Interview: Pascale Rentsch

By Susan Mansfield, 22.12.2023

Pascale Rentsch RSW, 'The Birds are heading to Roost', courtesy of Fidra Fine Art

When Pascale Rentsch talks about her paintings, she describes weather. Here is when the wind blew sand right into the palette. Here, it was so cold my watercolours froze. Here is a storm coming in over the Lammermuirs - and it’s there in the painting, a looming grey cloud which seems to draw closer even as we look - “I really had to rush to finish it!”

“If you can imagine the landscape around you is like a ball, I would like to be in the middle,” she says. “I don’t want to be separated from it, looking in. I want to feel it and be part of it, that’s when the magic happens. You know with superheroes, how they’re hit by lightning and suddenly they have superpowers? It’s just like that feeling.”

The Swiss-born artist, who has lived in Scotland since the mid 1990s, can be found painting en plein air in all weathers. Her expressive landscapes capture not just a sense of place but a dynamic sense of atmosphere. May Matthews, the managing director of Bonhams, Scotland, described Rentsch as “the most gifted artist I have seen in recent decades to capture nature and the elements so instinctively and spontaneously.”

In the last two years, her work has been attracting considerable attention in galleries around the UK. She is part of the current show, The Miniaturist Gallery, at the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh, and will have a solo exhibition there in 2025. In November, she had a solo show at the Scottish Arts Club, the result of the RSW Scottish Arts Club Award at the RSW Annual Exhibition in 2021, titled, perhaps unsurprising, When You Go Out.

Rensch’s studio is in the open air. She heads out from her home in East Lothian, art materials in her trusty trolley bag, and works fast and spontaneously, her materials spread around her on the ground. Her work responds to emotion, whether the energy of a storm, or the poignancy of a few golden leaves still clinging to a tree in late November.

“For me, the most important thing is the feeling that I have, something as tiny as a gold speck on a dark rock where there’s a little hint of light. If I can feel that, I want to put it down, I start and it just evolves. And at some point, hopefully, my painting tells me when it’s finished.”

Rentsch has drawn and painted since she was a child. As a teenager, she spent hours in coffee shops observing and sketching. But the natural world was always a passion. A key moment came just before she turned 16, when she took part in a drawing course run by acclaimed British wildlife artist John Busby at Dählhölzli Zoo in Bern. While still a teenager, she came to Scotland to do a further course with Busby on the Bass Rock, and a contact she made there led to an offer to study art in the UK, first in Brighton, and then at ECA.

Then life took a different direction as she became mother of three boys, and art had to take a back seat for a while. “When you’re a student, you have clear ideas - I would like this, I would like that, and you question yourself: why does it not happen? I loved looking after the boys, but I felt like I lost my identity, and then slowly I got back into painting. It’s almost like life decides when that time comes, and it’s never too late.” Covid-19 lockdown created an unexpected opportunity to return to a regular painting practice. “That was really the beginning of me going out [into the landscape] again. Where I live is really handy, I can either go to the Lammermuir Hills or the East Lothian Coast. It gave me the time to experiment, try things out.”

She began, tentatively, to offer work for sale on social media under the Artist Support Pledge, which helped attract the attention of several galleries and, in 2021, she entered a painting for the RSW Open Annual Exhibition. “It was the first one, and it was accepted, and then it sold and it won an award. Then the next year I was elected to become an RSW member. It’s amazing, just by doing something, things become possible.” Day by day, week by week, she continues to go out to paint on the East Lothian coast and the high moorland of the Lammermuirs, taking trips further afield when she can. She shows me a painting she made while staying on Islay in August. “I went down to the shore near my cottage, everything started to come into place, and then the heavens opened and it rained! Everything I put down, the rain washed it off again, but there was this amazing energy of going with it.

“It was a case of, what can I do with [this painting]? It really shouldn’t work, but if I just try it, what happens? If I stop now, that’s it, but what happens if I continue? And at the end of the rain, I still managed to have a moment that I experienced and captured on paper. That was very rewarding.”

Then she points to a much larger painting, a Hebridean coastline illuminated with late afternoon light: “And this is when the storm left and all the light came back in”.

:Pascale Rentsch’s work can be seen in The Miniaturist Gallery at the Scottish Gallery until 23rd December, in the Winter Exhibition at Fidra Fine Art, Gullane, until 21 January, and in the 143rd Open Annual Exhibition of the RSW, January 13 - February 6 in the RSA Upper Galleries.

www.pascalerentsch.com