Annabel Abbs, journalist and author, describes my work in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue:
“Van Heemstra’s landscapes capture not only the wilderness of her beloved Scotland, but also its sacred and eternal qualities, its ancient forms, its astonishing celestial light, so that we too can feel utterly and truly alive."
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I’m standing in the Waterloo studio of Geraldine van Heemstra when I have one of those extraordinary moments that only the most powerful of paintings can bestow: I’m no longer in her calm, orderly working space (white shelves of books and driftwood, swinging hammock, view onto the London skyline). Instead, I’m in the islands and highlands of Scotland – rain-drenched, windblown, watching the heavy clouds split to reveal a sudden shaft of divine light.
Van Heemstra’s latest works (the paintings, drawings and sculptures exhibited at Winsor Birch) evoke a Scottish wilderness so vivid and elemental that, later, when I too am walking across a storm-struck Scottish island, I feel as though I’m inhabiting one of her paintings. This is the miracle of the finest art – it lifts us from our quotidian hum drum lives and drops us into another world. And if we should be lucky enough to find ourselves, one day, in that other world (for real), we see it with refreshed eyes. Great artists invite us to look, observe, see, as they do. They sharpen our gaze, making our lives richer and more meaningful. Which is exactly what van Heemstra does.
So what is the world that van Heemstra invites us to see? And what sort of landscape encounter does she nudge us into having?
For me, this is simple. The world she entices us into, is one that thrills, excites and inspires. A wild, natural world once routinely experienced by our ancestors
but often unfamiliar and intimidating to today’s city dwellers.
Van Heemstra – a walking artist who experiences her landscapes on the move - urges us out and into this lost world of wind, rain, storms. ‘I don’t like still, summery days with blue skies,’ she tells me. ‘Those are not the days when I feel truly alive’. Instead, the ideas and images that seeded this exhibition came as she walked with her sketchpad, paints, palette, pens and pencils, into the most remote corners of Scotland, in the most dramatic of weathers.
In this way, van Heemstra asks us to imagine life away from the ease and convenience of modernity. And she shows us how to re-connect with Nature at its rawest and least predictable. For van Heemstra, this is also Nature at its most spiritually transformative. Van Heemstra’s landscapes capture not only the wilderness of her beloved Scotland, but also its sacred and eternal qualities, its ancient forms, its astonishing celestial light, so that we too can feel utterly and truly alive.
Being on foot in unpeopled, wild landscapes has always carried an element of risk and danger. And so van Heemstra’s oeuvre also reminds us of the terrible brevity of life. This is not a cosy, comfortable place of bucolic skies and fragrant flowers. And yet, guided by her unflinching eye, we too can imaginatively feel the rain lashing against our skin. We can see the yellow light scattering over rocks and lochs. We can hear the gush of wave and waterfall. We may even smell the wet black earth, the salty air. Indeed, van Heemstra reminds us that this is how we fully comprehend and grasp a landscape, this is how we find its soul – not with our mind but with our senses. She calls it the ‘hand-mind-eye-heart connection’ and it lies at the heart of her practice. Life, she seems to say, is too short and beautiful to sit inside waiting for the sun to shine: we need to feel its full elemental force – now!
In her work there are shades of Turner and Norman Ackroyd, with a nod to the Dutch masters she studied 30 years ago, as a student and then as a fine art restorer (see her biography). But, above all, van Heemstra brings to mind the dazzle and courage of Joan Eardley who famously painted the North-East Scottish coast in all weathers, roping her easel and canvases to trees and buildings, amid tempestuous winds and fierce rains. Like Eardley, van Heemstra powerfully captures the brooding skies pronged with light, the ferocity of falling water, the wind-buffeted alchemy and the electric energy, of remote Scotland. Like Eardley, she grapples with how to understand (not merely record) a landscape. But van
Heemstra also brings a quiet order to her work, so that rather than feeling intimidated or frightened we feel emboldened: we too can connect with this vanishing world and we too can find the pulse and soul of a place.
So why was I out walking in a Scottish storm this summer? Because van Heemstra’s ‘Windswept’ paintings had coaxed me out with their exhilarating refrain: wind, water, space, sky - this is how we truly feel alive.
Annabel Abbs, Journalist and author, August 2025
Gallery director Charlie Minter summed up the exhibition in his closing remarks:
“No pure blue skies, calm and heat-basked seas here. Rather, the bracing and invigorating experience of giving oneself over to the elements – to feel the wind, taste the salt, sense the earth, catch shafts of light – and be all the move alive for it. That Geraldine can condense the power and sensation of the vast expansiveness of Scotland’s tempestuous coast forms part of her work’s most enduring and emotive qualities.”
Unsustainable Magazine mentions the exhibition:
“The paintings, drawings and sculptures on show were conceived walking through remote highlands and sailing along rugged coastlines. Working in collaboration with the elements, van Heemstra sketches exposed to wind and rain, at times renouncing creative control entirely to record the forces of nature with drawing devices and wind harps made from objects harvested along the way.”
View full text here
Meike Brunkhorst, publicist and writer, who also wrote the press release, described her winter visit to Windswept as “a journey to the rough edges of the Scottish Isles” on Instagram.
View exhibition catalogue here