Glasgow Girls 2002  1 February - 2 March 2002

Rosemary Beaton
Lesley Burr
Alison Harper Debbie Lee

Vigorous style, imaginative approach and wanting to have fun. Teachers and winners of numerous art awards, the four Glasgow girls offer an alternative, open-ended view that explores all the usual topics of common artistic and human concern - the figure, fantasy world, hidden stories and landscape. All this with a fresh in -your-face approach and individual temperament -

It is the fourth time that the Glasgow Girls are putting in an appearance. = Rosemary Beaton, Lesley Burr, Alison Harper and Debbie Lee present an excellent body of work retaining the best features of previous shows but with an increasing sense of maturity, and strength of purpose. The first time, in 1987, they were hardly out of art school and it is to their credit that their work has improved, all of them in different ways.

The four artists trained at the distinctive Glasgow School of Art in the eighties. Each artist has relied heavily on working with the figure at some point in their development. But within the rigorous training, great freedom was accorded that part explains the high degree of experimentation that occurred around painting and drawing the figure at Glasgow in the eighties. The greatest value was attached to an unbroken connection with instinct and feeling. "The Glasgow Boys" at the turn of the century also subscribed to these criteria and bypassed London for France and Italy in their search for influences. The four Glasgow Girls have also travelled the globe extensively, bypassing London in search for influence.


Rosemary Beaton, best known for her colourful and highly personal figurative works, won the John Player National Portrait award in 1984 when she was just 20. She was then commissioned to paint Sir Robin Day for the National Portrait Gallery. She has exhibited widely in Britain and abroad and has been a part-time lecturer at Glasgow School of Art. Her work is represented in collections including the National Portrait Gallery and the BBC.

Beaton combines supreme draughtsmanship with an unusual and individual colour sense. Her new body of work centres round the theme of "Angels in Suburbia". A mother herself, she takes a sometimes ironic, moving and often funny look at the impossibilities of being all things to all people.


Beaton Whiting Bay Seascape


Burr I sailed to the Red Beach
Lesley Burr, after graduating from Glasgow completed an MA in Public Art and Design at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee in 1987. She has exhibited and travelled widely including to China and India. Burr has won awards including the Ruth Davidson Memorial awards, has work in various public collections and has executed numerous public commissions. She has also taught part-time at Glasgow School of Art. Burr is the one artist here who works most directly with landscape. Her sketches from life are transformed through her imagination into images that are romantic, dream-laden and filled with quiet. Burr lives in the Shetland Islands where the strange beauty of the Northern light; luminous summers and dark silent winters are major influences on her work. Nature is the vehicle for her ideas, which encompass themes of the cycle of life and death, love, loss, longing and spirituality.

Alison Harper, trained at Glasgow and did a postgraduate year at Oslo Academy of Fine Art on a scholarship. In 1993 she was a Commonwealth Scholar in India for two years. She has exhibited widely including at the Leicester City Art Gallery, the Collins Gallery, Stirling Museum, the Graphic Museum of Tokyo, the India Today Gallery in Delhi and the Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo. She has won several awards and has travelled extensively, most recently to Kenya. She was a part-time lecturer at Glasgow School of Art for five years. She is currently undertaking a Bursary year at The Prince of Wales Drawing Studio in London. Her most recent work revolves around the figure painted in close-up, depicted in relation to the warm, hot sun. The images are mysterious and ethereal and suggest a sense of longing and innocent faith. A new series of moving paintings is based on the simple gesture of women unveiling themselves in Afghanistan.


Harper Goddess of the Great Above


Lee based on Harry Potter
Debbie Lee, after a degree from Glasgow, completed her postgraduate studies at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Royal College of Art in London. She was a Commonwealth scholar in India and a John Kinross scholar in Italy. She has held solo shows at Leicester City Art Gallery, the Peacock Gallery Aberdeen. Her work is in the British Library and the Indian centre for Public Relations in New Delhi. As Timothy Hyman, painter and writer said about Lee's work: "The image of the self -as-child, as Snow White, as Dorothy setting out along the yellow brick road…I first encountered the art of Debbie Lee in Glasgow ten years ago: an astonishing outpouring, through which she vividly and intuitively recreated her life in the studios, streets and gardens around her. It seemed already the vision of an 'undying child', endowed with an awkward grace that was utterly compelling". Lee uses fairy tales and stories as her starting point and is exhibiting here for the first time a series of paintings based on the Harry Potter stories.