(Image: Supplied)
While we all live in the here and now, sometimes it’s worth looking back over our shoulders in order to reflect and, hopefully, gain a sense of perspective on things
It’s as true for artists as anybody else, and it’s a process Lenzie-based Scott Naismith found himself undertaking ahead of the composition of a new body of paintings to be presented at The Lemond Gallery in Glasgow this month.
The reason? Naismith’s decision late last year to publish a new book of his work, titled Atmospheric Abstraction.
It’s an update on the first such survey, 2015’s Scottish Skies, and involved him sitting down and considering his output over the last decade. That in turn led him to think about his future direction.
“You’re looking over 10 years’ worth of work, and you kind of have a period of self-reflection about where your work goes from there,” he explains. “My first exhibition I called Tide, because I felt the metaphor of the tide moving out to bring in something new was required. So this year has been about that process of progress, where you might take two steps back before taking three steps forward.”
Naismith’s more recent work has been given over to a form of abstraction, what he calls “essence of place rather than place itself”. He generally works by taking photos of landscapes and places on his phone, and sometimes making sketches on an iPad, but only as references. “As the painting begins, they go,” he says.
Yin Yang by Scott Naismith (Image: Supplied)
“The best camera is the one that you’ve got on you.” He means his eye, and his mind’s eye. Now he has moved back to painting what he calls “literal places”. The new exhibition, then, “is yin and yang based, where it’s two sides of the same coin.”
Fittingly, that is also the exhibition’s title, a nod to Naismith’s interest in the Chinese philosophical tradition of Taoism, and to concepts within it such as wu wei, which mean effortless action. The yin and yang symbol, meanwhile, is circular and made up of two interlocking comma-type shapes in black and white, each balanced with a dot, or seed, of the opposite colour inside it.
“I like these philosophical ideas of balancing unity, and that with the right mindset the unity should be greater than the sum of the parts,” Naismith says. “So, one colour setting off another, for example.”
And of colour there is plenty in his vibrant landscape paintings, most often presented on square canvases though sometimes on widescreen, letterbox shaped ones.
Among the works to be exhibited in the show at The Lemond Gallery are Morar Yin Yang, Sleat Yin Yang (an example of the more traditional landscape-shaped compositions) and, perhaps the signature work in this case, a painting titled simply Yin Yang, a tumbling mass of colourful clouds over a flat expanse of water.
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But the yin and yang idea is more than just an exhibition name or a neat tag to hang on a painting’s title. It pervades everything about Naismith’s approach to art and, as he says in the exhibition catalogue, it guards against hubris.
What exactly does he mean by that? “Every artist needs to be open-minded. If you’re not open-minded, you’ll not be creative. It’s just not possible,” he answers. “So you need to always have the seed of doubt. That’s what prevents a hubristic approach”.
It’s the appreciation that something might be missing, or that if something is wrong it needs to be addressed, which guards against that sense of arrogance or over-confidence, he thinks.
“Every stage of a painting process is to make a mark on that painting which is going to make it better than it was before, so you’re solving a problem every time,” he adds. “In order to have honesty and integrity or authenticity, you need to constantly question yourself at every stage of the process. That’s just the mindset of creating the painting itself.”
Naismith, who trained in printing and illustration at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, seems to put as much thought into, well, thinking about his art as he does actually making it. How to maintain creativity and what he calls “the philosophical mindset of the artist” are two ideas which occupy a great number of his waking hours.
“In the past, I’ve done exhibitions where I’ve really asked myself where creation comes from. I’ve had exhibitions called Order And Chaos, where I literally thought about my process as the creation process itself, where you need to have energy and chaos.
"So, the initial parts of the painting would be the primordial soup, and a process of organizing that chaos would then ensue, and the painting is finished when order balances chaos. The yin yang symbol encapsulates that as a process anyway. But with this exhibition I’m really thinking more about the seed on the other side.”
Yin Yang by Scott Naismith (Image: Supplied)
With 22,000 followers on Instagram and over 35,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, Naismith has long been an admirer of technology as a tool for artists and creatives. But unlike many of his colleagues in that field, he is sanguine and open-minded about AI and its influence.
He recently engaged with AI when he undertook a project with a whisky company in which an AI bot was trained on 150 of his works.
Then, customers answered a series of questions and the AI agent produced 2000 individual labels, each one unique. “It would be a new painting based on my work, but it was a robot that did it,” he explains.
While interesting enough, however, that was a process of “regurgitation,” he thinks. “It’s recreating instead of creating.” To his mind it doesn’t solve the essential question of where creativity comes from.
He believes the answer lies in the gap between what an AI bot can produce and what a human can. In other words true creativity is “whatever is missing from what you try to create from AI … If you combine one idea with another, you can come up with a new idea, but it’s still based on those two original ideas, and it seems to me as if AI is limited to something that is predictable, certainly at the moment.
"It’s limited to something that seems to have been seen before. So my more hopeful, optimistic take on the AI revolution is that we’ll all just appreciate proper creativity a little bit more.”
Scott Naismith – thoughtful, engaging and energetic – may take the odd step or two backwards. But his forward momentum is always assured.
*Naismith: Yin And Yang is at The Lemond Gallery,*Glasgow, from October 10 (daily until October 18)