Frances Walker CBE RSA is one of Scotland’s most highly-regarded living artists. A painter and printmaker, Walker studied at Edinburgh College of Art. She was sole teacher of art in Harris and North Uist in the Western Isles before taking up a position as Lecturer in Drawing and Painting at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. She was a founding member of the city’s Peacock Printmakers. This exhibition features six new co-published prints made by Walker at Peacock’s print studio workshop named in her honour.
Born in Kirkcaldy in 1930, Frances Walker studied at Edinburgh College of Art and then took up a post as visiting teacher of art for the Hebrides. This experience engendered in her a life-long love of wild and desolate places and since then she has chosen to depict the most remote landscapes, her compositions usually based on coastal reaches, craggy rocks and deserted beaches.
Since retirement, she has divided her time between Aberdeen and the Western Isles, especially Tiree, where she owns a thatched cottage, but more recently has also travelled further afield – her latest inspiration being the even wilder and more desolate landscape of the Antarctic and South Georgia. Tatha Gallery were delighted to work with Frances and The McManus, Dundee in securing a suite of Antarctic paintings were bequeathed, and exhibited as part of a major exhibition, Among the Polar Ice at The McManus in Dundee (September 2019 – March 2020).