Colonsay and Mainland from Tiree | acrylic on reclaimed wood, 25 x 93cm 🔴
Call to the West was a solo show of Watermill Gallery curator and artist Zanna Wilson’s work gathered over a two year period picking up where her 2021 Road to the Isles solo show left off. Zanna returned to the Inner Hebrides and did a week-long residency with The Old Post Office at Lochbuie on Mull and an immersive week alone on Tiree at the North end of the island at Caoles. Zanna has been focusing her work on skylines and increasingly her compositions give skies centre stage. From her Lochbuie residency Zanna looked out onto Islay with December skies and low horizons and winter moons. From her residency on Tiree, Zanna painted Barra in the distance, Rhum and Colonsay from the beach at Caoles and on clear days Jura, the Treshnish Isles and the mainland could be viewed in one direction and from the other side of the island at Ballevullen Beach she loved being able to see out to the Uists. For 2023, Zanna is already leaning towards a show with the title Islands on the Edge of the Sea and in September Zanna [is heading] to Islay for the first time. Zanna’s body of work again shows her keenness to experiment and explore a range of materials; sepia ink drawings done en plein air sit alongside her large scale acrylic on board paintings and back in the studio Zanna loves delving into thick oil paint and also works from memory towards abstraction with her oil monoprints on paper series. 66 paintings are in this extensive solo show and the work was accompanied by the work of 20 selected Scottish Potters.
Oil Monoprints
Zanna explores the memories of where she’s been by using the mono-printing technique. She considers these to be paintings more than prints. They are done by inking up a sheet of glass or aluminium with oil paint and drawing into the rolled paint then taking a one-off relief print from the sheet with paper and further working into the image created with either more oil paint or pencil mark making. They are all individual artworks but work particularly well as a series. This was a technique Zanna explored in her Lockdown studio when her trips west were curtailed due to travel restrictions. The experience has meant that her work has tended to be more gestural and abstract of late and less tied to being topographical. The titles of each piece reference the feeling of a place rather than its geographical accuracy.
