🔴 red dots & ARTISTIC DIRECTION
Big Thank You to all the people who have bought a piece from my exhibition at the ceilidh place. With just one week left to run I’ve managed to sell 7 works and keeping my fingers firmly crossed for a few more in the last furlong 🤞.
Putting work up for sale, especially when it’s a body of work which you have dedicated a large block of time on has always had a strange effect on my psyche. Going by previous sales and spurious notions of what other people want, I always seem to end up creating certain things in certain ways. Although I have managed to shift a few landscapes I had assumed (wrongly) that these would be the bulk of what people would be after. I have been pleasantly surprised that some of the pieces that I created for fun or pure expression have been bought. Of course the social conditioning that infects the creative process is a convoluted and abstract beast, trying to balance the concept of ‘what people want’ with the impulse to express what is within you is a bit of tight rope. Regardless, I am happy that some of the work I did directly from the heart and off the cuff has been procured and hopefully because it resonated with the buyer. I do put my heart and soul into every piece but I cannot lie and say some are not more predetermined than others. I always want to keep my work moving and searching , I must say that I find it quite disheartening when artists find a formula that works (financially and sociologically) and stick to it. I often wrestle with a petulant inner artist, in-fact after creating this body of work I am indeed wrestling with that black dog again. Deviously considering how I will reinvent myself this time, what form to take, what wind to pitch my sail at… of course the answer is to empty the mind, pick up the paint brush and simply keep going.
🔴 red dots as of 8th Aug…
All work from remaining from the exhibition will be available to buy from the website by Mid-August, hopefully some pieces will go to some other galleries… prices will remain the same and any discounts that are given going forward will be sent to mailing list members and previous customers only.
EXHIBTION PRINTS ARE AVAILABLE TO PREORDER BELOW…
PRINTS WILL BE MADE & POSTED, SIGNED and IN A PRESENTATION BOX
By 25TH AUGUST.
This painting is intense and meaningful. Although this painting looks dark it becomes absolutely illuminated in direct sunlight and is highly textured so casts it’s own shadows. Whilst varnishing this thing I noticed what looks like a rose in one corner… Now, the house that I’ve painted (in Cuidhnis, East Harris) had a rowing boat called Rose, tucked in behind the gable end and protected with a fishing net. The Rose that has appeared in my painting was not made by me; it was made by eroding layers of paint with masonry brushes, bed sheets and knives. It appeared supernaturally, of its own accord. Random happenstance created it but it came from another plane and I must say that I’m pretty spooked by that.
Truth be told, this house still haunts me. I saw plates in the preas, the kettle still on the stove, Sunday-best shoes laid neatly by the bed and a-top it, a packed, brown leather travel case with a silk scarf and an ornate vanity mirror. Throughout my visit I was entirely calm. I felt welcomed. The house was peaceful and I felt respectful towards the people who had once lived there. However, when driving back up the west coast road, I was struck by a sharp, brutal pain in my right foot, as if I’d stood on a nail and not noticed. I stopped to check twice, at one point convinced that blood was pooling in my welly. It was as if the house was calling me back. There are two schools of thought on why folk left all their belongings behind in such a meticulous way; one suggests a sense of pride in leaving behind the remnants of a life well-kept whereas the other espouses that your belongings be left as an offering to the land which helped raise you.
My experience at this house left quite a mystic impression on me; it plays a starring role in a music video I made for James Lindsay to accompany his 10-minute Gaelic/metal/folk/jazz odyssey Lewisian Complex. You can watch it here.
I value this painting highly for it’s third eye vision; for it’s shadowy depth and what I perceive to be some sort of living connection to something dead. This painting was originally the cover of Breabach’s Album - Fàs. Which depicts the ‘last ent of Affric’ an elm tree stuck way up Glen Affric that looks like a grieving owl. It is thought to be several hundred years old and a survivor of the ice-age forest that once blanketed the hills there. My experience visiting that place was also a strange one, with macabre blood soaked snow, a murder of crows and cutting snow storms that nearly scraped the face off me. So the artwork for that album is underneath what you see now. Needless to say I have channeled quite a lot of something on to this canvas. Our diaspora, the wonder of the dead come alive, confusion about the mystical channel I seem to be able to tune into occasionally.
I shrug, I move on… I had this hanging in my house for 2 years and have not tired of it. However, I must make a change and move in to future somehow. I must search for ‘spooky action at a distance’ that compelled me to create this thing, painful though it was.
Some sort of cleansing… some sort of leaving?