00:00My name is Andrew Parkinson, I'm the curator at the Peer Arts Centre in Orkney.
00:04So we're currently in the Reid Gallery at the Glasgow School of Art
00:08to mark the centenary of the birth of the artist Bette Lowe.
00:13The exhibition focuses on two of the places in Scotland that were most important to Bette Lowe,
00:18Glasgow and Orkney.
00:20She travelled around the whole of Scotland and made work in lots of different places
00:25and Orkney became particularly important for her in the late 1960s
00:30when she and her husband Tom MacDonald bought a small cottage in Hoy,
00:36one of the largest islands in the Orkney archipelago.
00:40And from that point on Orkney became an incredibly important subject for her work
00:46and she made many, many paintings of the landscape,
00:49particularly around Hoy but across the Orkney Islands.
00:52The exhibition is really the first major show of Bette Lowe's work since the mid-1980s
00:59and we're really pleased to have been able to arrange loans from many public collections
01:04including the National Galleries of Scotland, the RSA,
01:08other Perth Museum and art galleries and others,
01:11but also many, many private collections.
01:14It's really the first comprehensive retrospective of Bette Lowe's works for nearly 50 years.
01:20We're very excited about the events programme that goes along with the exhibition.
01:24Here in Glasgow there are many really interesting events looking at Bette Lowe's work
01:29in the historical context but also how it is influencing artists working today.
01:36And then in Orkney we're planning to focus on Hoy, the subject of the painting that's behind me,
01:42and to bring people over to Hoy and to have a really close look at the landscapes
01:47that Bette Lowe was inspired by.
01:49My name's Jenny Brownrigg. I'm Exhibitions Director at Glasgow School of Art.
01:53This exhibition's part of Glasgow's 850th anniversary year
01:58and we're excited because in the early parts of Bette Lowe's career
02:03she was very much making ink drawings and sketches of Glasgow and the city in the 1940s.
02:10I think her observations through her ink drawings and her sketches
02:15are very much of the life of the city.
02:17She was very interested as well in town head and cow caddans.
02:22So the small drawings and sketches that we've got in this first part of the show
02:28they're really capturing different events sometimes.
02:32For example, there's a float with women from the Co-op float.
02:36That's one of the sketches.
02:39There's other sketches where she's drawn a former tuberculosis and polio hospital for children.
02:47There's also a wedding. She's drawn a wedding scene.
02:52So she's really making these observations of people and the life of the city.
02:58Some of it becomes really like social history.
03:02For example, there's a sketch of Phoenix Park and that's there no longer.
03:07That was demolished when the motorways came into Glasgow.
03:11So I think people will see certain scenes where that place no longer exists
03:15but might exist in their memory.
03:17Bette Lowe was really consumed with finding her own individual voice as an artist.
03:24I think you can really see her being really driven.
03:29She's making these early figurative sketches of Glasgow.
03:33Then you see in the next section she was far more drawn to abstraction
03:38and this kind of start of her interest in landscape and water.
03:42Then she was really refining it when she was making her amazing formal landscapes.
03:48She was really refining and editing down her style.
03:52Then the last room in the gallery is of these really beautiful pencil drawings.
03:58She was really drawn to light changing in Orkney.
04:02She was really drawn to the changing of the time of day
04:05and the different kinds of light in the landscape.
04:08So you can really see this going through her landscape work.
04:13The last room's got these really beautiful, I suppose almost like spiritual drawings
04:20where she's observing the moon coming through clouds or the sun
04:25and cutting through mist over these trees.
04:29She really wanted to almost capture these atmospheric conditions towards the end of her career.
04:35So there's a real opportunity to see all the different kinds of work she made.
04:40Bette was at Glasgow School of Art from 1942 to 1945 doing drawing and painting.
04:46Her peers were Joan Ardley and Ian Hamilton Finlay.
04:50After her time at art school she went and did the summer school at Arbroath in 1945.
04:58She went on to do teacher training at Jordan Hill but she didn't enjoy it.
05:03So a chance encounter with Stanley Baxter on Sauchiehall Street took her into the Unity Theatre
05:10which was this amalgamation of left-leaning theatres in Glasgow.
05:15The exhibition here at Reid Gallery runs from the 11th of January through to the 8th of February.
05:21We're open from Monday to Saturday, 10 to 4.30.
05:26And then the exhibition moves up to Stromness at the Peer Arts Centre in Orkney
05:31and that runs from the 1st of March to the 7th of June.
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