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I
come from a Highland family and grew up in Sutherland in Dornoch, Tongue
and, mostly, Helmsdale, in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Sutherland of those days seems to me like another world; it was and
felt truly remote. Indeed, all the roads in this vast county other
than the only trunk road were single track. Many bridges that we
now take for granted had not been built. It felt like a great,
pristine, undiscovered land. And, by and large, it was.
When I went to art school I painted Sutherland landscapes because I
wanted to communicate their extreme remoteness, drama and purity.
I was enthralled by Suilven which I drew a hundred times. My
thesis was on life in Sutherland. There were no popular books then
specifically about the county so after college I came home to write one,
which resulted only in a pile of journals. However, by this time I
knew I would always paint Sutherland.
My abstracted landscapes are made using a form of collage I have
invented. The method enables easy comparison between versions of a
composition while ensuring that the final one is not lost when it is
taken apart to be glued. It is a system of "transference" of
information regarding how papers are juxtaposed, using adhesive tape and
registration marks. As the method also enables judgments to be
made from a distance, it allows me to ensure proportions are as I would
like them to be. I usually try many combinations of collage
pieces, sometimes hundreds, for a single image. This collection is
almost ten years' work.
For a long time I wondered what was beyond Sutherland. I wanted to
visit lands that were more remote, more elemental and more sparsely
populated: Sutherland, exaggerated. In 2002 I visited Iceland and,
in 2005, Greenland.
I found that much of Iceland is indeed similar to Sutherland, with its
inselbergs and odd shapes rising out of low land and the lack of
tall vegetation to obscure vistas of those masses. The vegetation,
mostly, looks just like that of the Scottish Highlands and there are
fjords similar to our sea lochs.
What I saw of Greenland, however, looked exactly like the cnoc and
lochan areas of west Sutherland: a giant version of Assynt, with ice
added. Perhaps this is unsurprising as Scotland and Greenland were
once joined.
The diversity of the types of landscape in Iceland seemed infinite;
Greenland, by contrast, is infinite variations of a theme. Both
places have much too that is very different from Scotland: ice and, in
the case of Iceland, volcanic and geothermal areas - with immense fields
of black and of white.
I visited Ilulissat in the Arctic - the town of icebergs. The
Ilulissat Ice Fjord is a glacial ice-stream which flows from the
Greenland ice-cap and calves into a fjord. It is the most
productive glacier outside Antartica and the mouth of the fjord was
choked with icebergs of immense number, size and beauty.
I feel that, because of modern developments and global warming, my work
has a retrospective angle. Much of Sutherland has lost its
pristine look; glaciers in Iceland have been receding; ice in Greenland
has been melting. In 2005 I saw, on the Greenland ice-cap, ovals
of intense sapphire blue which were lakes of melt water. The Inuit
told me that they get less snow than they used to.
In 2009 my brother flew over Greenland and saw that the blue ovals are
about ten times as large and the choked icebergs have gone.
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