Category: Visual Art - JAMES WYNESS

Passio 4

1/2/2026

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.

Passio 3

1/2/2026

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.

Passio 2

1/2/2026

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.

Passio 1

1/2/2026

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.

Fallow Land - the art work

24/2/2025

I’m going over different ideas for an eventual art work or works relating to the Fallow Land project and its themes. I’ve covered a lot of ground (literally), what with the art walks, my own walks and spending time in the field (again literally), looking, listening, thinking, exploring through all the senses, in both the mindful and the mindless modes. The other part is the social dimension which involves growing initiatives in the town and those are going very well. I’ll report on them next.

A few ideas are coming to the fore. Some of these involve recycling ideas and concepts that I've had bubbling away as part of previous investigations into Jedburgh and its hinterland. I had discussed with two of the farmers I know the possibility of making small signs to put on the gates of those fields along the paths where people walk the most, signs illustrating through symbols and/or words what’s going on in the fields. This might still happen and my own preference here is for some kind of ideograms that encapsulate the growing or function that the various fields are undergoing over a given period.

From my neighbour Alfie Dodds who farms below Hunthill south of Jedburgh I have some wonderful descriptions of the fields in the area I’m investigating. One goes like this: Species-rich meadow used for grazing, cannot be ploughed without permission from Department. Presumably that’ll be the Department of Agriculture. I thought this was all about insects, maybe dragonflies, but what it means is that there are rare grasses in that field and somebody has considered it worthwhile to protect them. As you’d expect other descriptions are very functional, for example Permanent Grass will be left until July and cut for silage or, more detailed, Arable silage field under sown with grass. Will be ploughed out in Spring and re-sown with arable silage mix and grass. To be cut for winter fodder 2025. I especially love this one - Winter stubble scheme to encourage birds, will be ploughed and sown in Spring with Spring Barley, because it's a novelty to me that food growing involves feeding the birds. It all makes sense within a more holistic view of the food environment.

Out of all this I’ll be spending a lot more time in the spring, wallowing in the amazing milky light you get at this latitude. In and around these fields employing cameras, lenses, a bunch of objects and ‘stuff’ to make some short test films and staged photographs, probably in my performance mode as ‘Landowner’. Back to the ideograms I can see a place for those as objects, printed out or as linocuts, brought into the environment.

Sound is tricky and I say that as someone who works with the medium every day. The sounds in those high fields and woodlands can be undifferentiated, nuanced and subtle at the same time, not without interest but difficult to manipulate into an accessible art work. Until I adequately decode the soundscape my way round this problem is to represent the sounds visually or even sculpturally which I find fascinating.

Finally, alongside finding a place for the words and phrases that the farmers themselves use to describe places and processes, I'm considering some activity around sonograms, again linocuts or other prints. If you’re not sure what I mean by sonograms I should make it clear that I'm not doing pregnancy testing for cattle.

After all that lot I might be able to make some decisions.

The Fallow Land Haiku Project

21/1/2025

As you might know I'll be hosting Jedburgh's participation in the Fallow Land Project for the next five months. As part of that I’d like to invite writers to contribute to the art works around the project by writing one or more haiku. A haiku is a short Japanese poem consisting of three phrases composed of seventeen syllables, in a five-seven-five pattern. Quite often there’s a seasonal reference.

The primary theme is fallow which can be understood literally, usually agriculturally, or metaphorically, for example relating to spiritual growth. Other related themes are land use and ownership, soil, the food environment and sustainability.

The Fallow Land Artwalks are under way on the last Sunday of each month. The themes from February to April are word, light and sound respectively so I'll be encouraging the walkers in February to contribute their own haiku.

You can submit as many as you like on as many relevant topics as you wish. If contributors wish I’ll then figure out a way of presenting everyone’s haiku(s) in small publications using folded card and paper as well as putting them on my website where I'll be updating progress regularly. It would be wonderful if you were able to participate and of course if you want to write something more substantial please do!

Please email me your poems (as word docs preferably):-[email protected]

Provisional deadline: Friday 21 February

There’s a very good Wikipedia entry if you want to dig deeper:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku

And here’s a link to the Fallow Land project:-https://www.artwalkporty.co.uk/project/fallow-land/

Jed Artwalks, Fallow Land

19/1/2025

As part of the Fallow Land project I've made a good start to the the year with my plans to host a series of four artworks in and around Jedburgh between January and April. I had the idea from the excellent work done by Artwork Porty over the years. The idea is to invite people to walk and reflect upon the environments encountered during the walk. Walks can be medium specific, for example a soundwalk, or more general, for example to make connections between creative people.

The first walk is fully signed up and we'll be doing a four mile circuit along the back roads and woodlands above Jedburgh to the south-east. In preparation for this I'm learning from local farmers, informing myself about what goes on in the fields. This is an important part of the project, investigating the patterns of activity in the managed landscape, from land ownership to land use to food growing, from which some kind of art work will emerge.

My hope is that we'll get talking and learning about not only about the land and landscape but also about how we might make art in and around the topics and themes that arise. This occupies me regularly on my walks and I'm always relish the opportunity to listen to ideas from other artists.

For the next three walks, at the end of the month from February to April, I want the groups to consider particular art forms, especially sound, lens-based media and writing though I imagine these will all fuse together over time.

Printmaking

12/10/2024

I'm a bit slow in the visual arts department. For a start I don't have the time to do my primary projects and establish a practice in other things that require my full attention. But over the years I've managed to get to grips with some aspects of collage, photography, book folding and linocut.

Recently I went to a printing workshop with the very wonderful Georgie Fay. https://georgiefay.com/ where I met some other artists involved in printing and bookmaking. Georgie's idea is to establish a club that meets regularly and eventually to set up a proper print workshop in Earlston. For this session we met at the Little Art Hub in Galashiels https://www.littlearthub.org/, a white space paid for by multi-year finding from various bodies. Jedburgh has nothing like this and the way things go in this cold, cold town is unlikely to see such a hub in my lifetime.

Anyway, I've always wanted to print, mainly to generate artwork for albums and posters and maybe zines and folded books so when a dear artist friend Sue Higginson-Bell recommended this workshop I snapped up a place and had the time of my life. I'd do this at home but you really need a large space to set out all the different clean, dirty and wet areas and of course you need a press. A good one is expensive and takes up yet more space. I won't go into the details but what I love about printing is the uncertainty. It's like wet darkroom developing when the print emerges from the tank like a fish you've just dragged up from the depths of the ocean. You're never sure what you're going to get. Then there's the repeat processes where your original print is modified and reprinted in different ways. It's similar in spirit to some of the recording techniques I use in building up a musical composition. Not to forget the amazing power of colour, nuanced by all the subtle textures that find themselves on to the print. I'm hooked. Here are some of my efforts with all the usual beginner's mistakes - thumbprints, smudges, light bands where I didn't pull the print evenly through the press, letters back to front and everything the wrong way round (some of these were happy accidents in the end).

Ideograms from another project

Oak leaves and acetate

A second generation of oak leaves and acetate

Oak leaves and acetate repositioned and reprinted

A first attempt at an Arcadian Meadows poster. Acetate cutouts.

Now the right way round with further texture

You'll see this one on one of my albums

Author

I 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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