<![CDATA[JAMES WYNESS

<![CDATA[JAMES WYNESS - Blog]]>Sat, 25 Apr 2026 11:42:51 +0000Weebly<![CDATA[RADIO NABU CONGUL 98.8 FM, RESIDENCY]]>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:43:41 GMThttps://www.jameswyness.com/blog/radio-nabu-congul-988-fm-residency

I'm looking forward to be working this year with composer, instrument builder and microtonalist Kraig Grady at Radio Nabu Congul 98.8 FM (somewhere in Australia). I got to know Kraig before the days of social media when people had lively discussions on newsgroup forums. I was interested in just intonation and microtonality, having come from early music and Indian music into making my own instruments. Kraig was a guiding light throughout this process and beyond into the current era.

Normally the resident would lean towards microtonal compositions but I want to widen the brief a little by making a piece about tuning rather than a piece in a specific tuning. Tuning interpreted musically, environmentally, cosmically, personally, spiritually, in terms of physics or even motor mechanics, more of a radiophonic piece proper with different sonic strands and of course the essential elements of rupture, disruption, dislocation, transmission and disarticulation, fundamentals in the history of experimental radiophonic practice. Let's see what happens.

If you want to see something truly original in the world of imagination, dreamworlds and new music then have a look at the Anaphorian site. Marvels await you. I'd also invite you to enter into Kraig's sound world over on Bandcamp. My favourite albums are The Creation of the Worlds, The Stolen Stars and Our Rainy Season.

]]><![CDATA[Passio 4]]>Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:18:52 GMThttps://www.jameswyness.com/blog/passio-4Finally

I’ve written about how the painting of different eras and nations have had such an important bearing on my work but I should also acknowledge the impact of other photographers, in particular those landscape photographers whose work transcends pretty scenery and gives me not only that shiver of delight, joy and confidence in the power and beauty of wide open spaces, as well as the intimate corners of our beautiful planet, but also forces me to think deeply about our actions and intentions towards what we call natural environments. The English photographers Fay Godwin, John Blakemore and Paul Hill, the Americans Robert Adams, Edward Burtynsky, Richard Misrach and Ron Jude. There are so many more.

I came to Paul Nash’s work by chance many years ago but more recently and significantly through the work of Derek Jarman and the ongoing projects of Daniel and Clara whose work continues to inspire in its inventiveness and generosity mainly because so much of what they do is fundamentally lens-based. I found out after I began my own forays into digital painting that they’ve been using acrylics directly on to large prints which I’d love to try sometime. They’ve also been working recently with ideas around angels which is oddly coincidental.

Throw in a mass of reading and there you have it.
]]><![CDATA[Passio 3]]>Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:16:03 GMThttps://www.jameswyness.com/blog/passio-3The Work

Passio is the title of a triptych of artworks that I recently completed for an exhibition, entitled Passion, a group show opening in March 2026 at Hawick museum and running for about three months. I don't consider myself to be much of a visual artist, a photographer maybe and well informed, but not a painter or an illustrator which abilities somehow and probably erroneously stick in my mind as being ‘properly’ artistic. However I was invited to exhibit so I agreed. The theme boiled down to an engagement with change in the environment, both change and environment being open to broad interpretation.

Our statement goes something like this:-

The Passion brings together a group of artists whose work investigates
the idea of environmental change, be it small changes in the immediate
environment or larger changes observed in the global environment. One
might indeed say the artists share an individual and a collective passion
for work that closely examines environmental change.

In 2025 Jedburgh artist Marianne Bamkin invited a group of artists to
respond freely to the theme of the exhibition and here we see these re-
sponses across a wide range of media, from recycled textiles, beach lit-
ter and wire to photography, printmaking and painting with water-
colour, oils and acrylics.

I already had some photographs of degraded landscapes near where I live, landscapes where the guts have been ripped out by clearfelling, where sitka spruce was being planted and ripped out for private gain without any care for the impact of the operations. My earlier and subsequent visits to these areas of clearfelling yielded some interesting pictures. One in particular looked like the Somme after a major offensive (see below) which sparked off some interesting ideas around how the work could develop. I began by lining up three pictures that somehow worked together as a triptych. First I tried colour, then monochrome, landscape format then square but the images, though not lacking in impact, were too literal to exhibit as they were - as very large prints the photographs on their own would have the scale to make an impact, and might forgive me the indulgence, emulate the impact of a Velasquez. I then fretted and busied myself with ideas on how to remedy this but I couldn't find anyone local who prints to anything more than A3 so forced to work with that size of document. I decided to centre an A4 print on to A3 paper.

With all that in mind I began to modify the photographs using overlays of appropriated historical art and digital paint. I reworked the three prints to produce Passio, a photograph incorporating an appropriation of The Menin Road by Paul Nash,
Golgotha, a digitally painted photograph incorporating an appropriation of The Crucifixion Triptych by Rogier van der Weyden and Vestigia Angelorum, a digitally painted photograph.

Paul Nash, The Menin Road

Rogier van der Weyden, The Crucifixion Triptych

I’ll write a bit later about some of the later influences on this work but if we go back to Picasso’s Guernica, Velazquez’ Christ Crucified and further back to the medieval and Renaissance canon of specific kinds of christian art we find more than marvellous depictions of stations of the cross or martyrdoms. There’s a transcendence, an overarching redemption at work, however tenuous or concealed within the work. At times the possibility of redemption is attributed to visitations by angels and these characters I find interesting. Angels are not fairies though try explaining that to a four year old daughter who dresses up as either or both. Whether you believe in them or not they are to be taken seriously. A visit by the Archangel Michael in full regalia and with sword is less desirable than a visit from the tooth fairy. Because angels appear so often in the religious art of Christianity in various roles (and indeed at times in Islamic art), I decided to incorporate them in my work as forces of benevolent vigilance and of healing. Who knows? We need as much help as we can get.

I sense an element of transcendence even in a piece like the 16th century Isenheim Altarpiece attributed to Nikolaus Hagenauer and Matthias Grünewald. Above and beyond the symbolism in the work contemporaries looking at this will see someone like themselves nailed to a cross and reflect on how such suffering can be overcome, provided conveniently as it happens by the Church. The punishing of somethings sacred with the promise of redemption or how the sacred overcomes the punishment and pain. Without such transcendent ideas I’d be stuck with literal pictures of bleakscapes.

It’s not a huge leap from this kind of thinking to a similar consideration of the land, the planet, scarred and abused as it is almost to the point of irreversible destruction, where the transcendence or redemption emerges from our collective (and growing) sense of the necessity to honour our duty of care and honest custodianship.

The proportion of passion to redemption in these images I shall leave the reader to reflect upon.

]]><![CDATA[Passio 2]]>Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:15:02 GMThttps://www.jameswyness.com/blog/passio-2

The Land

Outside his farmhouse Robert pointed to a line of sitka cresting a ridge to the east and explained that the harvest, the tree harvest or clearfelling, fails every three years. He told me how many of these plantations are owned by airline companies as sites of carbon offset.

It was on a landscape art project in the first half of 2025 that I had a long conversation with Robert Neill who farms beyond Nisbet. Robert is a highly knowledgeable and experienced farmer committed to maintaining the highest standards in food growing. In 2025 was appointed Vice President of the National Farm Union Scotland. He completely rewired my switchboard with respect to understanding land ownership, land use and agriculture in 21st century Scotland.

I find clearfelling to be disgusting. Completely unacceptable in fact. I can’t understand why we’d want to have a beautiful landscape ripped to pieces, albeit in ever changing patches, simply so that somebody who lives far away can make some money on the fly. By landscape I don’t just mean scenery, though we all love beautiful views (and why not?). I mean the layers of natural and human history that have shaped the land over time. The question we need to ask is the same we should ask about the siting of windfarms. Is this the right place to grow, fell, grow and fell these matchstick trees or is there a better place? Fundamentally we might ask whether there’s a less destructive way for remote capital interest to make money. It’s as simple as that for me.

Normal trees with abnormal trees in the background

I’ve read different policy papers and planning documents that try to convince me of the important economic benefits that commercial forestry brings in its wake. I don’t believe a word of it. My plan for Southern Scotland works on a scale of one hundred or even five hundred years. You plant native trees, as far as possible, or friendly immigrants, then you turn the place into a massive Sub Arctic lung where people can come from all over to walk and enjoy the benefits of the forest, the wildlife and all the rest of it. This doesn’t really fit in with ‘the end of the financial year’ approach but there’s no harm in mentioning it at various forums if only to annoy the right people. project for Scotland though nobody nowadays seems to have vision or ambition beyond the end of the financial year.

There are these signs around the place explaining how ‘operations will be carried out to the highest standard etc. etc. to ensure the ecological conservation etc. etc.’ They’re just rubbing your nose in it. I was walking once with a friend on the path leading from Southdean towards the source of the Jed Water. A bleakscape of felled trees opened up on our right. Some of the guys were still working the lorries so I asked one of them why they leave the odd tree sticking up after they’ve levelled everything else. ‘For the owls’, he said. Then he grinned and admitted that it would be a very stupid owl to want to sit on the long bare pole of a sitka trunk hoping for lunch from a sterilised landscape. I wonder if any of my readers have tried to walk into a sitka forest, either standing or felled over several generations? The forest itself not a pretty place to be. You can’t properly walk in unless they’ve cut out a clearing. The felled sites are a jumble of trunks and hollows, resembling a landscape recently shelled and bombed (of which more later). In the forests trees are packed so close together that hardly any light reaches the forest floor. Nothing grows there, no moss, ferns, plants, shrubs, flowers. No beasties for our owl to feast upon. The soil is toxic. By contrast the deciduous woodland is positively Edenic.

The question then arises - how do you make meaningful art on this topic of degrade landscapes? I should mention here that I’ve been investigating aspects of the Scottish Borders landscape in the broad sense of the word for about twenty five years, through sound, photography, moving image, text, even printmaking, and regardless of the value of these outcomes I’ve come to my own deep understanding of the complexity of this region of rural Scotland. Over time the same questions arise. What do you want to say about the land, about landscape and environment? What do you want to respond to, why and who’s interested (apart from me)? Well actually it turns out that lots of people from all walks of life are interested in what goes on in the land. Perhaps artists are well placed to create work that explores the concerns of all of us who care about what goes on. That’s enough to keep me going. The trick is to ‘say’ something interesting, anything at all, without preaching or banging a drum.

]]><![CDATA[Passio 1]]>Sun, 01 Feb 2026 15:12:31 GMThttps://www.jameswyness.com/blog/passio-1

Introduction

My introduction proper to the art world came to me as an epiphany, a revelation. In my mid-20s I found myself in Madrid for a month so I decided to have a look round the Museo Nacional del Prado. There was little sophistication or formal training in my understanding of the Western art world but I was at the very least aware that the Spanish produced great art and I’d begun collecting postcards of religious art from my European travels, my own little portable gallery. Just before arriving at the Prado museum I found a smaller museum, more of a white cube. I don’t even know if it’s still there. It was open and showing work by Picasso. When in Spain... On the left as you entered the gallery I came upon a number of small oil paintings exhibited on a wall which I immediately recognised as the series La Femme qui Pleure (The Weeping Woman) painted by Picasso in 1937 in response to the atrocities of the Guernica bombings during the Civil War. These variations on a theme were fascinating and kept me occupied for some time but what I failed to notice was the actual painting, Guernica itself, high up on the wall to my right. How I missed a canvas of 11 ft 5 inches by 25 ft 6 I will never know but there it was, a masterful portrayal of suffering - the gored horse, a bull, screaming women, a dead baby, a dismembered soldier and the flames. As a young man already sensitised to the world of suffering, evil and transcendence through both Christian and Eastern spirituality I had to sit down and process the impact of this work. How could paint on a canvas say so much about human experience?

A short walk took me to the Prado with a left turn into the main entrance and there it was. I actually lost my footing and struggled to breathe. Not only do they produce great art but the Spanish know a thing or two about curating because facing me as I entered the museum was the Christ Crucified by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez. So there he was, Christ hanging off the cross, eyes down. I felt as if at any moment he would raise his head, look me in the eyes and claim yet another disciple. I have a postcard of the painting in my studio and still contemplate it waiting for Jesus to look up and smile. It’s the sheer scale of the painting that stops you in your stride because at 249 cm × 170 cm it’s bigger than any human, larger than a slab of plasterboard, the size of a barn door. I have never been struck so profoundly by a work of art than I was that day in Madrid. My Damascene moment.

Before me lay the whole of Spanish history, the counter-reformation, the Hapsburgs, a massive slice of European history in itself, all distilled into a painting. And there also was the passion that I saw in Picasso’s Guernica. We must of course understand the word passion here in it original meaning, originating from the Latin passio which means suffering or endurance, applied from the beginning to the very suffering of Christ on the cross. Over time the word has become conflated with the desires of romantic love (which of course has its fair share of suffering). I ended my day trip by visiting the section devoted to Goya. Yet more suffering, more questions than answers.

The questions raised by these encounters have remained with me as has the notion of what we hold to be sacred or more specifically the sacrosanct which I take to mean something you don’t touch or interfere with. Allied to this is the question of how we overcome or transcend suffering, pain or violence done by us to others or by others to us or, to finally get to the point, violence done to the earth itself. Like it or not this is where we’ve been since we evolved as anatomically modern humans and this is crucially and significantly where we are with respect to our custodianship of the planet.

]]><![CDATA[Rugby Sevens, Melrose]]>Sun, 30 Nov 2025 15:47:11 GMThttps://www.jameswyness.com/blog/rugby-sevens-melroseDrypoint print, November 2025

]]><![CDATA[Lulu, Dylan and Bird]]>Tue, 04 Nov 2025 11:14:56 GMThttps://www.jameswyness.com/blog/lulu-dylan-and-bird

Drypoint with chine-collé.

The chine-collé got a bit smudgy but the happy accident is that it lends some dynamism to the objects and figures.

At Georgie Fay's wonderful print club I've been experimenting, watching, asking questions and learning slowly to find out what I can do and what I want to do with printmaking. It started off as an offshoot of some ideogram line drawings and linocuts that I'd done with the idea of making zines. I like the diy subversive element in zinemaking and wanted to get tore into some of the slimy political goings on in these little backward towns but I couldn't get any collaborators so it's unlikely I'll get that kind of thing going here. Fortunately there's a world beyond the Borders of Scotland.

Then I slowly began to appreciate the beauty of printmaking in its own right, the processes, the layers - not unlike some aspects of musical composition. It's not painting and as you can see you don't need to be a particularly good illustrator. I often see the world through a child's eyes or as some kind of cartoon, more like the notions of Lila and Maya than absurdism or nihilism if you want to get philosophical about things. I already knew about the art brut of Dubuffet (and indeed have made such music with drookitarlùp (2020)) then I discovered the brilliant work of Gary Goodman and Chang Uc-Shin and delved into books about animals, architecture and typography as well as the colour plates in a lovely book I have on Indian miniature painting. I copy and adapt motifs from those artists and eras - people, especially women and their adornments, simple, exotic and unusual or even impossible buildings, animals, especially pets (my dogs end up looking like piggies), trees, plants and flowers, how these artists set out simple landscapes and render features like mountains with a simple triangular or lumpy blob of colour. Always the sun and moon.

]]><![CDATA[A Jumble of Old Sticks]]>Wed, 17 Sep 2025 17:12:37 GMThttps://www.jameswyness.com/blog/a-jumble-of-old-sticks

The social dimension of music weaves itself in and out of conversations. Worlds are turned inside out and upside down. Soiled hand-me-downs are offered as new garments. Purposes turn to nostalgia. In another world long extended dialogues are sustained, aspects of science scrutinised. Models of evolutionary biology are pulled apart to reveal analogues of specialised practices of contemporary music. Consider speciation for example. From a particular perspective the complex behaviours of living beings under evolutionary or environmental pressures can help us understand or indeed create certain types of music. Literature, utopian worlds, worlds turned inside out, the weather here and the weather there, rarely politics, analogies drawn from linguistics, the art world, which comes out of most discussions smelling badly, the general stupidity of people, often artists as it happens and yes, ourselves.

If I must be thrawn let it be about the scientific method, its history and its successful adoption by so many great minds. I choose to respect it, all the more so in a world where the louder you talk nonsense the more people listen to you and eventually believe you. Or a world where commercial pressures demand fast content in regular doses. This includes the world of art and artists, which comprises of course music and the sonic arts.

Ernst Mayr had a spat with some American scientists over their claims about Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence based on unscientific principles. He also acknowledges that 'the scientific method is a powerful tool for understanding the natural world, but it requires adaptation and interpretation when applied to different fields of science, particularly historical sciences like evolution.’ From time to time the study of music also benefits from a change of lens.

And finally in the interest of equipoise let’s not forget how Kafka would be rolling about the floor laughing so hard while reading The Trial aloud “that at times he was unable to continue reading”.

]]><![CDATA[Vexatious Genuflections]]>Fri, 05 Sep 2025 14:32:47 GMThttps://www.jameswyness.com/blog/vexatious-genuflections

I can’t properly enumerate or describe all the topics that we’ve covered in our conversations but I can give the reader an idea. These have ranged from deep explorations of music, what it is, what it could or even should be and isn’t, theories of music personal and historical, to our own compositional practices and the work of other composers, anthropology and paleoanthropology including human origins to social pressures on music and the practices resulting from trends, fashions and commercial or industrial forces. Cacology, dendrology, ethnoichthyology, gelotology, glottology, heterology, ktenology, ludology, mastology, morology, ideological morphology, pantology. Fears localised and general burrowed into our composerly conference, both Italian and Scottish. Who wants to smell bad or spend money? Including:-

Anemophobia
Anthrophobia
Anthropophobia
Arachibutyrophobia
Astrophobia
Ataxophobia
Atychiphobia
Automatonophobia
Bromidrophobia
Cacophobia
Chrometophobia
Chronomentrophobia
Decidophobia
Dendrophobia
Dentophobia
Genuphobia
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia
Lockiophobia
Papyrophobia
Phobophobia
Pyrophobia
Scoptophobia
Zuigerphobia

Lesser known topics fell upon us in the depths of hard winters when the birds fell out of the sky: historical vexillology, the study of knocker-uppers, codicology, the multidisciplinary analysis of medieval flamethrowers, all the timer avoiding and critically banishing the idolatry of cats, lizards and beetles. We have touched frequently on technological matters, though never setting out a stall under the banner of fetishists of the new, or the old, taking a somewhat principled though obvious stance to the effect that what we have will suffice, unless something truly better comes along. I confess to having flights of fancy at times, enthusing about things when I should know better (and spending money needlessly), at times merely to irritate people who fetishise technology, at times because of the 84,000 neurotic states of mind the totality of which is unpractised by me as of this date, with 84,000 solutions but of more relevance the 21,000 rooted in attachment or having the character of attachment.

]]><![CDATA[Alea iacta est]]>Wed, 27 Aug 2025 12:03:43 GMThttps://www.jameswyness.com/blog/alea-iacta-estThe Die has been Cast

In my multitudinous conversations with Anselm of Canterbury, countless Scholastics greater and lesser, notably Radulfus Ardens, Berthold of Moosburg and of course Hugh of Newcastle whose fair skin and blue eyes prevent him from taking the sun, I have suffered ongoing bun fights, in which, to his disgrace if I’m honest, my erstwhile colleague René Descartes has chosen to participate. I am often chastised for the perceived fault of indecision that I, a mere composer, find to be virtuous in its application to solving problems. We may all well disagree but at my behest we continue to debate the matter. I often hesitate before writing, not knowing where to start, so I start at the beginning yet some would have it that even this defies logical precision and dialectical reasoning. Happily my friend and fellow composer Giancarlo Toniutti and I have corresponded by email for over a decade. We have also met in person and indeed worked together on musical projects small and large, great and good. But the bulk of our engagement has been by letter, he in Italy, me in Scotland. The outcome? Love them as I do, I have less need of medieval thinkers.

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