WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THE NICE LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS
From 2018-2024 I some how managed to build up a relatively prosperous career from painting abstract landscapes. This is the story of why I abandoned landscape painting and in large part also landscape photography.
In 2018 I had moved from a shared, office style space to my own enclosed space in a redeveloped college building in Calton, in the east end of Glasgow. I had been through the break up of a long term relationship and it seemed that everything in life had changed dramatically and violently. The studio I was renting in Rogart street was large but completely internal, no natural light, it was just a large white box with a concrete floor. I moved my computer set up to one end and decided to set up painting at the other end. since I now had the space and no one else to disturb. My Mothers death in 2013 had spurred me on to pick up the brushes again, she had always been so encouraging of my painting and was very competent and talented at it herself. Painting still helps me feel to close to her and I still feel her encouragement to this day.
As I re-aquatinted myself with the skill of painting I found myself, late at night, sometimes drunk, sometimes high, sometimes straight as a judge. Throwing paint and smooshing paint wildly, in a dervish, with no plan, no justification. Raw unbridled expression. This style of painting is very cathartic, the abstraction is curious and over time acts as a little wormhole for your soul, you can kinda burrow into your psyche it’s like trying to decode your dreams. You can never really grasp whats happening or what it is you are channeling or expressing, but you get an inkling, a gist, a feeling. The catharsis is real, but not cognisant, not logical and in no way a measurable therapy, it can trap you as easily as it can free you. As frustrating as it emancipating. I would find flow often in the earlier hours, where the paint would lead my hand and at some stage I would collapse on the couch and stare at what I had created, it made no sense to me or anyone else but it felt that I had expelled something. I was happy to
In this new studio I would computer by day and paint by night. I was working so hard in this era, basically the only rest I got were the 3 days a week I looked after my kids. I would do 8-10 hours on the computer and then paint well into the night… if I didn’t paint at night I was out partying, sleeping with everyone and generally running a muck and whoring myself out with zero shame. Painting was safer, more productive and definitely helped me untangle the tightly knotted emotions in my soul. As I started to find the flow in the action of painting again, I turned my attention to attempting to organise my paint into something other people may recognise or wish to hang on their own wall. At the time I had been escaping the city often, usually at dawn, I was super fit at the time and would shin up mountains in the dark with my camera and watch the sunrise from altitude. I was spending as lot of time in Assynt as my pal had inherited his uncles croft up there, I would go as often as I could, I felt at home there, I just fit into that landscape, the peace I found was the antidote to my hectic and often debauched lifestyle in the city. And so it was that these landscapes found their way into my wild and out of control expressionistic and out of control paintings. It was a way to escape my windowless white box, a transcendental exploration of grief, lust, hatred, love , belonging and abandonment. Of course being of the highlands does mean that my being is absolutely steeped in landscape, two generations back my family lived amongst the mountains of wester ross, with no shoes and their own language in their mouths.
{STILL WORKING ON THIS ONE}
