2025 END OF YEAR review
A very wide panoramic of Sanna Bay whilst on photographic assignment for Deiseil: Dancing in Time - a multimedia theatre show by Amy Geddes and Alison Carlyle, that played at the Edinburgh Fringe this year.
LIFE SITUATION = 9 • ART CAREER = 3 • HUMAN SOCIETY = -7 • BRAIN ROT = +1
I have now lived in my own home for a full year and despite the common set backs of DIY and dodgy pipes etc, it’s been an absolute god send. I cannot express how liberating it is to not have to magic up ungodly amounts of money every month to pay someone else for the privilege of shelter. Frankly had I not found work as a sound engineer I would either be living with my Dad or destitute. Despite having a reasonably succesfull exhibition in Ullapool in July, I must confess that my art career has hit a brick wall, the established systems of selling art over the internet have almost entirely collapsed. Since 2022 (my best year for art) the income from, painting, prints and calendars has dropped by nearly three quarters. When shining the cold hard light of capitalism on my work the graphs present a scene of utter devastation. I’m aware it is uncommon for artists to admit defeat publicly, it is bad for business and does project a big ‘L’ on your forehead but I know a lot of artists and only a small handful can paint a different picture. I think honesty is the best policy and I’m not afraid to be vulnerable, in fact I believe the very act of being vulnerable is what will give me the strength to continue to create without prejudice or influence and hopefully quell this fragile male ego I have been trying so hard to suppress. I’ve never been able to settle on a model for success when I have found it, I always want to keep moving and keep striving. In my mind an artist who settles on a template and continually reproduces to that template is a failed artist. The soul is stripped, capitalism has won! The process is the drug, not the plaudits. This is a mantra I must repeat over and over in 2026. I love to make art and should make it come what may, despite everything and everyone. Just keep creating and following whatever it is the universe channels through me. Thought is the enemy, society may never care, if I don’t make it, it wont exist! None of it will be termed ‘content’!
A black and white film photograph my eldest child captured of me at the brutalist, Henry Wood Hall. I believe I am lamenting the dearth of ineptitude present in modern society. My children are angels and so fckng talented, they are intelligent, aware of the pitfalls of digital subservience. Neither of them wish to be social media influencers or crypto magnates.They are literate, considerate and capable, they fill me with hope for a better future. In truth this was a magical day full of happiness and joy, anyone who knows me will attest that rants can and will happen regardless of mood.
I have been seeking dopamine hits from facebook groups to reasonable success. But still no feedback, no further interest, it’s a total cul-de-sac and I must find the where-with-all to leave social media for dead.
Somehow I have found a lot of solace in the mad utopian failure of Cumbernuald. This is probably the opposite of the rainbow photo above. Both are good, I am doing a good job :) I tried these photos in some liminal space groups on the internet and they failed every time. Too unprocessed perhaps, I mean the liminality seems overt to me.
NEITHER WAR LORD OR POET - BODY OF WORK - EXHIBITION - OIL PAINTING & DRAWING
My exhibition in Ullapool this year was the first since my solo show at the Tolbooth in 2022. That exhibition and the lead up to it represented the high point of my art career thus far. This years exhibition went well, but for a while it wasn’t looking too great and I cannot deny that I lay in bed for about a week just letting time pass. Thankfully I am lucky to have a few really committed collectors and one of them really hauled my carcass out of the ditch at the 11th hour. I really do need to grow a thicker skin about all this as I’ll never make it back to my peak without one. I am really keen to do more exhibitions and have so many ideas of radical multi media concepts that I want to enact at some stage. But I do accept that presenting work in all kinds of mediums, with lofty ideals, historical referencing and universal philosophical over reach is probably a bit much for most galleries or exhibition spaces. So as everyone has told me over the years, I will have to segment my work into bite sized facets that are digestible, rather than insisting on everything being an assaulting magnum opus of everything. I realise my painting work has taken on a strange aspect over the last two years, some people love it but most are confused by the abstract swerve away from the painting style I became known for in the pandemic times. Painting of course is probably the art form that concerns me most, it is hard to do, it requires flow and technique and luck. Paintings capture humanity, character, mood and soul and project it for ever back into the world. I am not an amazing technical painter, infact the only things I am good at technically are photography and sound engineering but even then my flagrant attitude often brings that into question . But what I’m creating here, it is unique, it does not look like anyone else’s work, it has joie de vivre… whatever I paint next I do not know. I know the trees will come back but that’s just because I stare at the birch trees outside my house every day. So aye, join the mailing list and get looped in, winter is always ripe for the painting.
The full body of work can be viewed here. - https://www.somhairle.co.uk/neither-war-lord-or-poet
MUSICIANS YOU ARE BEING PROGRAMMED BY TECH GIANTS - WISE THE FCK UP AND MOUNT A FCKNG RESISTENCE !!!
Well this is a can of worms... Having worked in music since I was a teenager I’ve seen many changes, things come and go, tastes and styles morph and even become born. However the last two years things have really spiralled into an abstract mess. With an ever increasing reliance on social media and streaming the musical output of many has been dumbed down and geared towards engagement that is entirely dependent on various digital platforms which all serve to not only hollow out the industry financially but also creatively. Sure there are bands filling the hydro and pulling in numbers that ten years ago would’ve been labelled as pie in the sky nonsense. Is this good? Is this success? That is not for me to say, what I can say is that the commodification of music and indeed our hard won culture has left me feeling dirty and to coin a colloquial phrase, a bit ‘Hoorish’. A high tide raises all boats as the saying goes, but to me it seems like the yachts are sailing clear while the skiffs flounder on the rocks. I’m not saying there’s not great music being made, in fact in my life time the quality and frequency of good work has gone up exponentially. We have amazing studios in Scotland now and digital technology has made it possible for any one who wants to learn to make amazing music at home. It’s just that’s what is successful is really successful and often it embodies the cultural pastiche that I fought so hard against as a young musician. Our culture is so deep, ancient and connected to our land in such a beautifully rich way that I think so much music fails to convey now. My children often pull me up on my artistic snobbery, people are having a good time, culture is being forged, why am I so militant? Well I’m Scottish, rebellion is built into me, rebellion is built into art. Regardless of what I think about the actual music, I think we can all agree that streaming and social media have been highly corrosive not only to music but culture on the whole. It’s a measurable phenomenon known as ‘cultural flattening’ and I will write an article on it once I have my facts straight.
TIKTOK IS A CHINESE PSY-OP AND IT WORKS !!! YOUR OBDIENCE IS PROLONGING THIS NIGHTMARE !!!
The demented and ever increasing mobile phone centric lifestyle has had a pretty stark effect on my photography business in 2025. With only one full price photoshoot this year, in 2024 I had 9… Social media has mutated into this strange truth paradigm where anything professionally done is considered fake and unworthy of attention. The metrics bear this out and indeed just trimming out the part where you press the phone to activate a video recording will cause your content to perform worse. Of course this ends up with peoples feeds being an insipid drip of disingenuous ‘turning on mobile phone and standing there’ videos. Can you imagine Kurt Cobain doing this? Can you imagine Ella Fitzgerald doing this? Content creators are going to be so fucking over in 2 years if they aren’t already? I’m so glad my attempts at it failed, for now we can all see what it is doing to our society.
On a positive note, in some cases physical sales are on the rise, young people are abandoning streaming and beginning to take ownership of the things they love. Collections of artefacts have been part of human life for Millenia and I think in the end peoples instinct to interact with art in the age of AI will circle back to the physical. I worked on some great albums in 2025 and the CD is not anywhere near dead. The Jazz scene in Glasgow is amazing right now with awesome music being made by a plethora of insanly talented musicians, a lot of whom I meet playing in cover bands that I am engineering for the corporate hospitality behemoth I work for.
I have everything crossed for an enlightenment, there are definite chinks of light BURSTING OUT everywhere, ART HAS ALWAYS PROVIDED THE FRICTION SOCIETY NEEDS TO BLOSSOM but right now it feels like we are IN A FRESH Dark Age.
Luckily I have had the pleasure of working on numerous excellent projects… WITH ARTISTIC MERIT AND LOW METRICS
🙃
Lauren MacDonald - Drummer for Heisk, Grayling, Horse McDonald, Scarlett Randal, Riley, The Socials + Session Musician.
Unprocessed RAW from a Nikon d800 - Zeiss Planar 85mm f1.4 + Tiffen ¼ black mist filter - Lit with a £30 LED strip in Cove One Studios.
I’ve got to the stage with my photographs that often I just try to create what I’m after in the studio, focus the lens and press the shutter. Film has taught me this and I think it’s fckng glorious! 2026 will show an ever increasing thirst for authentic humanity I am sure of it.
Layout for Chris Stout & Catriona McKay’s ‘A Love For All Season’ - Amazing music of such deft quality, authentic as it comes and with such humanity and expression, everything they do is pure art. So happy to have been a longterm collaborator with these genii. They simply went on to my website and found this photo I took in Iceland. If you understand Northern culture you know why these tractors work for this title. https://mckaystoutmusic.bandcamp.com/album/a-love-for-all-seasons
I did two releases for Patsy Reid this year. One digital and one physical, both are exemplary showcases of Patsy’s intense talent and technical prowess. Here I have digitally drawn a cello a violla and a bass and laid it on top of an old painting.
Cut Price Morphed Out Math Metal Portraiture for Electric Sun Defence.
I took this in my art studio for these fckng legends of Scottish metal. That’s me running behind them with a strobe during a 3 second exposure. Pretty freaky no? Joes lyrics are fucking awesome and this to me captures some of his gruesome poetry.
Digital release for The Strathspey Queens - Original painting; painted in reality whilst listening to the music.
Photography for Marianne Fraser’s Pop Project - Little Win
Digital Illustration for Gnoss - I did four of these for a digital EP which was released track by track over six months.
The absolute Tour De Force that is Jen Butterworth’s - Her By Design. I will do a full post on this one once I photograph the physical products. Me and Jenn had a really fruitful collaboration on this one, she had every t crossed and every i dotted. Not only is the record conceptually rich it is also executed to such a high level, so much so it won the prestigious Annual German Record Critics' Award (Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik).
A.I. - STOCHASTIC GRADIENT DESCENT
I was an early adopter of A.I. - Given my proximity to artistic technology throughout my life it seemed prudent to investigate how it works and what I could do with it. I didn’t shy away from photoshop and look what it did photography. Yes I understand that it’s energy needs are monumental and not in anyway conducive to the the furtherment of the human race, both in employment and in the ability to drink fresh water. Of course I am well aware of the slop, in fact I have generated a lot of it myself, I’m not proud of it but at least I know how the thing works and what I can do with it as a result. Personally I have a already lost quite a bit of work to it and I have also been paid to create A.I. stuff for other people. Like I say, I can often get it to generate something to a brief which most other people cannot, at least not consistently. Can I deep fake video speech? no. Can anyone deep fake video speech? yes, though it does require quite a lot of post production to be convincing. I often leave A.I. alone for weeks at a time and then get slowly drawn back in, it’s similar to social media in that way, FOMO? Truthfully it’s promise in many fields is astounding, physics engines, medicine, disease detection. It’s ability to statistically crunch possibilities is unrivalled and what it can achieve in the hands of practiced professionals really is epoch defining. I appreciate the public backlash and really I echo it, I do not think the way it is being rolled out is at all responsible. Of course having used both LLM’s and generative engines like Mid Journey I know how mad and hallucinatory A.I. is… Some commands it simply cannot carry out and it undoubtly has a very dark heart and it lies all the time. I dream differently because of A.I. and nobody, not even the people who invented it and work at it’s cutting edge really know how it is doing what it is doing., why it hallucinates and why certain strings of commands create such unrelated and chaotic results.
IN IT’s CURRENT STATE A.I. IS unequivocally BAD IT IS corRosive like mobile phones & social media, IT IS ANTI HUMAN
A.I. cannot think, it is not sentient and many proponents of the field believe that this may never be possible. Even if it is, the hallucination problem seems un-correctable as just like with humans and animal brains this very hallucination is the only reason it works in the first place. In short, it is likely that it will never be the reliable silver bullet that so many corporate types and the ceo’s who are leading the financial circle jerk that will likely break the world economy say it will. What I can say is that the genie is out of the bottle and it will not be put back in. I have been pumping my art through these engines wilfully and recently I had to update my website to optimize it for A.I. search.
This brought in a traffic spike from China as Deepseek and Moonshot scraped all my images.
I am starting to see spikes from America now but China were straight on to my high res images the minute I updated my code. Basically you can try to block A.I. Bots but this will mean my site would be blocked from A.I. search (all search) and basically become invisible. Be aware that if you are using any search engine apart from duck duck go (with AI turned off ) you are using A.I. - If you have an android phone, you are using A.I, - Apple have decided to back out of full A.I. integration at the moment as they deemed it to unreliable and belived it would harm their reputation as a privacy first company.
Chat GPT has proven it’s self to be the most amazing research tool for me, as long as you ask it for sources you it will lead you to the human texts The fact that it can navigate university filing structures and read pdfs means that you can find documents you could never find with a conventional search engine. I still use mid journey to mash paintings and even sometime flesh sketches out in an iterative process that really does speed things up, perspectives can be changed and in terms of productivity it has speeded up my workflows in masking, layer separation and many other menial tasks that used to take up hours and hours of time. Is this convenience good in the long term? I can probably say no…
Will the A.I. push people oFf social media & drive them to seek out authentic human creations? I have to say yes.
ANYHOW HERE’S SOME SLOP I GENERATED WITH MY OWN WORK AS SOURCES, I’M SORRY BUT IT IS A FEARSOME IDEAS FACTORY / NIGHTMARE FUEL
THE LAIRD OF FCKNG NOWHERE
It’s fair to say that when I first started taking photos of Glasgow’s high flats in the pandemic I had no idea all the arms and legs it would grow. What started out as an exercise in replacing landscape photography has ended up becoming possibly my foremost body of work. As time has worn on it has become clear that documenting all this stuff in the detail I have dedicated to it has meant that I have inadvertently created a high resolution record of my country’s slide in to dystopia. So many of the buildings I have photographed have been demolished and it would seem that I started this project at just the right time to cover a time of un mitigated and rapid transformation. Ironically the failure of my art career and the regular money I make from sound engineering has meant I am able to commit more of the work to film which adds to it’s brevity and longevity. This year I have wrestled a lot with the motivation to continue this work and like everything else it ebbs and flows. Nothing important comes without struggle and my constant recommitment to this ‘thing’ is thorny and jagged. Maybe like all my social media posts it will also dissolve into an ether of ambivalence?
It’s probably my best shot at getting into a museum ☠︎︎ (when I’m dead) ☠︎︎
☠︎︎
One of the major events in my art career has been killing the calendar project off after 10 years… Sad maybe but 100% needed, I must try and push my work into channels that fit it better instead of shoe horning it into a mass produced format that just doesn’t warrant such confrontational and lofty societal critique. People want to feel positive at New Year and lets face it the festive season is hardly a bastion of hard edged truth… The world spins on and I am hopeful that I can find ways to present my work in reality throughout the coming years. My full thoughts on the matter are presented below (↓)
TOTEMI VISIO 2026
