Benno Schotz and A Scots Miscellany

With the exception of William John Thomson, none of the artists had a family connection to these shores before they made the leap of faith to come here, but all are now a distinctive part of the creative family of Scotland and its mother arts body.

As travellers, each has brought something with them on their journey, and often their work echoes or reflects their shifting identity across origin, destination and place.

Every one of us is a migrant of sorts. We live on continents forever shifting in geological time, on a planet that was formed from the journey of rocks across the universe. We all have the same origin point and we are each but a fragment of a wider, never-ending migration.

Through their art and contributions in their profession, the cultural landscape of Scotland is richer and more diverse thanks to the immigrant artists who live and practice here. Art has the capacity to bring people together, and in uncertain times the evolving multi-cultural arts scene in Scotland gives hope for an involving and exciting future.

He immortalised hundreds of people in his portrait sculptures, from artists to art administrators, from family to friends, and from the workers of our nation, elevated to heroic status in works like The Iron Knight, to the eminent individuals who sat for him across his career. Many of these survive in public collections, while he also influenced the landscape of Scotland in his public sculptures, such as his spectacular Ex Terra in Glenrothes.

In 1963 Schotz was made Queen's Sculptor in Ordinary in Scotland, and in 1969 he was made an honorary Doctor of Literature at Strathclyde University and Honorary Fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1981.

Schotz married Milly in 1927 and his first child Cherna was born three years later. Cherna and her brother Amiel, with the rest of the Schotz family, have preserved his legacy through the significant studio gift they presented to the RSA in 2020. A spiritual leader for Scottish sculpture, Schotz was buried in Jerusalem in 1984.

Also studying at Gray’s School of Art and being around the energy that surrounds Peacock Printmaking Studio in Aberdeen made me feel part of a family here and introduced me to the legacy of Scottish art and printmaking, which has been a real inspiration for my practice. I remember visiting the RSA collections when I was still a student, discovering the prints of famous artists like Frances Walker. When I was elected to the RSA it was a real honour to join Frances and my Gray’s tutors Lennox Dunbar and Michael Agnew as part of that Scottish artistic family tree.

All my work has been made in Scotland, but the diversity of my imagery has its origins from watching the news when I was growing up in Nigeria. I see my art as like writing, and since I migrated, my travels and going to new places have served to add characters and their storylines into the wider narratives of my work. These narratives cross popular culture, imagery and history but also flow from my identity as a traveller and discoverer of different lands.

In 1915 Bose was appointed Sculptor to his Highness Sir Sayajirao Gaekwad III (1863-1939) the Gaekwar of Baroda in Gujarat, India and undertook a visit back to the country of his birth. He was commissioned to create a series of eight bronze figures of national historical personages of Baroda for the Lukshmi Vilas Palace gardens in Vadorada and two bronze statuettes for the Baroda Art Gallery.

At the General Assembly of the RSA on 18 March 1925 Bose made history on being elected an Associate Academician (ARSA). At a Scottish Arts Club gathering to honour Bose and his fellow new Associates, Bose referenced the strain between India and Britain and felt that his honour would help to ease this and would be accepted as much by his countrymen as by him.

Bose was very much a sculptor on the rise, exhibiting at the RA, RSA, RGI and the SSA, but sadly his promise was cut short after he suffered a fatal cardiac arrest whilst on a fishing holiday near Peebles in 1926 at the age of 37.

Being invited to come to Scotland for a year from California seemed an opportune time for me to migrate. I had worked in England previously. My intention was to visit and move again after a year or so. I found the people I met in Glasgow welcoming and the students I was fortunate enough to work with were amazingly interesting. The invitation from Glasgow School of Art, School of Fine Art, was to found a Department of Fine Art Photography. I would design the curriculum and workspaces and select the students and staff. At the time I was 36 years old, and it was a thrilling opportunity to make something unique and new, something that was missing in higher European art education at that time. The course quickly attracted students from home and abroad. The course proved vibrant and allowed me to develop my own critical practice as an artist. Most likely I hardly slept for my first 15 years in Glasgow. At the time I described myself as a teaching artist. Teaching was my vocation. Making pictures was my passion. The department was my family.

The first time I left Glasgow to explore the west coast and Highlands I was immediately struck by the physical similarities between Scotland and home, in northwest coastal California. Pine trees clutching to rock faces things like that. Then I discovered that when Scotland was physically formed, the northern tectonic plate above Loch Ness was in fact made from the same paleo-geological tectonic plate as home. Although I had travelled thousands of miles from home I was still really at home! That gave me an immediate affinity with this new place called Scotland.

Coming to Gray’s was life changing. It's a bit like a sliding door moment, if I hadn’t taken that bus journey I wouldn't have applied there, completed a degree and got a job. I met my partner there and have two kids, so everything is connected. While I was there, I won the Young Scottish Artist of the Year award and went to Paris as a post-graduate, which gave me the opportunity to develop myself as an artist. And after returning I was offered a job as a tutor at Gray’s. I mean, that was a big deal for a little Chinaman who couldn't even speak the language properly. The opportunity to come back to my old school to teach was invaluable and helped me become a full-time painter.

Drawing was a particular strength at Gray’s and for me it has remained a vital foundation to my process of making a painting. The preparation, the thinking, are still similar now as to when I was a student. I need to have a drawing, a backbone in my head. I always draw first, but not necessarily to transfer the drawing to the painting faithfully. But I need to somehow visualize my idea in drawings. So, it was the start for me for everything. I think it's a trademark in in the 80s and at the times of stronger and figurative work with the Glasgow boys like Campbell and Wiszniewski, which made a huge impact on me. They were doing all these big pictures with all the swagger and the big gestures, and all that stuff was exciting.

As a smaller school Gray’s had a family feel about it, and that has extended more generally into my time in Aberdeen. I feel at home here and 100% identify as a Scottish artist. I learned all the stuff I know about art and painting in Scotland. I can't speak about painting in Chinese as all the terms I know are in English.

When I arrived in Scotland, my own work had been about literary or musical subjects; I now realise that most of them were masculine. And it is by having children that everything just changed for me, and I became involved in the domestic and I had to make work about that, because there wasn't anything left over. In terms of where I could function, I was juggling teaching in colleges, in workshops, and children. I grew up during this time, really, and my focus became the domestic, and the universal element of the domestic. It was the idea that the personal is political that really had meaning for me.

The major events of my adult life, work, family, have been in Scotland, 'a foreign place'. I now realise that place (much as I love it) has never been as central to me as my connection to the world through my work. This has been anchored in my family, my husband and two children. As with most women committed to both a domestic and a professional life, the pull between them has been characteristic and dominant. I have made work from the combination and the conflict, first inadvertently, and then by choice.

As I enter my eighties, I feel my life and my family, and thus my art, is intimately tied to being in Scotland, a place I have called home since I settled here in the 1970s.

I feel like there was an openness in Scotland, where an approach to working across discipline was welcome, encouraged and supported. This slow time, exploratory and research-based approach, which felt very artist led, allowed me to work in more experimental ways, to develop a different ecology of practice. I thought I would be in Scotland for two years to complete my MFA, but then I met my partner and was invited to continue research at the art school, so a momentum around work was telling me to stay, my heart was telling me to stay, and suddenly it's over twenty-five years later.

My work is a corporeal exploration of geology, and my time in Scotland is intimately connected to how my practice has evolved. Learning to Read Rocks is really a work that embodies and situates this journey. Geologists say the history of the Earth is like a book, where the pages have been ripped apart and scattered, and their job as geologists is to try and reassemble the story. It is a beautiful way of thinking about our relationship to place. The drawing is a narrative, deep time map that connects geologic encounters on Mull, Iona, and Staffa with volcanic encounters elsewhere, but it builds a family tree that expands beyond the five generations that, at least in Western culture, we are often told are the core generations we need to think about: our own generation, two ahead and two behind. But a lot of my work is about looking at ways of expanding that generational sense of connection. So instead of five generations, what about 500? What would 500 million years of a family tree mean?

There's a pink granite quarry in Fionnphort on Mull. That stone was shipped all over the world, even to New York. My understanding of geological and mineral material, and the migration of living and inorganic beings back and forth across the Atlantic grew over time. My family fled across the Atlantic. From the earliest geologic moments, landmass travelled across the surface of the earth. Rocks were the first immigrants, and we followed. A few years ago, while working in a specific region in Japan, we asked if it would be all right to do fieldwork in a neighbouring prefecture. My geologist colleague said ‘Geology doesn't know the difference between these prefectures.’  I think we can learn a lot from that.

Born into an impoverished Catholic family in Belfast and orphaned early in life, Sir John Lavery grew up to be an ambitious artist who painted portraits of the elite and moved in their circles. His birthdate remains unknown but he was baptized on 26 March 1856. At the age of 17, Lavery apprenticed with a photographer in Glasgow, where he developed skills using cameras. It was also at this time that he decided to become a painter and attended the Haldane Academy.

He moved to London in 1879 and studied at the Heatherley School of Fine Art and then in 1881 to Paris to further his education at the Académie Julian. There Lavery was introduced to the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884) and painting en plein air. His exposure to naturalistic painting and artistic development while living in the artist colony, Grez-sur-Loing, during 1883-1884 and the years afterwards, marked a turning point in his career.

In Glasgow, Lavery became involved with the ‘Glasgow Boys’ whose radicalism he had already recognised as being at the forefront of British Art. Possibly with the experience of his own time in France, and contrary to the Scottish peasant and land worker focus of fellow ‘Boys’ Guthrie and Walton he recognised that his route lay in adapting naturalism and plein air painting in portraying the bourgeoisie at their leisure be that indoors reading a book by the fire or outdoors playing the then still novel game of lawn tennis.

Otto Theodor Leyde was born in 1835 in the small town of Wehlau in East Prussia [now Znamensk, Russia] and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Kunstakademie) in the major Baltic port of Königsberg. He came to Edinburgh at the age of sixteen or seventeen and soon began working with lithographic printer Friedrich Schenck (1811-85).

Although competent as a landscapist, it was as a portraitist that Leyde would cement his reputation in Scotland. His success in this field was no doubt largely thanks to his early work with Schenck. This was several series of portraits; of Scottish MP’s; of eminent Scotsmen; and of historical personages including Goethe and Garibaldi, Robert Burns and Queen Victoria and HRH Prince Albert, which were drawn in chalk lithography by Leyde and published by Schenck between 1859 and 1862. Schenck advertised his wares widely in the Scottish and English press. The advertisements were accompanied by his sending copies of the prints to the newspapers and the resulting reviews were universally favourable. This must have played a key role in circulating Leyde’s abilities as a portraitist.

Leyde was also an original member of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour in Scotland and of the Society of Painter-Etchers and exhibited in most of the major exhibitions in Britain. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1870 and was elevated to full Academician rank in 1880, becoming in the process the first Academician of mainland European birth.

In my visits and revisits, I record and photograph places I happen upon—places that are viewed every day by many but not seen, places that are overlooked because they are considered ordinary, everyday places. Yet, my every day is not your everyday.

I take the photographs and make them into all kinds of prints. I add a title that may resonate, and hope, you the audience, see something there you can relate to.

My work, whether in print or in other media, always tries to reflect the personal, but it is rooted in the collective Palestinian narrative. It gently probes the uncomfortable, tries to evoke a sense of loss, and instils beauty in the abandoned, the neglected, and the marginalised. My aim, subtly and subversively, is to make everyone a Palestinian.

I chose to do printmaking - the democratic medium - and as a traveler I was drawn by its portability. Glasgow School of Art was such an amazing place, and it became the catalyst for the creation of Glasgow Print Studio, which came out of an involvement with Philip Reeves, Beth Fisher, and a number of senior students.

Everything seemed possible at the time, I remember being introduced to Ricky Demarco in Edinburgh and I was travelling and meeting people and discovering many different cultures. This was a formative time for me as a person and an artist.

I have always seen myself as a voluntary exile, someone fortunate to choose their adoptive country. I’ve had an attraction to that position of wandering and not being fixed and I feel that is a privileged place to be.

I’m not that wandering person now, my life is rooted in Scotland, but the experience of moving between cultures made me who I am.

I met my husband the artist John Taylor in 1974, whose example and dedication continue to surprise and inspire me.

My memories of Australia are firmly linked to my family upbringing in a time of war: my father was killed at El Alamein and I never saw him. My stepfather was a prisoner of war. My brother James was in the Navy and lost at sea while on a mission, his body never recovered. My other brother John was in the Army in Vietnam. A family scarred and hurt by war. The notion of remembering, sensing and forgetting as very human traits have flowed through my work since coming to Scotland and in some way is intimately tied to being an exile in another land.

William John Thomson RSA is notable as being the first person born outwith the British Isles to be elected a full Royal Scottish Academician. He was born in 1771 in Savannah, Georgia, then a British colony. Following the outbreak of the American War of Independence his father, a native Scot and a Royalist, evacuated his young family to London in 1776.

The young Thomas began painting portraiture miniatures and is recorded as having first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1796. By 1797 he had moved to Edinburgh and, although he returned to London period, by 1812 he had settled permanently in Scotland.

The move to Edinburgh saw Thomson’s repertoire broaden with works illustrative of literature, from Cervantes to James Thomson to Allan Ramsay, and later still turning to the Bible. Genre figurative works also featured more prominently amongst his exhibits and for the last four years of his life it was landscape that appears to have occupied him most. The change in subject matter also saw Thomson move increasingly to oil paint from the watercolours he had favoured earlier in his career.

A prolific creator and exhibitor, at his death Thomson enjoyed a reputation as one of the country’s leading artists. Since then, his name and his work has slipped largely and unfairly into obscurity, possibly because large parts of his career including knowledge of where and under whom he gained his initial training remain unresolved. That is something we are pleased to resolve in part in this exhibition.

In 1884 Traquair secured her fist major commission, the decoration of the Mortuary Chapel in the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh. This led her to secure a larger commission for the Song School of the Cathedral Church of St Mary in Palmerston Place (1888-92) and ultimately to her masterpiece, the interior decorative scheme for the Catholic Apostolic Church, Mansfield Place (1892-1897).

She was unsuccessfully put forward for RSA Associate Membership in 1900 and again in 1901. The fact she was a woman and was perceived as working in spheres deemed at odds with the ‘purity’ of the ‘fine’ arts may have been the main points that counted against her. Despite this less than glorious moment in the Academy’s history, Traquair was eventually elected an Honorary Academician in 1920. This treatment did not deter her from making a generous bequest to our Collections at her death in 1936.