Oil on canvas: painting the energy landscape of Scotland's North East (2024)

From the Granite City to the Silver City, Aberdeen has been known by a number of different nicknames. As a city that has thrived both because of oil and in spite of it, Aberdeen embodies some of the contradictions of the North East of Scotland.

Climate change and environmental issues have led to drives to reduce reliance on fossil fuels in favour of renewable energies. Though this impacts the whole UK and beyond, places such as Aberdeen, which have been shaped by the oil and gas industry, are facing something of an identity crisis.

The North East of Scotland before the 1970s relied heavily on Victorian industries: the leading trades for Aberdeen and its inhabitants included textiles, stonemasonry, pottery, foundry work and paper-making.

However, two dramatically different events – a deadly typhoid outbreak in 1964, which seriously damaged the city's reputation, followed by the discovery of oil off Aberdeen in 1970 – changed what the rest of the twentieth century would look like for the city.

British Petroleum, as BP was then called, was the first to discover oil in British waters, in the North Sea off Aberdeen in 1970.

In order to store and process the reserves effectively, the company needed much better infrastructure, necessitating the development of an area that at the time consisted of not much more than a harbour town with a few fishing docks.

BP is still heavily involved in the development of the city today. More than 50 years after the first oil discovery, the BP Galleries now form a significant part of Aberdeen Art Gallery, the main public art gallery in the city.

'The North Sea proved to be a new frontier for the oil companies when they first arrived', production geologist Mike Shepherd wrote in Oil Strike North Sea, a 2015 memoir detailing his first-hand experience working in the industry during the oil boom.

'They had been offshore elsewhere in the world, but never in waters quite so stormy or deep.'

Shepherd witnessed some of the offshore exploration drills in the 1980s, a few of which would go on to power Scottish homes and industries for the next 40 years.

There are, of course, many artistic depictions on Art UK of the dark and turbulent seascape of the North East of Scotland beyond the subject of the oil industry.

By the mid-1990s, the oil and gas industry had created large-scale employment in and around Aberdeen, and the city had earned another nickname – the oil capital of Europe.

The make-up of the city changed, not just physically with the development of new quays and docks, but also on a deeper social level. The region experienced an influx of scientists, engineers and geologists linked to the energy industries – and it also attracted a multitude of other professions, creative people and investors.

With this economic boom came an age of prosperity in which music, art and the wider creative industries started to take centre stage. The number of bars, cafes and arts and entertainment venues grew.

Alongside the prosperity, however, came difficulties in the industry and, eventually, disaster. On the night of 6th July 1988, the oil platform Piper Alpha exploded and collapsed, killing 167 men on board, and leaving only 61 survivors.

The blaze was created by jet gases that had become uncontrolled in the early hours. Only weeks beforehand, artist Kate Downie had undertaken a one-week residency on a different oil rig near the Arctic Circle. She made this painting, The Flare Boom, following the residency on North Alwyn A, capturing the flaring of waste gas on the platform.

The Piper Alpha tragedy and the response to it meant the subject of her painting was particularly sensitive, and initially The Flare Boom was exhibited only in the gallery at Downie's Wasps studio.

The tragedy of Piper Alpha didn't stop the rise of oil and gas in the 1990s, however, and offshore oil rigs continued to support Aberdeen and its growing population.

A mural celebrating the workers of the oil and gas industry had been planned for Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, but the plan was scrapped following Piper Alpha.

This early draft design by Kate Downie captures her experience of the intense physical activity on board the oil platform during the residency. The original design was eventually swapped for Safe Harbour (1988).

In Safe Harbour, a massive mural triptych completed in the same year, the artist adopts a quieter colour palette, with the golden structure of the rig and the workers' yellow vests divided by a pale, flat sea – interrupted only by the soft shape of a commercial ship at the centre.

Downie's mural abandons the sweat and violent contrasts of the oil rig far at sea, bringing the attention back home. Visible on the horizon is the prosperous city, with its sturdy granite buildings still standing proudly despite the disaster.

Once its proudest achievement, Aberdeen gradually became over-reliant on the oil and gas industry, and years of decline followed.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, with divestment from fossil fuels, the city found itself wholly unprepared to survive without an industry that had been its lifeblood since the 1970s.

According to Centre for Cities, a think-tank combating urban social inequality, Aberdeen was one of only two cities in the UK with fewer people in employment in 2023 than in 2010. In 2015 the city reported record unemployment.

Oil remains a heavily politicised topic still to this day, and has been used to make or oppose the case for Scottish independence since the 1970s.

Now, reliance on oil is at the centre of the debate on renewable energy. Made around the time of the oil boom, The Original Earth Guarantee (1981) by George Wyllie engages with topics of climate change before the term made it to the mainstream.

'This product (registered trade mark 'Earth') has been produced from the best materials available and is only Guaranteed insofar as daft things are not done to it or on it.'

Another less playful piece from Wyllie, Hope is Hard (1991) references drilling themes, with its skeletal ship at sea digging various objects from the seabed.

From an artistic, social and economic point of view, it is impossible to separate the landscape of the North East of Scotland from oil and energy.

However, as Kate Downie's mural work for Aberdeen Royal Infirmary shows, art can process difficult times and even tragic events, and highlight a more positive picture.

Rory Buccheri, freelance journalist

This content was supported by Creative Scotland