NOCTURNES

I N T R O

The Nocturnes series began at the turn of 2016, on the north Aberdeenshire coast at Portsoy, where I saw in the new year watching fireworks give way to constellations in a black, crystal-clear and unpolluted sky, with mysterious lights out across the sea. The images stayed with me.

These are very dark works, mixed media on canvas, in which almost everything is given over to night. Out of near-black fields a faint green glow gathers like an aurora, a scatter of pale marks reads as stars, and here and there a low string of lights suggests a distant ship, a ferry, or the shore. I was drawn to the old idea of the sublime: the idea that, when faced with something beyond our grasp, of standing at the limits of our own perception, we are at once compelled endless and afraid. It’s a sense I first met as a child in the endless night sky of George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, and returned to thematically at art college in later years.

As with several of my series, the paintings became the ground for a collaboration with the cellist and composer Atzi Muramatsu. We talked over the themes, and Atzi responded with a set of pieces for cello, from a minimal, mysterious opening to darker, searching passages and strange, creaking, almost primal sounds, which I set against the paintings in a short film.

P A I N T I N G S