HARRIS AND LEWIS 2027

I NT R O

The Harris series (Paintings below) grew out of a stay on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides in May 2017, made in the company of my friend the musician Donald Ferguson. We were based at Lickisto, on the island’s east coast, in a yurt at the blackhouse campsite that John Furniss has shaped slowly and organically over many years, clearing the ancient ‘lazy beds’, rethatching the ruins of old crofts and letting the paths follow the land’s own contours. It was a place, and an attitude towards landscape, that set the tone for the whole series.

Most visitors to Harris are directed first to the west coast, to the turquoise water and white sand of Luskentyre, whose luminous greens and blues seem scarcely believable in nature. As a painter, though, I was more drawn to the east: its small rocky bays, the remains of crofts and fishing piers from harder times, and the strange, charged atmosphere of plain buildings set against a shifting sea. Much of the island is built from Lewisian gneiss, among the oldest rock on earth, jumbled and glacially worn, and threaded here and there with seams of rose quartz and feldspar that catch the white Hebridean light. Many of the paintings are an attempt to hold that light as it glances off ancient stone.

Worked in mixed media on wood panels, the series began with small studies and moved gradually towards larger, more abstract work. I chose to give the paintings their Gaelic names, from Traigh Luskentir to Loch Fhleoideabhaigh at Mannish, in acknowledgement of the island’s layered history, in which Gaelic and Norse are bound together and the survival of the language carries the memory of the Clearances and of Culloden’s long aftermath. Alongside the painting I was reading the island’s history and legend, and found myself drawn especially to the moon: its part in the raising of the Callanish stones on neighbouring Lewis, and its light over the lochans and coast roads of Harris on clear nights.

The completed paintings were shown as Moonscapes: Isle of Harris at the Whitespace Gallery, Edinburgh, in July 2017. The exhibition opened with a performance by the cellist Atzi Muramatsu, a friend and collaborator since 2013, who improvised in response to the paintings, moving from Scottish reels through darkly Baroque passages to moments of avant-garde dissonance, and returning me, as I listened, to the darkness and light of the island itself.

P A I N T I N G S