Where Sky Meets Earth 2 March–25 March, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh

We are delighted to produce this exhibition of new work by Janise Yntema, an American artist who lives and works in Brussels. She combines fine art with philosophy and specialises in the ancient painting technique of beeswax encaustic. Her participation in our Realist & Lyrical Landscapes in 2020 introduced an artist of exceptional pedigree, from somewhere else entirely, but whose response to landscape in Scotland places her firmly in the realm of the sublime, which is central to the understanding of Scottish culture. Since 2000, Janise has encompassed our landscape and atmospheric weather into her practice. She has visited Oban, Isle of Mull, Isle of Staffa, Fingal’s Cave, Fort William, Mallaig, Isle of Skye, Portree, Ullapool, Inverness and St Andrews, Perth and Edinburgh. Scotland has

become her spiritual home. The majority of her paintings in this exhibition were made

during an extended visit to Scotland in 2021.

Yntema does not wish to physically locate her paintings, as her titles reflect, the subject is more to do with the when rather than the where. Like a good modernist she allows the viewer to participate, the narrative unlimited by a narrow symbolic key. But her purpose is not mundane, we are invited to move through the landscape, just as the process of making the image involves mixed media, one technique obscuring another, the subject revealing itself at an enigmatic point, the process arrested when the journey might have gone on. The elusive experience of viewing, light always transitory, is the synaptic path to transcendence. This need not be an occasion of high drama; biggest and loudest is not always best, instead the quiet impingement of beauty on our being is an accumulation, becoming a definition of our humanity. Romanticism, symbolism, and expressionism are inseparable strands of Scottish landscape painting, each a word suggesting access to transcendence, a painting giving pause, moments of contemplating allowing us to reconnect with how we feel. Euridice Awaits the artist hints that this movement might take us beyond life, in Charlotte’s Way Home that the universal is also in the individual. In all her work she draws on her own early, formative experiences in the landscape, each painting a glimpse of temps perdue.

Christina Jansen, Director, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh Scotland,