Atmosphere is in the air and then without notice seeps under the skin. It permeates through quietly. It is both external and internal, something seen and experienced becomes visceral. I have recently been away on a research trip in Assynt, a place that keeps on giving in every flavour of weather. Each time I return I see the landscape a new. Changed yet still familiar.
It took me a while this time to adjust to being away. To adjust my looking and behaviour. There is no rushing in this summer landscape. The space dictates this, the long days and light tells you to wait. The tidelines ask for you to look a little longer. The hillsides littered with Lewisian Gneiss will you to spend time joining the dots, to see it’s undulations and find the crevices and valleys, peaks and troughs. The Iron Age broch at Clachtoll asserts this thought of precious time, history, where slowness and this passage of time becomes relevant to now. Evidence of lazy beds used for cultivation lie under the turf, speaking of the lives that once lived here.
This place has a lasting effect. The external, once again becomes internal.
Landscape changes you. Our surroundings become part of us. I write this a few days after my return after having already started new work in response. My painting is never preordained, never dictated, always an exploration. What has started to come clear in these new works is an affinity with the feeling of a quiet continuum. From then until now, from what is seen and sensed, to an outer space and an inner one. As we watch dawn break we know it will turn into day, as the sun sinks and the shadows lengthen, dusk starts to sing, so on and so forth.