Well the Colourists were a group of Scottish artists who were working at the turn of the 19th
and the early 20th century. J.D. Fergusson, Leslie Hunter, Samuel John Peploe and Francis Cadell.
Four men who painted in a certain way and had a particular interest in colour
and in the application of paint and in the properties of paint and in representing nature
and in representing form. And they weren't actually a defined group but they were a
bunch of artists who were hugely inspired by what was happening in France at the time,
this emergence of new ideas about painting and colour. And they absorbed all of this and they
brought their ideas home to Scotland and they created some of the most exciting, seminal works
of Scottish art ever created. They were explosive in their use of colour, they were gestural,
they were instinctive, it was full of eroticism, sensuality, love, excitement and passion.
Edinburgh/Scotland in the late 1800s was a bit of a grey, staid place. Presbyterian,
quite strict, quite severe and that extended into the way the art was taught. Fergusson,
Cadell and Peploe all studied at different points in Edinburgh, but I don't think any
of them particularly identified with the way the art was taught. You couldn't talk about Scottish
Colourists without thinking about France, the centre of the international art world at the time,
so if you were an artist who was interested in finding out about cutting edge art, it had to
be Paris. So people like Peploe and Ferguson would have encountered paintings by Manet, Cézanne etc.
When they could get their noses up to the surface of the canvas, you're basically learning the
secrets of fluidity of brushwork, a painterliness, a freedom with the way that they made marks,
a willingness to experiment with colour, nobody in Britain knew about this stuff, you had to
go to Paris to really find out. They are there at the moment when a lot of the great exciting
breakthroughs happen, when the the work of the Fauves was shown. In a sense they're at the fulcrum
of change. And they began absorbing it into their own painting, that was the great training,
that was the education that really made them. In France at that time artists were simply unafraid
to go and take their easels and plonk them outside and experience how the elements how the changing
light would affect the way that they approach the canvas. There is a particular attachment to
the Western Isles. When the water, the sea goes over the white sand you get these really strong
colour contrasts if the light is, if the weather is good. Well the first thing I say when I'm
introducing someone to the Scottish Colourists is Scotland looks like this, you know they think, oh
they're making it up but no the water can be that turquoise the granite rock can be that violet.
So into this landscape where Scottish art is very subdued, where the colours are controlled,
come these artists who are using primary colours. But the word wasn't so much they were shocked
it's very often they found it bizarre, ugly, that comes up, garish, what we now see as as being very
beautiful treatment of colour and juxtaposition of colours, was shocking in the sense that it
hurt the eyes. I think that the Colourists are brave and I think that that's an important word,
because when you're an artist and you're trying to make a living, there are lots of pressures on you
to create the work that the people will buy and if you're going to kind of put yourself out there,
test the public's ability to invest in you, then you're brave. In terms of the work of J.D. Fergusson
Les Eus, is a painting that I find just stunning. This great frieze of dancing naked men and women,
it's just such a joyous image, it's so huge, it's so overwhelming. It takes a while for
them to be appreciated and that doesn't really happen until the latter half of the 20th century.
As an entity the Scottish Colourists were a product of the market in a way, they were
brought together by dealers, even J.D. Fergusson said that, in a sense a marketing opportunity to
promote the art. The market has decided these are artists worth investing in and they merit it but
the real value of their work is simply that still today decades on from when they were created they
allow you to see the Scottish landscape in a new way. I mean you just see how they are responsible
for crystallising our idea of Scotland and even though their work is over-exposed, over-exploited,
reduced sometimes to its financial worth, it still merits being admired.