplying and becoming the mountains in the faraway landscape. There’s no sky. I didn’t want it to be a landscape as such, but an image of a landscape within a hard border.”

“The same thing happened for Nymph of the Holy Well. I liked the idea of the strength of the woman within a particular landscape but with everything whitened out in and around it, to draw particular attention to the story. I wasn’t trying to do anything realistic. I wanted the viewer to know they were looking at some kind of story, and not a generic woman in a landscape.”

“There’s quite a bit of printmaking going on in Flora: very simple monoprinting. Basically she is a statue coming back to life and she is feeding the garden. These three paintings are about nurturing the land, and about sadness. I think the breast milk can be seen as tears. In The Nymph of the Holy Well, the nipple is an eye and that is a feature that is used in an awful lot of medieval paintings, so the eye is crying or the nipple is letting the milk drop down to the land to feed the holy well, or I think in the case of the Fruit of The River, everything is leaving the body and the milk is part of that. In Flora she is definitely feeding the land and the landscape.”

Empathising with fellow women has always been central to Rosemary’s work, but the statement has gradually evolved into the story. In the political paintings the message was immediately very strong and very direct. She was taking a subject face-on. The Goddess paintings are much more subtle with a lot more narrative behind them. They aim to tell stories about women, motherhood, nature, life… and to let the viewer interpret. Yet they came about in response to anger and frustration.

“It was a pivotal moment, that’s for sure. I would say I was always drawn to the female form. It was the most important thing in my paintings up to that date - even in the more political ones the woman is always very important. I was always more inclined to enjoy the female form when I was drawing in the life room. The male drawings turned out quirky, funny, I don’t know why, but the female drawings could cover the whole range of emotion: quirky, funny, sensual, sad, all of these emotions, female emotion, my emotion.”

“The Painter is a female painter; she’s out in the landscape, she’s painting plein air and she’s doing what the Glasgow Boys or the French Impressionists all did, working outside. But of course here she’s got a happy healthy baby slung on her shoulder, so a bit of humour coming in there… and a strong message.”

So few artists in recent time focus on the human body. It’s not at all fashionable. Rosemary Beaton comes into the studio, and says to herself, ‘I’m going to paint another woman. In this painting, my woman is going to do this.’ It’s an endless fascination. It’s like Morandi painting pots. Beaton paints women. And continues to find new expression. What motivates?

“A defiance, maybe. The feminist issue never goes away, does it? I think we’re getting to be more equal in our society, but in other societies it’s still not equal is it? I think the gender balance is getting better but…”

“There are (and have been) a lot of women. Paula Rego painted the human body a lot. There are a lot of influences I could draw on - I did go as far back as Botticelli, just breathtaking. There are many influences from history, but nowadays, maybe Chantal Joffe. She does big, powerful women.”

I wonder if she came to the point where she felt that Rosemary Beaton had to paint the human body and bright colours, because that was her identity.

“No. I think it’s a journey and it will keep moving on. I’m excited about the next series of paintings. I’ve got a huge big canvas here ready to go, but at the moment it’s gardening time, and that painting will get started very soon.”

Drawing and painting people has dominated Rosemary’s artistic life, but it doesn’t define her, and in the last decade there have been more and more landscapes. This has been coincident with a growing interest in gardening, and chunks of time spent in the countryside in the West of Scotland and Majorca.

“I’ve always been drawn to landscape. I carry sketchbooks everywhere. If we went on holiday, I’d always be drawing a landscape or the kids at the beach. At art school we went to Culzean to work in the landscape every year and when I was in 3rd year I was awarded the GSA summer scholarship to Hospitalfield House in Arbroath. I spent the whole summer of that year working on the beach at Lunan Bay and drawing all the small villages nearby like Auchmithie. It was here that I filled many sketch books with drawings of jazz and folk musicians who played at the Foundry bar in Arbroath.”

“Drawing has been a constant throughout my life. Every year for the last 21 years I have been going to the islands with some art friends, and that has made a huge impact on my work… it just feeds it… you’re a week in the landscape, working, and it’s a joy, even if it’s raining.”

“I’ve started to do some mixed media drawing. We’re looking at ‘Loch’ just now - it is acrylic on paper, and again it’s got some soft imagery in it, and I’m trying to play around with the ideas of screen printing, but it’s not screen printing. That interests me right now: to bring that printed form into a drawing… whether these become bigger paintings I don’t know. They’re just landscapes taken from the drawings, but almost done in situ when I’m out in these places. I’ll be out drawing during the day, but at night I’ll come back and I’ll maybe work on an A1 paper acrylic format like this. Whether that’s a mid-way, onto a bigger canvas, I’m not that sure. There’s “The Shore at Ardnamurchan”. It looks like a screen print, but it’s not. It’s acrylic on paper and worked with a squeegee and brushes. It’s just quite fun to do. It’s a very different way for me of working – painting immediately after the drawing is done in the landscape, and only taking a few hours. The thinking is: ‘What can I do from the drawing aspect to get me into another frame of mind to maybe take me onto a bigger canvas?’

It is an interesting new world, incorporating layering, multiple references, and detailed work in a colour scheme that challenges the senses. She’s communicating with the viewer through another prism.

“I work abstractly, but I can’t seem to produce just an abstract piece… I think abstraction is very difficult. In ‘Loch’ I have swimmers and kayakers and in the Ardnamuchan piece I’ve added shore birds.”

But wherever she is, and whatever the context, portrait, landscape, detailed, abstract, the colours are always Rosemary Beaton colours.

“They are getting more zingy. It’s fun to play about with it. I do worry sometimes that they’re all just a bit vibrant and you have to take it down a wee bit, but these are good problems to resolve. That’s why you paint. I regularly think: ‘this is not quite working, I need to do something else to it’, or I just try things to see if they work…”

The colours in many of Rosemary’s landscapes are not the ones we might see out and about on the West Coast, for example. It’s almost as though she’s bored with what the eye can see (a bit of Baudelaire here!), but perhaps she’s asking the viewer to look at these subjects with a heightened awareness, and all of their senses switched on? There’s a parallel there with the approach to human issues and emotions. Perhaps it’s a ‘come on’ to bring you in to the painting, encourage you to look about, and perhaps challenge you to think more about the subject, and how you feel about it. I’m not sure, so I ask, ‘this hits my senses in a way that a flat grey/green/blue won’t. Is that why you’re using these colours?’

“Well I love colour. To me it’s joyful and it’s playful and that’s the reason I use it. Maybe other people choose not to, because they want it to be a bit more solemn. I think the colour is very different in these drawings. I’d still consider it a drawing and not a painting, because it’s not on a canvas.”

Are they preparatory?

“I don’t know. To me drawing is the beginning of everything and they stand on their own.”

Rosemary has been going to Majorca for a few years now. Did it bring new colours into her life?

“Did it? Or was that colour coming? The idea of the brightness in Majorca is certainly a thing. Everything is so bright and clear, whereas in Scotland, it’s so wonderfully soft and cloudy and you get lots of different shading on the mountains. They become very complicated because you’ve got all that different colour happening just with the clouds simply passing over the land, whereas in the Mediterranean you’re going to get a blue sky and you’re going to get that clarity. So maybe not so much the colour changing, but the light and the clarity.”

There are no shadows in The Bird of Paradise. She’s almost inside the landscape here.

“I’ve taken a small area of land and I’ve made it massive, whereas in the smaller acrylic drawing I’ve taken a very large area and made it small. I like playing around with scale. There’s quite a lot of patience needed for this type of painting in oil. I’m using a lot of monoprinting techniques and the texture is really important for me. I work on two or three paintings at the same time, so I can let some dry while working on a different canvas. I do like the cleanliness of a brilliant oil. I find it quite difficult to keep it clean. The paint has got to be dry when you want to add another layer of colour or a glaze so I can easily wait a week before going back to any one piece... Whereas with the acrylic, basically as soon as you put it on the canvas it’s dry and you can put a layer on top of it. But Bird of Paradise looks fresh and I’m pleased about that.”

“I was painting a lot of women in landscapes touching on environmental issues before lockdown. When lockdown came, I started to paint large-scale landscape without the figure. I had been working on quite a few sketches in Mallorca and I was glad I had brought them back to work from - I just started to make them bigger. I wanted to make the lockdown landscapes joyful. Bird of Paradise was painted from a sketch of my courtyard garden in Mallorca. I’ve made everything much larger - from the succulents to the Bird of Paradise flowers in the centre. It’s oil on canvas, so we’re back to oil again, and it’s just about the light and of course the joy of being in the landscape.”

“The lockdown landscapes were shown in the exhibition ‘5@GPS’ at the Glasgow Print Studio in November 2021. In November of last year Alison Harper, Lesley Burr and I had a huge show in London. It was called ‘Glasgow Girls - Resist Much Obey Little’. For this show I made some new pieces. I went large scale again and the women came back in full force for that show. They’re all big feminist pieces and I loved painting them. In Sleeping Beauty I reduced the colour to red and blue and went back to painting in acrylic. I wanted it to be a strong statement about women still being on high alert.”

“The London show was my biggest exhibition (with well over 50 works) since the Glasgow exhibition ‘Alternative Realities’ and the book launch in 2018 which had more than 100 pieces of work. The Glasgow Girls London show was a huge undertaking but really rewarding, especially when you’re putting something together on that scale with close friends since art school. We had great fun doing it together.”

“Artists supporting each other is vital and it was wonderful to have some of our art school contemporaries including Adrian Wiszniewski and Ken Currie attend the private view with our GSA tutor Sandy Moffat, who has been a constant mentor.”

We look at a work in progress.

“That’s just an acrylic on paper at the moment and I’m playing about with ideas from some of the screenprints. I try to make the screenprint complicated. I like to get lots of stuff going on and then I’ll probably wipe most of it out. That’s my way of working at the moment. We’ll see what happens and if the idea works it might get put on a bigger canvas. It might be you just end up with that. I never work solely from a drawing and just translate it on to the canvas. It’s only there as wee ideas, and then it happens very organically, whatever it is that you want to paint about will appear, will almost make itself known.”

There’s no messaging in this work. It’s all about fun and sensuality and a response to light and joy.

“And the technical aspects of the paint… and learning new skills and how things work. I think the landscape and the more figurative pieces have always worked hand in hand. I did work on some bigger landscapes some years ago. In fact, Agi Katz from the Boundary Gallery in London sold them to a firm in London, so that was very nice, but they were rarities at the time.”

And the method is plein air drawing, traditional sketchbook, colours… and then back to the studio to work some of them up?

“Yes, I usually work in sketchbooks when I’m out and about. I love watercolours - they are light to carry and easy to work with outdoors. I would normally do two or three drawings at a time. Back in the studio, I hang the drawings on the wall and maybe use them in a new composition on paper or canvas. It all happens quite organically. I’ve worked in this way for as long as I can remember. The drawing always informs the painting.

How and when does she stop?

“Or how do you finish? Well, that’s hard isn’t it? With the bigger oils, I don’t want them to get too muddy. For me, they have to be kept quite clean. The acrylics can go on and on. If you reach a certain stage you might say to yourself: ‘I do think that’s finished’, but I’m always desperate to get on to the next piece.”

Before travelling to Kilmacolm, I wrote down a list of things that people have said about Rosemary. I thought it would be interesting to know what she thought of their descriptions. 

Top of the list was ‘1. Spontaneous’. It seems to me that Rosemary wants to retain spontaneity in everything, because she wants to hold the spirit and the joy of the moment in her work.

“I think so, but it’s very difficult not to overpaint things. I thought I had overpainted one of the new canvases, The Ancestors. It could have been more simple, but in the end I felt it had added complexity.

‘2. Danger’: Does she like danger?

“Nobody that knows me would think I like danger. My name is ‘Safety Officer Beaton’. I don’t shy away from difficult subject matter, but I wouldn’t climb down a cliff edge.

‘3. Clarity in conception’: she’s just said that’s not correct: she’s an organic painter.

“I think I’m an organic painter. I can have the ideas, but I can’t finish them in my head. They’ll happen organically on the canvas.”

‘4. Passion and sensuality?’

“Hopefully that’s always been there. Certainly passion for painting, passion for drawing. A sensuous line is important.”

What is a sensuous line?

“I have to have something that’s gorgeous and lovely and juicy. I love paint. I love playing about with different painting methods. It’s not a cold, calculated method of painting. For me paint should flow freely, it should be left to drip… a bit like gardening. You’ve got to let it grow wild, but you can bring a few things to heel if you’ve got the patience.”

‘5. Honesty?’

“Well I do try to be honest. When I’m painting someone’s face, it’s not to everyone’s taste - why are you giving them a big nose or why have you given me big ears? – that’s probably a bit of fun if I’m going in that direction, but I do try to be as honest as I can.

‘6. Immediacy’. what does she think?

“Yes, you’re in the moment… you’re trying to capture that second of movement of line or colour.”

I’m immediately thinking if I walked into that painting, I would know how I would feel.

“That’s like me with my Granny’s paintings, thinking ‘this is dark and mysterious, I want to be there.’ You want to float into a nice, joyful, comfortable landscape.”

Rosemary’s narratives take more time. The colours may be immediate, and she may draw viewers in, but once engaged, people think ‘why are there 25 breasts in this painting and what are the fruits doing?’ The viewer spends time trying to figure it out. It’s a little less immediate, but the constituent elements feel fresh and spontaneous.

“The storytelling happens in the drawing. When you start a story, or you’re reading a story to somebody, you don’t know how it’s going to end, do you? It’s the same with a painting. I’m never 100% sure what direction it’ll end up. When I’m looking at a painting I find it helpful to have a bit of background information on it, and then there might be a new realisation of what it’s meant for the painter to paint it.”

And the gardening: is she just painting out there? Is that her biggest canvas?

“No, I can’t do that. It’s not a garden that you can easily control. I’d love it to be full of colour. I can’t do that. In the West Coast of Scotland at the moment all you see is green, but we get a lot of colour in spring and autumn. The spring garden here is magnificent – azaleas, rhodis – because the deer don’t eat them. If I plant lots of lovely coloured things – which I have tried – the deer will just come down and eat them. You’ve got to work with nature: live and let live - except for the slugs!”

“I think to be a gardener is to love the natural world. You know you can only shape it a tiny bit. I can shape what happens in the studio, but when I’m gardening I can only shape a small amount. But I get such enjoyment out of that engagement with the natural world. I like getting my hands in the soil or taking the weeds out the pond.”

Whether painting or gardening, managing a natural world that includes homo sapiens is a constant challenge. Control or abandon? A period of looking at Rosemary’s drawings and paintings makes a viewer engage with these questions. Where is her focus, and what does she leave untouched? Her answers have been to look for truth, to see the brighter side, emphasise a feminine sense, seek the humane element, and always sympathise with the powerless.

She wants to take you with her into the picture. A key tool is exciting your senses with joyful and often playful colour; another one is telling you a story, sending a message, or giving you the material to let you tell yourself one; and then there is the new perspective, the familiar surprised by an odd vantage, a colour discord, a double-take. Rosemary has all of these assets readily available, but it’s the way she treats toughness with tenderness, and vice versa, seemingly in every brushstroke, that defines a subtle, understated underpinning to her work. That’s what you find when you’re with her, inside the picture. It’s the Beaton angle.

Roger Spence

All images courtesy of Rosemary Beaton, except where otherwise stated.

Note 1: On the table next to my chair, Rosemary has anticipated our discussion by producing a handwritten A4 sheet headed up Artistic Influences.

Here it is:

Italian Renaissance – female form, portraits, Botticelli.

Bert Irvin – colour, paint, abstraction, acrylic.

Georgia O’Keeffe – natural world, bold images.

Egon Schiele – line, movement, drawing.

Sam Ainsley and Adrian Wiszniewski – poetic, lyrical work.

Matisse – joy, composition.

Chris Ofili – colour, portraiture.

Frida Kahlo – storytelling, composition.

Picasso – politics, social comment, war, nudes, abstraction, human relationships.

Paula Rego - figuration.

Note 2: In the Rosemary Beaton book (p.10), Rosemary is quoted as saying: “The free fast pace was something I picked up from Jack (Knox). If it wasn’t working, turn it upside down and start again. Nothing was precious.”

Note 3: Ref: Rosemary Beaton, p.11