Helen Glassford Following A Changing Light

HELEN GLASSFORD RSW

Following A Changing Light

Introduction - Capturing the Soul of the Scottish Landscape

Scotland’s ever-changing weather and dramatic terrain hold a magnetic pull - one that has profoundly shaped the work of landscape artist Helen Glassford. Through her distinctive and emotionally charged paintings, Helen captures the very essence of the Scottish environment, immersing the viewer and offering not just a scene, but an experience.

A graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, where she also completed a Master of Fine Art, Helen settled in Newport-on-Tay in 2003. Since then, she has earned a loyal following both in the UK and internationally, with her award-winning work consistently recognised for its depth and originality.

For Helen, painting the landscape reaches far beyond recording what the eye can see. Raised in the Lake District and closely connected to the natural world from a young age, Helen brings an emotional sensitivity to every canvas.

Whether inspired by the sweeping skies above her North-East Fife studio or the wild and remote beauty of Scotland’s North-West and its islands, Helen is drawn to the most elemental and isolated environmentsplaces that offer clarity, solitude, solace and connection.

Her artistic approach moves fluidly between abstract expressionism and more refined, nuanced markmaking. Layered paint suggests drifting mist, soft rain and distant contours. Horizons appear and disappear, while washes of colour dissolve and reassemble the land’s memory.

These are not literal representations, but emotional landscapes - fleeting moments, moods, and atmospheres experienced by Helen and then captured in paint.

The result is a body of work where each piece is a portal into a remembered place and time – immersive, contemplative and quietly powerful. To stand before a painting by Helen Glassford is to feel momentarily transported – to be standing within the landscape itself, where time slows and the world breathes around you.

Susan Bennett, August 2025

Strathearn Gallery

Front Cover: Rumour, oil on board, 60 x 60cm

Following A Changing Light

Full exhibition may be viewed at Exhibition opens Saturday 6th September at 10am

Sales enquiries welcome on receipt of this catalogue

www.strathearn-gallery.com

Exhibition runs until 5th October 2025

Following a Changing Light

“My paintings draw on memory, experience and observations of the remote areas of Northern Scotland. Embedded both in place and the imagination yet reliant on the mutable and the intangible personalities of the landscape. From the intimate to the vast they are a reflection upon the raw human experience of nature. This exhibition explores these rich experiences and aims to foster a deeper relationship with our natural world.

On the edge of a wild shore, November is a month unaccustomed to procrastination as winter sweeps in. A landscape that speaks of emptiness yet is steeped and scoured in the past. I follow the changing light as it silently slides across the sea loch, seductive and jewel like, not wanting to lose it. I try to hold onto it, perhaps to touch it or simply to cement it in the mind. It reminds me of words from a poem. ‘ Words after speech, reach into the silence.’ The memory stays.

Oil paint is layered: glazing, blending, pouring, dripping and scraping away seeking out the atmosphere of both the seen and the unseen. The process of painting is one of discovery, one of curiosity as shapes, tone and colour take form on the surface. The slow layering of paint revealing a history, like strata, a notion of time, a memory that is imbued with atmosphere. Touching upon human kinds relationship with nature, the layering of the senses in constant flux within the multi-layered surfaces of my work. Eventually marks rest where they no longer need to make sense, just to feel it. There is a silence, a presence, a moment when everything changes.

The ancient iced land behind me glistened. But only where the sun fell. Pockets of burnt umber notes of the winter birch are momentarily highlighted as the foreground takes form again. Moss carpets, rich earth, luminous skies, hanging branches and light pockets. Over on the dark headland, at the far end of the sound, the rain is falling, the light follows closely behind.

My practice is an internal attentiveness for the spirit of place. I paint the essence of each landscape sensed, absorbing the spirit and If I imagine it’s past and it’s future, I see its latent beauty. The beauty that lies beneath, the beauty that can be felt. In northern landscapes I become acutely aware of the passing of time, a place where light becomes sacred and where distances grow deeper after the equinox.”

Helen Glassford RSW July 2025

Carried on The Wind, oil on board, 90 x 150cm

Tomorrow Is Only A Vision, oil on board, 20 x 20cm

Time Flow, oil on board, 24 x 18cm

Flow II, oil on board, 24 x 18cm

Take this Longing, oil on board, 30 x 25cm

www.strathearn-gallery.com