Helen Glassford

Helen graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in 1998 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art, Drawing and Painting and an MFA in 2002. Originally from Cumbria, she is now based in North Fife, Scotland. She has exhibited her work widely throughout the UK since the mid 1990's and has won a number of awards, including 'The Sir Robin Phillipson Memorial Medal' at the Royal Scottish Academy Students Exhibition and the 'Cuthbert New Young Artist' award in 1998, the prestigious 'Armour Award' at the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts in 1999 and in 2007 Helen was runner up in the Jolomo Scottish landscape painting awards.Helens paintings are in essence abstractions of the Scottish landscape in which she finds herself immersed. Her painting is in a constant state of flux, a condition perpetuated by her experience of the shifting weather systems that roll inexorably across this landscape, as a counterpoint to the slow creep of geological time. She reacts freely to the immensity of nature before her, attempting both to capture the spirit of place, and humanity's transient experience of it. Graphite scratched across a primed ground, loose colour washes, determined single brush strokes, and ghostly scumbled glazes are just some of the techniques used to convey a sense of place at a particular moment in time. The marks are chosen with a considered awareness of what is needed to convey a sense of the shifting, fluid elements of the changing patterns in nature, and although the work is undoubtedly informed by the Scottish landscape in terms of its pallet and surface, it is equally concerned with the paint itself, its application, and its role as a visual language that seeks to convey the artist's perceptions of living in the landscape.

"Dundee based Helen Glassford is one of the young rising-stars of the Scottish art world. Landscapes are hard to paint; for they are too vast and too changeable to capture in a single composition of hill, sky and river. But Glassford gets under the surface of it and captures the deeper more abstract qualities of a place. Her work is just as much about paint and energy that lets her do this as it is about the landscape."
Tony Davidson