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These two paintings (below) record the demolition of Cockenzie Power Station on the East Lothian coast, brought down at noon on 26 September 2015. A coal-fired station opened in 1967, run first by the nationalised electricity board and later by Scottish Power, it had stood on the Firth of Forth for almost fifty years before it was judged inefficient, decommissioned, and finally felled. On the day, people lined the shore to watch it go, and a friend’s phone call sent me out to join them. I filmed the event from just a few feet from the water, and only later decided to paint it.

Both works are mixed media on seventeen-by-eleven-inch wood panels. In the first, ‘Cockenzie Power Station, 26th September 2015’, the two chimneys and their long reflection stand in a pale expanse of sea and sky. I let the reflection break into a jagged vertical line, so that the towers read less as solid structures than as the needles of a seismograph, the waves around them as markers of time and disruption settling back into stillness once the moment had passed. The second, ‘Watchers (Cockenzie)’, turns to the boats gathered out on the water. In my video of the day I had caught the same sequence in sound: the boom of the explosion and the crowd’s oohs and aahs fading gradually into the peaceful lapping of waves. (see vid below)

‘Cockenzie Power Station, 26th September 2015’ was selected for the Royal Scottish Academy’s annual open exhibition, the RSA Open, in Edinburgh that winter. There it was singled out by the author and art critic Giles Sutherland, writing in The Times, who felt the painting caught the demolition in “a fleeting moment of beauty and tranquillity”, and praised the assurance of its composition.

 

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