IF

01 August to 29 August
bearly there
by shalese sands
£650.00
youthful exuberance
by shalese sands
Sold
nepalese house
by dwoj gurung
Sold
river, nepal
by dwoj gurung
£350.00
untitled I
by faranak ranginkaman
£295.00
untitled II
by faranak ranginkaman
Sold
the beach, brankaster, norfolk
by marc yeats
£750.00
near tidmore point, the fleet, dorset
by marc yeats
Sold
infinite impermanence
by mark ivan cole
£650.00
take heart
by mark ivan cole
£650.00
this rarified air
by mark ivan cole
£650.00
vignette I
by nita arumastuti
£295.00
vignette II
by nita arumastuti
£295.00
fruit seller I
by john vusi mfupi
£3,500.00
loch eriboll creatures - mother and child
by lotte glob
Sold
study for the young florentine
by tom wilson
Sold
ten green bottles
by tom wilson
Sold
melbury hill, dorset
by marc yeats
£1,250.00
untitled III
by faranak ranginkaman
£250.00
untitled IV
by faranak ranginkaman
£250.00
untitled V
by faranak ranginkaman
£250.00
untitled VI
by faranak ranginkaman
£250.00
untitled VII
by faranak ranginkaman
£250.00
vignette III
by nita arumastuti
£250.00
vignette IV
by nita arumastuti
Sold
vignette V
by nita arumastuti
£250.00
vignette VI
by nita arumastuti
£250.00
easton broad toward southwold, suffolk
by marc yeats
£1,200.00
smacam down, near cerne abbas, dorset
by marc yeats
£785.00
assiduous
by mark ivan cole
Sold
what might have been there
by mark ivan cole
£350.00
the bridge
by mark ivan cole
£350.00
cob webs
by michael t hensley
£1,100.00
nepalese mountain village
by diwash karki
£295.00
untitled
by diwash karki
£295.00

IF is an exhibition curated by the Scottish artist Rob Fairley. It assembles a selection of internationally based artists who have been an inspiration to Fairley and have had an influence on his own contemporary works. The artwork on display represents a huge variety of mediums and subject matter, each personal and unique to the individual artists who have created them. Here is an introduction to the exhibition by Fairley himself:

Whilst conducting an archaeological dig through my sketchbooks  for the book soon to be published by Resipole Studios - the earliest of which earliest dates from when I was just eight or nine - I became aware of the host of artists who have in some way influenced my work. Many are, of course, long dead: the artist/shamans of the Chauvet caves; many of the equally unknown Pictish and Viking artist/craftsmen; Raphael, Elsheimer, Gaudier Brezka; here in Scotland: William Gillies, Joan Eardley and Robin Philipson. Jim Nicholson, who was utterly unknown but did much of the graphic work for Ian Hamilton Finlay, took me under his wing on a school trip to St Kilda and showed me that it was possible to make a living as an artist. Ken Bushe would have also been amongst the invited artists had he not left us so early.

It was once pointed out that my musical taste was so catholic as to provide a definition of having no taste at all, and perhaps visually this is the equivalent. Everyone invited to take part in this exhibition constantly provides me with the visceral thrill that great art should do. All but two of those who were approached and responded are represented here.

Tom Wilson and I met in our mid-teens at the Edinburgh Sketching Club. The average age of the members must have been around sixty-five. Tom and I were maybe fifteen. We were not only spoilt rotten but learnt a vast amount (indeed it was the only place where I was instructed in watercolour painting). Tom’s precise way of looking at objects and making them tell a story had a profound influence on me. Back then, of course, I would never have acknowledged the fact.

Tom ran the Henderson Gallery in Edinburgh for some years then, after a short period with Bourne Fine Art, took over the Open Eye Gallery transforming it into one of the country’s most important galleries. He gave me my first one man show in Edinburgh. When Tom retired to concentrate on his wonderfully intellectual drawings, I left the Open Eye and moved to Resipole Studios.

Rozanne Wirth, Chrissie Orr and I met at Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1970s. Rozanne and I shared a love of tapestry and thoroughly enjoyed studying in Archie Brennan’s tapestry studio. I think, however, we both found it too slow! We puzzled our contemporaries hugely by our need for physical excitement: out of college interests saw me heading for Alpine north walls, while Rozanne went hot air ballooning - a sport I have aye thought of as about as safe as swimming with great white sharks! I have always regretted not investing in one of her stained-glass panels and have long thrilled at her quirky, often very funny drawings.

Chrissie Orr, now resident in New Mexico, has always been a wonderful polymath, able to turn her skills to almost anything. For many years, I cherished a silk screen print of a flattened, striped sweetie bag which sadly went missing when I moved away from Shona Beag. Intriguingly, she co-founded El Otro Lad, an organisation not too dissimilar to Room 13, that is changing the cultures of classrooms through nurturing connection, empathy, and respect. By sharing their stories, teachers and students learn to see each other in new ways. Chrissie is internationally recognised for her pioneering work in community-based art projects and has been honoured locally with a Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. She is a founder of the Seed Broadcast Collective, a mobile broadcasting station that examines the interconnections between people, seeds and agriculture through performance, listening, and the sharing of stories, resources, and seeds.

Richard Head and I are also near contemporaries, though we did not meet until I moved from Shona Beag to the mainland. Most summers, Richard would appear for a fortnight or so, staying with relatives, and painting the most magical, fresh outdoor paintings. We both have a fascination with painting techniques, so his visits were, and are, keenly anticipated as an opportunity to continue the discussions.

In 1994, during the opening weeks of what was to become Room 13, I was interviewed by an artist/journalist called Marshall Anderson. In the beginning, I was wary and was not sure that I actually liked the man. However, it did not take long for him to become a good friend while, as an artist, he has constantly challenged my thinking. We have written to each other (nearly always old-fashioned posted letters) every week for 25 years and he was the first journalist to write and publish about Room 13. Anderson’s work was wildly extraordinary, often taking Scottish landscape into new areas. Sometimes quite literally... he would frequently carry very large drawing boards into some of the country’s remotest places, where he made ink and crayon drawings, often incorporating the soil and peat of the land itself. Strangely, in the 1980s, long before we knew each other, we had exhibited side by side in Tom Wilson’s Henderson Gallery. He called himself Pete Horobin then. From 2000 he was Peter Haining. Haining did several projects with the young artists in Room 13 Caol, and it is one of these we have chosen to show here.

I would not have met Lotte Glob if it was not for Haining, although she worked for some years in Morar before I really knew the area. Lotte is, of course, best known for her lovely, innovative ceramics; however, it is her land art which I personally find inspiring. Materials collected from the land (like Anderson, these can be in extremely remote locations) are put under tremendous heat in a kiln and made into wonderfully odd sculptures. These are then reinstated back to where they come from. One of the most enthralling and thrilling exhibitions I have seen was by Anderson/Glob: a collaboration of book works by Marshall and Lotte.

When I was at Edinburgh College of Art, the head of the Painting Department, Robin Philipson, did little teaching but ghosted around the studios at night after everybody had gone home; except I never had, and we ended up having some fascinating conversations. One evening he asked me why I had chosen to go to Edinburgh. Being too shy to admit that it was because I admired his work, I muttered something about wanting to be an artist. His reply was memorable: “You would learn more about being an artist by finding someone to take you on as an apprentice than you will learn by completing four years here. We can teach you to draw; we can give you the facilities to paint. We cannot make you into an artist.” I should of course have knocked on his studio door the following morning! His words remained with me and, when the Room 13 project was in its infancy, I decided to put such an apprenticeship idea into action. 
David Surman was my second full time apprentice and I think it fair to say that I learned far more from him than he ever did from me. He is an outstandingly brilliant draughtsman with an intellectual approach to his work that is fed by a constantly questioning intelligence. A rare combination indeed. We probably did not get off to the best of starts as he was obsessed with Japanese manga drawing, which dominated everything he produced. I hate it! David has become a supreme animateur, a quite individual and unique illustrator, and now one of the UK’s most exciting painters.

In the years when Room 13 was expanding worldwide, we had problems with one of the emerging studios in Soweto in South Africa. Through conversations with Anderson/Haining, we knew that he had travelled in the country, had family connections there and was interested in returning. We asked him to go and solve the problems for us. He coordinated with the kids’ studio management team and, between them, they appointed John Vusi Mfupi (Vusi) as the studio’s artist in residence. It was an inspired choice. Very quickly, Sapebuso Primary School became the leading South African studio.  Vusi was one of the first international artists to attend the Room 13 Summer School held in Ardnamurchan High School. His unique working methods take the understanding of collage to an entirely new level. It is exciting to see his international reputation growing.

Room 13 introduced me to a lot of wonderful “art teachers” many who would never claim the title. Diwash Karki in Kathmandu is one of the best and most inspiring.

Marc Yeats is one of the United Kingdom’s most exciting and innovative composers. We met on the internet, but so easily could have met locally, as he lived on Skye where he brought up his family and worked as a painter. In many ways it is remarkable that our paths did not cross. Alan Macdonald from Glenuig once said to me that he only plays the pipes because he cannot sing. I think I paint because I cannot write music. With wild expertise, Marc can do both. His drawings have an energy and freedom which I envy.

A decade or so ago I received an email from the woodturner, John Hodgson from Morvern, asking if he could introduce me to a Facebook friend of his. I agreed and so began a fascinating friendship with the calligrapher Faranak Rangikaman from Tehran. She encouraged my interest in Persian poetry and slowly she encouraged me to stop using English text - something I had occasionally done since ECA days, even designing my own fonts - and to start experimenting with Persian inspired calligraphy. This not only looks better but also means that some very complex ideas can be expressed in a single line of beautiful marks. I do need a lot of practice yet though!

Goli Tavakoli is also from Tehran. We narrowly missed each other as she studied at Edinburgh College of Art after I left. Her work, like Faranak’s, is Persian, permeated with profundity and high technical skill. As I write this, we are trying to work out a way to 3D print one of her sculptures for the exhibition, as Covid restrictions preclude her sending them.

As a kid, I had a fascination with “amateur radio”, building myself receivers and transmitters and revelling in speaking to other enthusiasts all over the world. I suppose this has affected my use of the internet. One evening, I found myself talking to Nita Arumastuti in East Java. She told me that she was very interested in art and at school had drawn in the “vignette style”. I thought I understood what she meant, but as she explained, and then showed me, I realised it was a form of expression completely new to me! A way of making an image that told a serious, complex story in graphic form. It is possible to see how this has mutated in places like Bali into a populist tattoo art, but the true origin is hard to find. I find Nita’s work personal and heart breaking, as all art should be, and I am in awe at how fearlessly she takes on ‘big’ subjects.

I don’t really know Michael T Hennessy at all, we rarely talk on social media. Although, every time he posts his work online I find it very exciting. I love and envy his ability to say something both important and profound while incorporating populist images with a fine freedom. He is a latter-day Rauschenberg... but more painterly.

I mentioned earlier that one of the most important exhibitions I have ever seen was that by Anderson/Glob in Glasgow. Another was by the German artist Malte Sartorious in the Goethe Institute in London in 1983. The critic Terence Mullaly wrote of it, “art is quite suddenly moving again in the direction of philosophy. Artists are asking us to redefine our attitude to seeing.” This is something I have always found important. The thing that always drew me to the work of Philipson was that he did not shy away from the ‘big’ subjects: the opposing forces that beset the human condition – the physical, the spiritual; life, death; pleasure, pain; profound love, violent strife; darkness, light.


Mark Ivan Cole and I met properly when I tried to purchase a pastel he had posted on Facebook. There are few who use the friable medium of pastel with the skill he has. For reasons known only to his and my banks, the financial side of things refused to function and by the time it did we had become good friends. It was only when I saw his drawings that I realised he was doing what Sartorious did: looking so closely and treating every square centimetre of the paper with the same intensity and rigour that he was redefining how we see.

I think many struggle with some aspects of the arts. Certainly, many struggle with art music: many who love ‘classical’ music struggle with anything after the second Vienese School, many struggle with folk and country music, some only listen to 70s pop. I used to struggle with pibroch, the classical music of the Highland pipes, until talking to Allan MacDonald, Glenuig, opened a new world to me. Sometimes it takes speaking to or watching/listening to a master to unlock a new way of thinking.

Shalese Sands is too young to be an old master, but watching tiny video clips of her working on scraperboard drawings opened a new world to me. Scraperboard, to me, was the uncomprehending gift your aged maiden aunt gave you as a child when you admitted you were interested in drawing. If Vusi has reinvented collage, Shalese has reinvented scraperboard. Quite how she manages to draw soft snow using just black and white is extraordinary. Her depiction of fur is wildly brilliant; snow on fur, beyond extraordinary. She makes images which go far far beyond photography. Her graphite drawings are also amazing.

When I began to put together this exhibition, I dreamed that the preview might allow me to meet and introduce many of the friends who impress and inspire me. Covid 19 has destroyed that dream for at least this year. Both Avanish Karn and Mukti Singh Thapa have not been able to get work here because their dealers are closed. Goli has sadly been very ill and it is unlikely that her work will arrive.

I thank all who have contributed, particularly those I have never actually met… Thank you for your trust. Thank you also to Andrew and Kerrie here at Resipole for trusting me to introduce artists to the gallery. To you, the gallery visitor, thank you for being open enough to experience some new names and some very, very exciting work.

Love Rob
June 2021