Wick artist's painting like a LSD trip
A painting featuring in a new online show by an artist from Wick was lauded by a scientist who had worked in psychedelic therapy in the 1950s.
Professor Ian Charles Scott, who now lives in New York, has work in the show hosted by Edinburgh's prestigious Open Eye Gallery – an online-only exhibition due to Covid restrictions.
The show is called "An Exhibition Celebrating the Lives of W Gordon Smith and Mrs Jay Gordonsmith" and features Ian's painting, which was created in 1989 and depicts a surreal scene within a megalithic chambered tomb in Orkney known as the Dwarfie Stane.
The piece is called "Guest and Ghost from the First Stone to the Sag and Fall of the Roof" and forms part of a "unique art collection [that] is the culmination of a lifetime's work" for the connoisseurs Smith and Gordonsmith.
Ian said: "The memorial show is from the late art critic W Gordon Smith's collection.
"My contribution is a large oil painting set inside the interior of the Dwarfie Stane and it was only about a year after completing it that someone told me that a man who had retired to Orkney used to sit inside the cave wearing robes identical to the ones I portrayed.
"He had been stationed in Persia as part of our overseas intelligence corps during the Victorian era."
Ian related how during its initial exhibition within Glasgow's Compass Gallery, a "lady spent an hour starting at it".
"She was a former employee of the Sandoz company in Switzerland and said looking at it gave her the exact same feeling as she had in their early lysergic acid (LSD) experiments."
The psychedelic drug was first synthesized on November 16, 1938 by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in the Sandoz laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, and was later used in therapeutic applications to treat mental health issues and addictions.
Ian's painting can be seen in the online show until the end of January and can be viewed at www.openeyegallery.co.uk/exhibitions/testan-exhibition-celebrating-the-lives-of-w-gordon-smith-and-mrs-jay-gordonsmith-test
Other artists include Adrian Wiszniewski, George Wylie, Jack Vettriano, Avril Paton, Craig Mulholland and Neil MacPherson who lives at Scotscalder.
All works are for sale unless marked otherwise.
The proceeds of this exhibition will assist in fulfilling Smith and Gordonsmith's legacy to the promotion of art in Scotland by supporting the RSA’s Residencies for Scotland programme and bursaries for foundation year students at Leith School of Art.
The Open Eye Gallery has been established since 1982 and is one of Scotland’s leading contemporary private art galleries. Set in the heart of Edinburgh’s New Town in a former Georgian townhouse, it offers an extensive and varied exhibition programme of Scottish contemporary painting, printmaking and applied arts throughout the year.
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