Way Out West

Way out west is the collective title for this group of related painting projects that I have been working on during the last 12 months.

Before Christmas I went deeper and deeper into the birch woods, I was intrigued with what it was possible to see looking out through the edge of the tangle of trees. There is a feeling of being protected and sheltered in even the smallest wood, creating the idea of looking out from a sanctuary onto the wider world, seeing and not seen. The intertwining of trees presented different notions of describing space; some trees silhouetted against the light, others lit against a dark background. Far from single vanishing point perspective these paintings became about multi vanishing point perspective, whatever was beyond the edge of the wood seeming to disappear to a distant point through any criss cross of branches within the picture. They were mostly created by forming a web of masking tape over the paintings’ surface that resembled the silhouettes of trees, on top of this the birch bark trunks were painted and then the mask removed before this paint had time to dry. This left a lattice of tree trunks from which trunk and branch shapes were sometimes missing, the minds eye compensates for the incomplete sections and the illusion of looking through many layers of trees is created.

Early last summer Flick and I again visited Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The cliffs on the west drop sheer into the Atlantic and there are swells and big seas most days. We were lucky enough to be there during a storm and the waves smashing on the rocks and beaches were awesome. I made some paintings based around Mangursta which is just south of Uig bay. Some of these were photographed digitally at very high resolution and I was able to look at them on my computer and zoom in to small details of paint within the image. These details looked strong and I used them as starting points for a further set of paintings about storm tossed seas at the foot of tall cliffs. I wanted big gestural marks to convey the energy, movement and scale of what I was seeing and by enlarging the paint in the originals I was able to progress my language.

The holy grail of wanting to achieve the perfect “mark” goes back to De Kooning. Once in a book about him I saw a beautiful detail of a single large brush stroke that looked like the high gloss reflection in a curved and polished car wing. I started trying to achieve something similar by dragging different colours with a flat piece of card; when I had the exhibition in Berlin I saw my first Richter and he was doing it too. Unlike Richter and De Kooning I wanted to use this mark making language figuratively and so the marks and processes that I now associate with reflections across water, birch bark, snow and ice or windswept hillside were conceived. At the same time I was having to develop tool making skills in order to apply the paint on the scale I wished to achieve, palette knives were bent and adapted, pieces of MDF and mount card cut with a jig saw, even individual paintbrushes became favoured for their particular “footprint”.

I have often thought of the minds eye as a camera on a long telescopic boom, if one can think in this way it is possible to picture the same scene from different viewpoints, a little to the left maybe, looking up from below or down from above. After climbing Ben Mor Coigach in the ice and snow with my son Sam in early January I moved from considering a small enclosed space with glimpses of beyond to exploring large panoramas from a great height. The day was short but clear and we sat at two thousand feet watching the sun set behind the islands to the south, the light flooded across the sky and glinted on the water; sometimes clouds and small squalls moved between us and the islands. The sense of infinite space was tremendous and as a result I have made a series of paintings that explore many locations on both sides of the Minch. These too have multi, not single vanishing point perspective implicit in their construction as the eye finds distance in first one and then another part of the horizon or sky.

To live way out west in this part of Scotland is to live with a constantly changing sense of the land and the sea, to see in each calm beauty and furious wrath; it is to live both on the edge and at the centre, in the heart of nature.