Letting the Paint Do the Talking

This is your second Lammermuir project. Why do you paint the Lammermuirs?

I discovered the Lammermuirs in 1997. I was taken by their accumulated history – they are full of collective and personal memories. I always return to areas that absorb and intrigue me, and was pleased to be able to revisit this area of Scotland. I became fascinated by this seemingly barren, wild area so close to Edinburgh. I painted there in December, January and February, often in deep snow, and outside in the freezing weather. I was attracted to the low sunshine during winter months in the hills.

In late 2019 a trip I had planned to the Antarctic was cancelled by the organising company. With no other trip abroad possible owing to Covid restrictions, visits to the Lammermuirs were easily organised. The area can be reached in an hour from Edinburgh, where I live, and I can be home again the same day.

I created studies there in the depths of winter, often after snow. Despite my eagerness to catch the best of the day out on the hills, caution is required. On one occasion a large police officer stopped me from attempting to reach the top of the moor in really bad weather. He did the right thing! I was driving a car totally unsuited to icy and snow-covered roads so exposed to the elements.

What draws you to the Lammermuirs and how do the images you make there follow on from your Arctic works?

Initially I found it quite difficult to change my palette from the cool colours of the Arctic to the earthy colours of the moors. In the Arctic there are very few traces of human presence, but there is a spirit of the place. The Lammermuirs are so much smaller, and the area is full of signs and traces of its past history and present usage. Its intimacy brings together competing commercial and leisure activities. The rapidly changing weather there is very different too, obscuring and then revealing its nature. The land has been worked and reworked and its past history layered.

If gates predominate in some of my images, that’s because there are so many. They mark out human territory – exactly the imprint I search for in areas infused with historic significance.

You don’t like to think of these works simply as landscapes. Is the human presence important to you? Certainly in your Arctic works, it seemed to be the human story that was often uppermost in your mind, even faced with wilderness.

The human presence is absorbed into the spirit of the place – that’s my inspiration. An appreciation of the history of the Lammermuirs is essential to an understanding of what we see now.