Atlantic Coast
When I was planning this exhibition earlier in the year I was reading the essays and poems of Kenneth White.
I was struck by his idea that the way we consider our environment and our aesthetic response to it needed a big overhaul and a rethink; he writes at length about the early Christian monks who settled the wild and lonely fringes of the Atlantic, of their wide knowledge of language, philosophy and deep wisdom. Of how they would travel long distances in small boats as a spiritual voyaging, searching and meditation that has parallels with the Aborigines’ walkabout, and he suggests that a return to that close relationship with our daily living and our interaction with environment might be a part of this re-evaluation. So it was with more than a passing nod to his ideas that I have borrowed the title of one of his many discerning books for this exhibition.
I have lived on this Atlantic coast for nearly thirty years and have seen the dynamic of changing weather that close proximity to the edge of a large ocean brings, through the seasons it can be by turns wild and sublime but it is seldom passive. So too in the upsurge of hills and mountains on the edge of these tectonic plates that once caused volcanoes and lava flows from Mull and the small isles north and are still active as their point of pressure moves beyond Iceland today. The legacy of this activity in combination with ice sheets and glaciers created the soils and the flora which we see around us, and with a little knowledge it is easy to read this landscape whose skin is so thin and whose ancient bones are so close to the surface.
The exhibition has paintings from Applecross, Inverpoly and North Uist; unlike St Brendan I travelled by car and Cal Mac ferry but also walked long distances on foot. Like those early travellers I had some modern technology of the times in my backpack, a Trangia stove for cooking, pencil, sketch book and digital cameras for recording what I saw; I can only wonder what they may have travelled with! How times change, North Uist with its legacy of runrigs, stone cleats and ruined dwellings would have been the centre of the known world, Inverpoly and the central Highlands an impenetrable barrier too dangerous and difficult to cross.
The large painting of Inverpoly speaks of autumn, the end of the year when a few leaves still hang on the trees but the days are short and the light is low. For the painter these are some of the best times, low light casts long shadows and form is clearly seen. From a series of video and digital images I have made a painting with two vanishing points, one each to left and right; the left hand one is echoed by the crook of the birch tree’s branches below it, the one on the right with the two lochans leading away is reinforced by the procenium arch of the two trees to create the illusion of depth. Apart from the two distant mountains there is little or no tonal recession in the colours of the mid ground, the feeling that you could reach out and touch the nearby hills says that the air is crystal clear. The painting is also “human scale”, no illustration to be perceived as reality, one could walk right into the grasses, heather, rocks and trees of the foreground.
The Loch Lundie triptych involved an altogether different process. I began with a pencil drawing made on location on a beautiful July morning. The triptych format allows many vanishing points; as the vertical divisions frame each image, it is possible to sustain a panorama that has a vanishing point somewhere near the centre of each panel and also on each of the two vertical joins, (with even the possibility of two more on the outer edges); clearly careful planning is required! Having worked the drawing up in the studio, transferred it to the canvas and executed my plans to perfection I was most disappointed with the result, which was wooden and dry and lifeless; in disgust I put the piece away in the store. Some six months later, excited and still energised by completing another project I got it back out, keen to have some fun and divested of all the emotional baggage that often surrounds the finishing of a painting. I began a “rescue” package that I have used before; first paint the whole painting white and let that dry; next, tungsten carbide sanding disc on the end of a power drill and begin to grind the surface down. Because I apply paint that is thick and sculptural the original structure is not lost and as this had been a summer painting so highlights of colour also emerged. This rather cathartic process I think of as a parallel to glaciation, and to extend the metaphor, next I did the weather with wild stokes of wind and snow, dribbled marks of rain and gouges of rock and ice. This frantic maelstrom of mark making hung on the original over tight construction released the power of the mighty landscape that I had first sketched six months before, summer turned to winter with a covering of snow revealing the skeleton beneath.
Where these two paintings are solid and stable the waves and shifting light of North Uist are in total contrast; ever moving ephemeral forms they appear and fade before your eyes. Although turbulent and ever moving the surface of breaking waves on a rough sea is essentially flat but with none of the visual constructs associated with landscape to denote depth, the only receding space being a change of scale and a sense that some waves are in front of others. The flying spume, the tumultuous energy and above all the colour of sunlight through the curling wave tops and broken water are the substance of this wild environment.
When these oceanic energies meet the craggy rocks and sandy strands of that western edge where the light is always changing as the tides ebb and flow, as the ever-present wind whips the sunshine and clouds across the turquoise water and the myriad flowers of the machair blow to and fro; then there is work to do! To achieve this the painter must use a different language to hold down what is fleetingly there, describing light with colours that dance and sing beside each other. Complimentary colours invigorate each other, broad marks are stopped by small sharp gestures, it is necessary, if you can, to abandon analytical thinking for a while and to just feel the world around you; not to stand apart and observe but to dissolve your edges and become seamlessly part of it all.
For the first time I have included in this exhibition some of the short video pieces that Flick and I now make. For me the lens facilitates feeling part of Nature, seeing right into the micro-cosm provides a very rich involvement and engagement. Often the camera’s decontextuallising of a subject really forces one to look afresh and try to understand, which has parallels with drawing that is also about looking hard as well as doing. This is a very modern sketchbook, one that allows me to record and compare details and large vistas, to reconsider and reappraise. But perhaps most significantly for me as a visual artist used to working with more traditional methods the “no loss” possibilities of the digital world are the most exciting, poor decisions can be reversed! This new workspace can incorporate tried and tested ideas in an enhanced environment, it may have taken away a certain edge but it has opened an enormous horizon.
James Hawkins, July 2006