This mesmerising retrospective takes up three floors of the City Art Centre, moving in distinct stages from the reedy flanks of the Pentland Hills through fractured half-views of Venice and Scotland and into fresh, twilit forests. Mirrors and windows reflect and refract, rigid faces stare from the shadows, animals flit and bare branches twist. It’s 50 years of painting, and half a century of observing, finding, losing and remembering.
Victoria Crowe, born in England but long since adopted by Scotland, is one of our more distinguished painters. She is a respected portraitist but it is her other work that dominates this show, and rightly so. We see the trajectories of an inner life expressed through these paintings.
The exhibition begins with student pieces that establish a fondness for the flattened landscape interrupted by skeletal trees. Soon after, the stage shifts to the Pentland Hills, below Edinburgh, and in shuffles Jenny Armstrong, an elderly shepherdess — neighbour, friend and major figure in Crowe’s work. Armstrong’s final years become fixed on canvas, a sort of longitudinal study that incorporates landscape, interiors and portraiture, a celebration of understated dignity.
‘Large Tree Group’ (1975), probably still Crowe’s best-known work, shows the old woman stepping through snow, dwarfed by the bare, straggling trees beside her. The structural balance of the painting, dissected into multiple horizontal and vertical planes and weighted by a warm, pale-brown sky, is sublime. Other glimpses of this Pentland life — views through windows, glimpsed animals, narrative gatherings of interior objects, darts of warmth in the darkness — would all become familiar tropes in Crowe’s later work.
The second floor of the exhibition is where everything gets more complicated. Here are the strange mid-career works, dominated by splintered compositions, visual inflections of memory and mysterious symbolism.
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