Acrylic on Mahogany board, 16 x 17 inches, December 2011
I spent 3 and a half weeks in Morocco during the Summer of 2010. The highlight of the trip was definitely hiking up the High Atlas Mountains and staying with a traditional Berber family who lived and worked upon the mountains. The Berber people are truly inspirational, hard working and welcoming. The scenery was astounding and the colours amazing. Triangles everywhere.
Acrylic on Mahogany board, 16 x 17 inches, January 2012
At the end of the Summer I took a nostalgic trip to Raasay, which i had visited as a child, to write some music upon the eery bay of Hallaig. It was the reading of Sorley McLeans famous poem that drew me back. It is an extremely evocative location with a past that bears a certain resonance, I simply could not resist. The music I wrote was denoted in my innovative colour score in an attempt to capture an essence of the place. Painting seemed like the right road to go down to transfer and portray a part of this essence in another medium other than music.
Hallaig by Sorley McLean
Time, the deer, is in Hallaig Wood
There’s a board nailed across the window
I looked through to see the west
And my love is a birch forever
By Hallaig Stream, at her tryst
Between Inver and Milk Hollow,
somewhere around Baile-chuirn,
A flickering birch, a hazel,
A trim, straight sapling rowan.
In Screapadal, where my people
Hail from, the seed and breed
Of Hector Mor and Norman
By the banks of the stream are a wood.
To-night the pine-cocks crowing
On Cnoc an Ra, there above,
And the trees standing tall in moonlight -
They are not the wood I love.
I will wait for the birches to move,
The wood to come up past the cairn
Until it has veiled the mountain
Down from Beinn na Lice in shade.
If it doesn’t, I’ll go to Hallaig,
To the sabbath of the dead,
Down to where each departed
Generation has gathered.
Hallaig is where they survive,
All the MacLeans and MacLeads
Who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim:
The dead have been seen alive,
The men at their length on the grass
At the gable of every house,
The girls a wood of birch trees
Standing tall, with their heads bowed.
Between The Leac and Fearns
The road is plush with moss
And the girls in a noiseless procession
Going to Clachan as always
And coming boack from Clachan
And Suisnish, their land of the living,
Still lightsome and unheartbroken,
Their stories only beginning.
From Fearns Burn to the raised beach
Showing clear in the shrouded hills
There are only girls congregating,
Endlessly walking along
Back through the gloaming to Hallaig
Through the vivid speechless air,
Pouring down the steep slopes,
Their laughter misting my ear
And their beauty a glaze on my heart.
Then as the kyles go dim
And the sun sets behind Dun Cana
Love’s loaded gun will take aim.
It will bring down the lightheaded deer
As he sniffs the grass round the wallsteads
And his eye will freeze: while I live,
His blood won’t be traced in the woods.
I have re-installed my Degree Show at Logie Steading. The exhibition ends on 13th December ’11.
This is currently my studio which is at the back of my exhibition space.
(Acrylic on Wood) 2009
This is one of my early paintings. Putting my father’s head upon the body of a gazelle seemed somewhat comical at the time. I chose the gazelle in particular because of my dads spindle-shank legs and i have attempted to portray him saving the world. In life he’s perched upon his steed encountering the “abrupt global warming!” (the name of his box file folder) and i really take my hat off to him. A wonderful chap and father.
