Sylvia Wishart: Painter and illustrator inspired by the landscapes of Orkney

The artist Sylvia Wishart was born in Orkney and spent most of her life there, and the landscape of the islands was her inspiration and her subject matter. Her paintings were rooted in the love of her home ground, but as an artist she was world class and her works are held by, among others, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Contemporary Arts Society, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Aberdeen Art Gallery.

Wishart was born in Stromness, in 1936, the daughter of James Wishart, a seaman, and his wife Elsie. At school she showed obvious artistic talent despite having limited sight in one eye (she just made the other one work a bit harder). A painting she exhibited at the age of 12 was recently printed in The Orcadian, and it reveals a mature grasp of spatial relationships but, more interestingly, the subject matter was the same part of Hoy that she was still exploring in paintings at the end of her life.

On leaving school, Wishart worked in the Post Office prior to going to Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen. She then did teacher training and embarked on a short career in teaching. Luckily, a Scottish Arts Council grant gave her the opportunity to return to Orkney to concentrate on painting, and she worked from a cottage in the valley of Rackwick in Hoy. She continued to spend part of her time in Aberdeen, however, lecturing at her former art school. She was a fine communicator, having the very rare gift of being able to speak with a pleasing, unmistakably Orcadian voice that non-Orcadians could understand, in addition to the skill of sharing and passing on what she had learnt in a generous and encouraging way.

From the beginning, Orkney was central to her work. In the 1960s a discerning local businessman commissioned her to produce art for a series of calendars and she made a collection of beautifully detailed drawings of parts of the islands.

In her work, she played around with scale and proportion in a lyrical way and, by choosing an unexpected view-point, she combined elements with elegance and panache. For example, in one of her accompanying illustrations for George Mackay Brown's An Orkney Tapestry (1969), she managed to draw a coherent landscape that fits the scale of an oat-seed head. We can see what she did and we are reminded of her drawing each time we see a field of corn – sadly seldom oats any more – but how she achieved it is a bit of magic. Her work for this volume captures the haunting emptiness of a deserted valley strewn with the relics of former farms.

Later, when she became a part-time lecturer, she had a home in Orkney as well as Aberdeenshire and this was her most prolific and innovative period. She painted the greylag geese in Tarty, Aberdeenshire, and the views from her house on the pier in Stromness, juxtaposing fishing boats and the plants on her windowsill.

The greylag series of big oils on canvas is startling. They are tantalising because they are impossible to remember and impossible to reproduce – the geese can only be seen when the oils are viewed full-size. Wishart somehow managed to paint seemingly thousands of geese individually in a field. The balance between the expanse of the land and the detail of the almost camouflaged geese is masterly. She used close tones and a limited palette to create a vibrancy of scale, colour and texture. She made tiny marks and drew into the oil paint, using meticulous drawing to make a field of crackling energy that was romantic and harmonious.

Wishart eventually moved from the pier to a little farmhouse high up on the hillside overlooking the neighbouring island of Hoy and the ever-changing Atlantic. She "retired" there – although she never stopped working – and painted her late work, which mainly recorded the changing seasons outside her wide horizontal window, combined with reflections of the interior. Her work is a record of the pleasure she took in her surroundings.

Wishart's old house on the pier became the Pier Arts Centre in 1979, home to her friend Margaret Gardiner's unique collection of St Ives school paintings and sculptures. Wishart contributed greatly to the cultural resources of Stromness by playing an influential part in the centre's development, from the first spark of an idea, to becoming a trustee. Her calendar drawings were considered by many people the highlight of the 2007 opening exhibition of the centre's spectacular new extension.

Marian Ashburn

Sylvia Wishart, artist: born Stromness, Orkney 11 February 1936; died Kirkwall, Orkney 4 December 2008.