Helen Glassford

Helen is an award-winning Scottish artist. Helen’s life and art begins and ends with the Scottish landscape and a desire to translate it and communicate it through her practice. Her work is a response to observation and direct experience that is later invoked in the studio. Here the paint as substance and painting as an activity transpose the elemental experiences to the aesthetic of painterly abstraction. Sometimes this is vigorous and complex, sometimes minimal and spare, but always powerful and arresting and mysterious. She celebrates and orchestrates the predominating northern qualities – serenity, melancholy, remoteness, absence and belonging, and cites influences as varied as Still, Hodgkin, John Cage and Joan Eardley.

‘Getting to know the landscape is a mysterious hunt and will perhaps always remain elusive. Yet it is as perplexing and as intangible as any other relationship. The dark hills forbid yet entice. The thin light on the water is fragile and uplifting. Softening light at the end of the day unifies landscapes to a single texture and quilts its harder edges. It is the fascination for these transient beauties of the landscape and the weather it wears that will forever inspire me’.

Helen has enjoyed much success, exhibiting widely and winning a range of awards including the Philipson Medal for Painting at the Royals Scottish Academy, the Highland Spring Purchase Prize, the Cuthbert New Young Artist Award and the Armour Award at the Royal Glasgow Institute, and was a runner up in the Jolomo/Lloyds TSB Landscape Painting Awards. Helen is currently exhibiting at Tatha Gallery and has a forthcoming exhibition at The Scottish Gallery.