Following its debut last year at Glasgow School of Art’s Reid Gallery (featured on this website), the exhibition Bet Low: An Island on Your Doorstep has moved to the Pier Arts Centre, in Stromness in Orkney.

The exhibition celebrates the centenary of the birth of the Scottish artist Bet Low (1924 – 2007) with the largest collection of her work to be assembled this century. Featuring over 60 works, it includes early Glasgow pieces, abstract works and her more widely-known landscape paintings, along with previously unseen drawings and archival material – giving a rare insight into Low’s working practice.

Bet Low RSA RSW RGI D.Lit. was born in Gourock and attended Glasgow School of Art. Although Glasgow would remain home, in 1967 she and her husband, the artist Tom Macdonald, bought a cottage in Lyness, Hoy, on Orkney, where they spent many summers. The time spent documenting Hoy’s vistas had a great impact on Low’s work, helping her develop a unique style of figurative landscape painting and understanding of colour, reducing land, sea, sky and weather to simple elements to define a particular moment.

The exhibition is a collaboration of Glasgow School of Art and the Pier Arts Centre.