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Finally
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.
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The 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.
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AuthorI compose electroacoustic music and new music for electric and acoustic guitars. As a sound artist my work ranges from investigations into public ritual to the sonification of climate change data to working with the voice, in particular spoken Scots. I incorporate lens-based media and text in commissioned and exhibited work relating to understandings of the complexity of landscape and the rural environment. |
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