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This is an unplanned, flow piece. My only task was to use up a large tube of process cyan paint that was going to dry up and be unusable. So I cut it open, squidged it out and started painting; at first this character started to look a bit like my talented, studio mate, Chris Farrell. In painting it I was definitely trying to convey an over whelming feeling of despondent, completely non-plussed, ambivalence. The world to day is such a horror on so many levels, some times I just wanna turn to mush and seep into the ground. Naturally I am fucking raging about America and it’s current administration, so given this bogey-ish character I had created I looked up Mary Anne MacLeod, referenced some jewellery combos and added them along with a perplexing title. Art achieved? Not really, but at least i expressed myself. When making these ‘creepy pets’ I have a lot of childish fun, I chortle and mutter like a wee boy playing with his cars. I suppose I’m trying to convert negative (thought based) feelings into positive, innocent joy. The tube of cyan that I used was my dead friends, Mary Somerville. I reckon she would like my creepy pets and of course it is her death that led me to start painting these things in the first place. So aye, here’s to dead friends. Love them still x
This painting is framed in a black gutter frame and is ready to hang.
This painting is quite large and would need to be crated to send by courier.
Pick Up from Glasgow; super easy and be nice to see ya…
This one explains itself doesn’t it?
Tell you something though, don’t you think it an absolute travesty, what with all we’ve been through for sheep. That it is almost nigh on impossible to get Mutton from anywhere, what is happening to all the old sheep? Because I as sure as hell am not getting to eat any of them.
So this one is a total ‘HOT TAKE’.
Any one who is local knows the DEL ❤ KELLY crag, half way down Corrieshalloch Gorge. In 2016 BEAR Scotland, the Public Private Partnership which oversees the road network up here, decided in their wisdom that they would remove the graffiti that had been there since the 1970’s. Folk got mad understandably, this heartfelt scrawling had become a local landmark, you can always see it in the dark and is a good marker that you’re nearly on the flats out to loch broom. After a public outcry BEAR Scotland stated that ‘if the graffiti is to reappear it will not be removed’…
Honestly I painted this picture to get over a long stint working in The Corinthian Club, I think DEL would probably have a great craic in the Corinthian to be fare. I joined the dots and here’s it. Apologies to Del and Kelly for exploiting their love for the sake of a creative ‘HOT TAKE’
This painting in real life really does poses an interesting visual effect, essentially the blurriness is heightened in reality.
This painting is derived from a photograph I found in a photo book called ‘The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams’ by Alessandra Sanguinetti. Who photographed two cousins from rural Argentina for 20 years. It’s an incredible project that encapsulates their lives so beautifully.
The photos evoked many memories of my own child hood growing up in rural An Aird, it is not rural where i come from anymore, there are 10 times the houses and 1/100th of the community.
I changed the raccoon in the photo to Pole Cat. Spurred on by a lack of ability to paint things, procrastinating and finding this article of polecat persecution in Assynt.
https://www.assyntwildlife.org.uk/2017/06/polecats-in-assynt-a-blast-from-the-past/
Is this the new owner of the Spar in Durness?
This painting reflects the absolute shame and betrayal I felt when Nicola Sturgeon unexpectedly stepped down from the Scottish first minister job. Seething… I had a lot of faith in that Woman. All evaporated, like a puff of smoke in the wind. I understand that she was fighting a cackle of hyena’s from Westminster, but still, painful and the twist of the knife that had stabbed me after the Independence referendum. LOOK AT US NOW EH!!!! RESOUNDING SUCCESS!!! pfftfftftf
This is undoubtedly a niche product. I’m trying really hard to be a good and authentic artist, searching for that flow state that resides deep in my subconscious, it’s strange where that leads I’ll admit. I have spent some time amongst the trees in the deep highlands but yet rotting caravans and failing hydro electric infrastructure feels more compelling.
Not sure where this character came from. Some of my friends have said it’s a self portrait though it looks nothing like me. I have certainly expressed something here, when you paint freely it is quite discombobulating what bubbles up.
*Future me here… This one is a about fragile masculinity, existential dread and the fact that i miss my dead Mother every day. I often feel like a wee boy and all men do, I’m not afraid to admit that i need ma Mammy.
This painting is highly textured, it is actually heavy with paint. There maybe upward of 20 paintings underneath it.
I believe this work posses some sort of magic, I can’t describe what it is. But it has ‘something’… it feels like real art to me, it’s got soul and gravitas, museum quality??? I dunno sometimes stuff just feels magic and important 🤷♂️
I’ve certainly expressed myself here.
MR TEETS IS VERY EXPENSIVE BECAUSE I LOVE HIM AND HE LIVES WITH ME :)
This painting was inspired by a conversation about male lactation. Interesting story for you…
“There have been countless literary descriptions of men miraculously breast-feeding, from The Talmud to Tolstoy, where, in Anna Karenina, there is a short anecdote of a baby suckling an Englishman for sustenance while on board a ship. The little anthropological evidence documented suggests it is possible. In the 1896 compendium Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, George Gould and Walter Pyle catalogue several instances of male nursing being observed. Among them was a South American man, observed by Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who subbed as wet nurse after his wife fell ill as well as male missionaries in Brazil that were the sole milk supply for their children because their wives had shriveled breasts. More recently, Agence France-Presse reported a short piece in 2002 on a 38-year-old man in Sri Lanka who nursed his two daughters through their infancy after his wife died during the birth of her second child.
In her 1978 book The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding, medical anthropologist Dana Raphael claimed that men could induce lactation simply by stimulating their nipples. The eminent endocrinologist Robert Greenblatt of the Medical College of Georgia concurred. But Jack Newman, a Toronto-based doctor and breast-feeding expert, insists that in order to produce milk, a hormone spike must occur. "That Tolstoy quote suggests that the father just put the baby to the breast and he would produce milk; I think that's pretty unlikely," he says. "It could be that you have this man with this pituitary tumor and he produces milk once the baby starts suckling."
Scientific American 2007
Assynt has a primordial grip on me, a tangential connection. Perhaps it is something to do with my heritage from Wester Ross. Perhaps it is just the vast and unquestioning connection that the rock here has to the very, very distant past of all Earth’s creation. This landscape is so old that its presence tells rich stories of wisdom, endurance and persistence. It’s not an ordinary concept to respect or pity rocks, yet I do. The turmoil these rocks have been subjected to is so brutal that at times my heart bleeds for their troubles. Suilven... an inselberg that I hold in such abstract and lauded esteem oozes character from every aspect. The grumpy face of the sad grey giant from the West, from the east a towering bum of pride, from the south and north appearing as the sleeping giant, bloated and tired, gasping at the sky. I love this place with the grief of death, it’s darkened, long lasting aspect a chilling reminder of my fleshy insignificance.
This is probably my favourite landscpae painting so far, i love the composition the colour and the atmosphere, it is strange that once you get close to achieving the vision in your head it just kind of evaporates, like fog in the morning, steam from a hot mouth. I’d love it to go to a good home.
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?