Stromness has produced many artists over the last one hundred years and this exhibition brings together work by two of the most distinctive artists who have worked in the town in more recent times.

Bryce Wilson (b. 1942) studied fine art at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen and worked as an itinerant teacher then head of Art at Stromness Academy, for four years before becoming the first Museums Officer at Orkney Islands Council in 1975. He has combined his artistic output with writing several books on Orcadian culture and history as well as providing illustrations for other writer’s books. The exhibition includes portraits of friends, family and neighbours alongside landscapes and many illustrations dating from the 1960s to the present day.

Sylvia Wishart (1936-2008) also studied at Gray’s and taught there for two decades before returning to Stromness to paint full time in 1987. Throughout her career Sylvia created a series of remarkable drawings and paintings of locations around Orkney including many from Rackwick in Hoy, where the artist established a base in the early 1960s. Heatherybraes, the artist’s home until her death in 2008, was to inspire a group of large-scale paintings that charted the seasons from her ‘picture window’ overlooking Hoy Sound and the mountains of Scotland beyond.

The artists were life-long friends and shared a keen interest in drawing from observation – using the skill of hand and eye to create striking and sensitive images – as well as of a deep love of Orkney.