Marian Ashburn

Acknowledgements by Neil Firth

It is the public gallery's task to present to as wide an audience as possible a clear image of the diverse spectrum that art encompasses, both for pleasure and entertainment, and as a forum to question or demonstrate new ways of seeing and thinking. Consequently, each exhibition contains a potential for education. However it is rare for an exhibition to grow entirely from an educational initiative.

In 1989, Stromness Academy commissioned, with aid from the Scottish Arts Council and Orkney Islands Council, a small portfolio of self portraits for use as an educational resource.

The Pier Arts Centre through Private View has expanded that original portfolio of eight self portraits so that the advantage of direct contact with artists and their work can more easily cover Orkney's entire school population.

Again, Orkney Islands Council Education Department and the Scottish Arts Council were instrumental in ensuring the success of this project through their funding and guarantees. Orkney Enterprise have also played a crucial role, providing the portfolios which will each contain a selection of the 28 self portraits, allowing their easy distribution and exchange throughout the schools' network. All these bodies are to be thanked for their financial support.

Individuals too play a major part in steering a project from idea to fact and I am grateful to John Cumming, Principal Teacher of Art at Stromness Academy, for his work and support, and to Michael Cassin, for his fine introductory text. My thanks are also due to the artists who have each provided us with a unique visual survey of their identity, while illustrating in a wider sense many of the areas art embraces.

Private View is in effect a continuously touring exhibition and will, I am sure, prove a valuable and well used educational tool.

Neil Firth
Pier Arts Centre

The first portraits: an educational resource by John Cumming

Marian Ashburn • Colin Johnstone • Colin Kirkpatrick
Frances Pelly • Robert Shaw • Sylvia Wishart

Conscious of the many artists active in Orkney and the rich diversity of styles and media being used, the staff of Stromness Art Department were anxious to provide opportunities for students to meet these artists, to reflect on their work and to respond both critically and creatively. There were however problems involved in bringing these artists to the classroom or taking the class to the studio. As an alternative we, as a staff, decided to commission a number of local artists to make work within a common context, thus creating a small, easily managed portfolio of original works.

When this scheme was outlined to the local authority and to the Scottish Arts Council, financial support was secured for the commissioning of work and those artists approached all responded positively.

Since its creation, the original portfolio of six works has been in almost constant use, forming the basis of a Standard Grade unit, travelling to island schools and promoting discussion and debate wherever it went. To the original commissioned works has been added a number of gifts, most notably a steel etching by John Bellany.

When the first portfolio was commissioned the artists were asked to provide a written statement in support of the visual image. Some were, not surprisingly, reluctant to commit themselves to the printed word. Nevertheless I feel that these written contributions have added considerably to the educational value of the portfolio. I would like to thank all the artists who have, over the years, and often for no financial reward, given their support to this and other such educational projects. If the visual arts in Orkney continue to flourish it will be, in no small measure, thanks to their generosity.

John Cumming
Principal teacher of art
Stromness Academy

The Stranger in the Mirror by Michael Cassin

Most of us know what we look like, or at least we think we do. During the course of a normal day we check ourselves over dozens of times in bathroom mirrors and shop windows for combed hair, spots, spinach between the teeth, undone zips, inexplicable lipstick on the collar, etc. All of us carry around images of ourselves in our heads, mental self-portraits which we have constructed, sometimes with affection, sometimes with regret. Whether these self-images are accurate or not, is of course debatable; we may not know the person in the mirror as well as we like to think. Artists are just like the rest of us, their mental self-images may be accurate, unreliable, flattering or wilfully misleading, just like anyone else's, and their pictures may be the same.

There are, of course, lots of different types of self-portrait. In Renaissance altarpieces which depict religious stories the painter may decide to include his own face as a kind of visual signature, or as an eye-witness, to prove that the events he describes really happened and looked just the way he has shown them, or simply as a cheap piece of self-advertising. In an age in which the visual arts were struggling to compete with the liberal arts - rhetoric, mathematics, music, etc. - a painter might wish to demonstrate by painting an independent image of his own face and figure that his status is equal to that of the poets, philosophers and princes who might commission pictures of themselves.

Other artists may use themselves as their own cheapest model. Rembrandt's sixty-odd surviving self-portraits show the painter in dozens of different 'disguises' displaying an enormous range of facial expressions and internal emotions. It is as if he is using his own features to try out and perfect ways of describing human flesh, smooth and flexible in youth, lined and wrinkled as he gets older, the way different lighting can soften surfaces or increase drama, and the way translucent and opaque touches of oil paint may be combined to suggest that there is more behind the outer layer of skin than bone, muscle and sinew. Somewhere in there a human brain and human sensibilities lurk, hidden or at least cloaked, but suggested by the light in the eyes and the puckering of the flesh at the corners of the mouth.

An artist's self-portrait may be the visual equivalent of a written autobiography, consciously constructed for public consumption. Then again it may be intended as an entry in a diary, intimate and personal and only seen by other people by default. Whatever reasons an artist has for making a self-portrait, however accurate, reliable or trustworthy the resulting picture may be, it is almost always a fascinating piece of self-revelation. The man or woman reflected in the artist's mirror may be a stranger to us and possibly to him or herself, but our fascination with these uniquely personal images remains.

Michael Cassin
Scottish National Portrait Gallery

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