Margot Sandeman, No More Sheep

By Greg Thomas, 17.02.2025

Margot Sandeman, 'Yellow Irises, Arran Shore' (1976). Given to Glasgow Life Museums by Joan Hughson, 2017. © Sandeman Estate.

Margot Sandeman is the kind of artist who suits a six-painting exhibition. Indeed, her paintings and sketches are a brim with such a quiet beauty that engaging with them might seem to be marred by the prospect of a long trudge round endless white corners. They suit stillness; unhurried viewing. The tiny and poetically named 'Fragile Gallery' at Kelvingrove makes a suitable setting then, for this group of works in acrylic and ink evoking the light, wildlife, and landscapes of Arran.

The Isle of Arran, nestled in the Firth of Clyde, was a haven for Sandeman throughout her life. As a child she holidayed there, returning as a young painter with her more famous and tempestuous friend, Joan Eardley. Then, in the 1970s, Sandeman bought a cottage on the north-east coast of the island, in the marvellously named High Corrie, with her husband, the ceramicist James Robson.

The six pieces that comprise No More Sheep date from that decade and from the early 1980s. The stand-out works are two oval-shaped compositions depicting the same, overgrown paddock in different atmospheric settings and light conditions. In both cases, the title phrase “no more sheep” appears along the lower circumference in whimsical mock-heraldic fashion, enclosed with ribbon-like strands of grass and billowy pelts. One piece (‘No More Sheep I) is all gloomy greys and greens, the sky above a washed concrete. In the other (‘No More Sheep III’), bright yellows and blues dominate, and the eye is more attuned to a trio of swallows in flight across the mid- section, their wing-shapes echoing the loops and knots of the barbed wire fence below.

These works initially seem like part of a series of time-based studies, capturing the same spot en plein air at different points in the day or during different seasons. But what’s intriguing is that, in terms of the placement of objects and details, they are literal replicas: same random coil of wire aslant in the foreground; same grass strands, captured dancing in the wind in the exact same positions; same mid-flight bird-forms. What we have here then, is, oddly, almost like a modernist colour study – the shapes remain, the tonal contrasts shift – and, simultaneously a more concentrated evocation of the romantic or expressionist idea of pathetic fallacy. The scene becomes a perfect mirror for the emotion of the artist or viewer, the spot-the-difference-style composition pressing home the idea that the mood of a place is all in the mind and heart.

In general, romanticism is a good touchstone Sandeman’s aesthetics as expressed in these pictures. There is a touch of Samuel Palmer and The Ancients in the use of colour, for example, a brightness that seems to emanate outwards from the body of the land itself. In Sandeman’s case, a tonal haze spreads outwards beyond the surfaces of rocks and hillsides, seeming to spill into the surrounding air – as if the earth lit the sky rather than vice versa.

The abundance of sheep is another feature familiar from Palmer’s Shoreham years, and, for Sandeman as for the English painter, it seems to have spiritual connotations. Shepherds are nowhere in sight though, perhaps –perhaps not – reflecting the rather more vexed relationship between sheep and people in the Scottish rural imagination post-Highland Clearances. Where humans appear, they are in the distance, in little boats: a safer emblematic space.

There’s something pantheistic and, again, romantic, in Sandeman’s use of line. The waves of grass rhyme with the waves of the sea, which in turn evoke the flow of sheep’s wool. All is animated with the same spirit. High Tide III is a case in point, a wide, flat landscape composition across which the eye traces gradually flattening curves, from grass tussocks to the fleeces huddled near the shore, to seaweed- dressed shoreline to soft, lapping waves. A family of ducks makes the same walk out to sea as the viewer’s eye. This use of visual metaphor and simile to draw together different aspects of an environment is reminiscent of Ian Hamilton Finlay, another stormy comrade of Sandeman’s.

A more exaggerated panoramic format is adopted in ‘Sheep Grazing On A Hillside’, its ovine subjects nestled in the folds of the land like a maternal bosom. In this piece and others we get the distinct sense that Sandeman is offering us a sheep’s-eye view. There is a lot more land than sky in these works; we seem to be close down to the ground, grazing and huddled up for warmth, while taking in the scene around us.

If ever there were an exhibition that bore out Finlay’s maxim that ‘small is quite beautiful’, this is it. Fragile and lovely.

No More Sheep by Margot Sandeman is exhibited at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum until 1st June