WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THE NICE LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS
From 2018-2024 I some how managed to build up a relatively prosperous career from painting abstract landscapes. This is the story of why I abandoned landscape painting and in large part also landscape photography.
In 2018 I had moved from a shared, office style space to my own enclosed space in a redeveloped college building in Calton, in the east end of Glasgow. I had been through the break up of a long term relationship and it seemed that everything in life had changed dramatically and violently. The studio I was renting in Rogart street was large but completely internal, no natural light, it was just a large white box with a concrete floor. I moved my computer set up to one end and decided to set up painting at the other end. since I now had the space and no one else to disturb. My Mothers death in 2013 had spurred me on to pick up the brushes again, she had always been so encouraging of my painting and was very competent and talented at it herself. Painting still helps me feel to close to her and I still feel her encouragement to this day.
As I re-aquatinted myself with the skill of painting I found myself, late at night, sometimes drunk, sometimes high, sometimes straight as a judge. Throwing paint and smooshing paint wildly, in a dervish, with no plan, no justification. Raw unbridled expression. This style of painting is very cathartic, the abstraction is curious and over time acts as a little wormhole for your soul, you can kinda burrow into your psyche it’s like trying to decode your dreams. You can never really grasp whats happening or what it is you are channeling or expressing, but you get an inkling, a gist, a feeling. The catharsis is real, but not cognisant, not logical and in no way a measurable therapy, it can trap you as easily as it can free you. As frustrating as it emancipating. I would find flow often in the earlier hours, where the paint would lead my hand and at some stage I would collapse on the couch and stare at what I had created, it made no sense to me or anyone else but it felt that I had expelled something.
In this new studio I would computer by day and paint by night. I was working so hard in this era, basically the only rest I got were the 3 days a week I looked after my kids. I would do 8-10 hours on the computer and then paint well into the night… if I didn’t paint at night I was out partying, sleeping with everyone and generally running a muck and whoring myself out with zero shame. Painting was safer, more productive and definitely helped me untangle the tightly knotted emotions in my soul. As I started to find the flow in the action of painting again, I turned my attention to attempting to organise my paint into something other people may recognise or wish to hang on their own wall. At the time I had been escaping the city often, usually at dawn, I was super fit at the time and would shin up mountains in the dark with my camera and watch the sunrise from altitude. I was spending a lot of time in Assynt as my pal had inherited his uncles croft up there, I would go as often as I could, I felt at home there, I just fit into that landscape, the peace I found was the antidote to my hectic and often debauched lifestyle in the city. And so it was that these landscapes found their way into my wild and out of control expressionistic and out of control paintings. It was a way to escape my windowless white box, a transcendental exploration of grief, lust, hatred, love , belonging and abandonment. Of course being of the highlands does mean that my being is absolutely steeped in landscape, two generations back my family lived amongst the mountains of wester ross, with no shoes and their native tongues in their mouths.
As my desire to flee the city heightened, I got really, deeply immersed in landscape photography and would make trips often to visit trees and boulders which i had befriended, to stand in the white noise of rivers and scramble up stupid, fool hardy routes which simply piqued my interest. I kept meeting wild goats and they would often lead me on merry dances across crags and boulder fields. I still follow the goats when I find them, they are charismatic little balls of mischief, I find their natural nonsense totally endearing. and magnetic. As I worked on my photography skills they bled into to the painting. I concentrated hard on refining composition, colour, contrast and perspective, through these efforts I developed a muscle memory with the camera and i could reach this really zen process, where the camera just melted away and it was just me and the world, standing still, watching, listening, waiting. Even in the harshest of weather I can still find this peace. As with most things in my life what began as a hobby soon started to develop into a profession. People liked the photographs and I began printing them and selling them, musicians and arts organisations would commission me to make album covers and multi media live shows based on the landscape work. Some how I had morphed into a professional landscape artist. All the time my painting was developing along the same lines and when I finally worked up the courage to put a batch of paintings (that i didn’t totally hate) up for sale, I was flabbergasted to have sold all of them within 24 hours. This spurred me on and as time passed I spent much less time at the computer and more time at the easel.
At this time there was a phenomenal zeitgeist around landscape photography driven by the social media platform instagram and to a lesser extent twitter, it certainly felt like a ground swell at the time and I definitely got swept up in this unprecedented maelstrom of interest in Scotland and it’s beauty spots. Of course at the time this felt like a very positive force a reason to work harder, edit photographs to be obscenely dramatic. Honey pot locations like Buachaille Etive Mòr were guaranteed to generate hundreds of likes, validating comments and even the odd request to buy prints. In this time I hit some virality with a handful of photos bringing in many thousands of likes,.The first few times this happened I naively thought that this would help me step up my profile, find more customers and grow my “business” however what it actually brought was phone addiction, 100’s of annoying messages from scammy little bastards trying to milk something out of you and an endless amount of hap hazard low quality attention, most of it vacuous and staggeringly pointless. In reality it was the complete opposite of what landscape photography is. instead of peace, solitude and wonder it was a noisy throng of clamouring idiocy. Of course social media as we all well know thrives off this cigar toting ‘Some day your gonna make it Kid’ outlook. In reality it turns out to be this meaningless hamster wheel which creators must flood with attention grabbing content in order to advertise bullshit with the sole purpose of enriching evil and malevolent tech corporations. What’s the adage? If the product is free, you are the product!
And so it was in this disillusionment I slowly started to step away from landscape photography and double my efforts at painting. it seemed to me that paintings in their unique, oneness are far more valuable, they are definitely more real than a digital photograph, a photograph can really only exist if it is printed after all. In my mind, at that time my financial future could be made from doing something that I loved, that was truly valuable to other people and allowed me to express myself freely. No algorithms, no need to shoot for international stardom or to aspire to influence. I was managing to slowly raise the prices of my paintings, they were selling well and I was getting more proficient at my haphazard and incredibly messy process. It was during this slow and gradual ascention that the pandemic struck. Within a week it seemed as if the world had completely stratified. A complete nebulisation of money, society and industry. Truthfully for me the pandemic was a bit of a god send, I got to spend loads of time with my kids, we made and album in house ‘Death Waltzes and Robo Poetry’ and through all the societal collapse and existential dread, on the whole we had a great time, with our daily walks being dragged out with scooters, sticks, climbing trees and skateboards. There was hardly any traffic and the flat in which we were living transformed from a noisy, functional bolt hole to a peaceful home, full of love, fun and creativity. Getting bored is so good for kids, for everybody. Once restrictions started to ease it was clear that I would have to move out of my Rogart street studio, furlough schemes and a rates relief scheme meant I had a sizeable pile of government money coming in. My corporate landlords tried their best to ring fence as much of this as they could from me, I told them in no uncertain terms what I thought of their hawkish behaviour, scraped the paint of the wall and floors (with the highly appreciated help of my darling Popes) and stormed out, just round the corner to my current studio run by my long term friend Peter Gillies.
It has been in this studio on Dornoch Street that my painting has flourished. Being in an open and airy victorian school with large sash windows a half decent hi-fi was the polar opposite of the lonely internal box i resided in before. Surrounded by other artists, with their art, ideas, encouragement and criticism helped my art blossom (all properly social distanced at the prescribed 2 metres of course). All this creative emancipation luckily coincided with an audience, trapped in their homes, staring at blank walls looking for inspiration. It didn’t hurt that folk had money piling up in the corner with nothing to spend it on, chronically on-line watching stupid videos of me throwing paint and musing about life’s great philosophies, bass playing in my underwear and chain smoking. I honestly thought i was going to be totally sunk financially with the music industry collapsing , At the begining I even took a job labouring in Knoydart, I lasted 5 days before an angle grinder kicked back and smashed my hand into some scaffolding and broke two bones. This was an absolute heyday, I created much of my best work in the last months of the pandemic and with government rent freezes and a receptive audience It finally seemed that I might even be able to reach the long imagined Shangri-La of financial security.
** GOING TO TAKE A WEE BREAK FROM THIS ONE AGAIN - I FEEL THE NEED TO WRITE THIS, BUT BY PUTTING MY MIND ON IT I HAVE REENERGISED SYNAPSE PATHS WHICH ARE DETREMENTAL TO MY ONGOING HAPINESS **
