My references are immediate and deep. 

A walk today, after a summer thunderstorm, in the forest around my house in Glenmuick – the tangible solidity of birches, the rasping texture of Scots Pine and the happy coincidence of vivid moist forest greens with the (complementary) pink granite hue of the track.  An immediate and vivid immersion in life.

And the sensed reality of Assynt, my magic place, and a deep knowing of the age of landscape, its process and stratigraphy, the violent presence of time.

I am fond of the work of  Peter Goodfellow, an artist who paints and curates not far from here in Strathdon.  What has long impressed me about Goodfellow’s work is  his evocation , almost kinaesthetic, of the rawness of rock – of the Scottish landscape.  This is landscape which is only ground – no figures.  Nor is it airy (though it involves skyscapes) nor watery (though it involves burns).  It is not pastoral like Constable, incendiary like Turner nor shimmering like Cezanne.  Perhaps it is as raw as Van Gogh but Vincent should have gone and found himself some proper mountains.

I write poems…no…as my friend Mandy Haggith points out, poems are discovered, like precious nuggets, in the landscape of a walk, a climb, a trek…they may require some setting but the matter is chthonic, immanent.   The walking meditation and the sublime sense of space, of being alone and high up, most especially when the temperature is well below zero, evokes poetry intended to invoke (using Don Paterson’s distinction) the rapture (no other word) of space, freedom, time, vertigo…dread.  I struggle to photograph.  Greed seizes me.  I click the shutter.   How can I not want to ‘say’?…which is to share.  And yet, depth is lost, space is loss, the image cannot be dizzy.

A similar experience surprises me in forests.  A sense of intimate moist enclosure. The play of light..it is the evanescence of light which makes one feel this moment is precious, this moment must be captured and shared with those one loves.  My son, who photographs, opines that all landscapes are clichés – Pound’s ‘enormous correlation of particulars’ overwhelms and inflates the value of the landscape image to worthlessness.  He is young.  He hasn’t yet realised that this light will never return, he will never pass this way again.  The momentary light on Suilven, the Pass Roland, Lewis, Tillyfourie.

Landscape, however, has no form – cannot be posed.  Landscape can only be commented upon and edited to taste.  The problems of likeness (what does it ‘look’ like) and scrutiny (how does it feel) are central to the form.  In the presence of photography – or even sound recording – art must evoke how a landscape feels – its spatial and temporal immensity not available to the mechanical picture plane.

This is as true in literature as in painting.

You’ll never guess what happened.  This is what it was like.

Travel writing is, I think, a great vice in modern writing- the novel of the ephemeral place.  It is true that we experience new places most vividly in the first 48 hours.  We notice things the ‘natives’ have grown blind to – but we do not see it, no matter how deeply we have researched out itinerary.  And even when we do linger longer than the average tourist everywhere is already commodified through photography – we all know what the Taj Mahal looks like.  Perhaps we can all guess what the backstreets of Luanda look like (at least from the back seat of an SUV).

But how does it feel?  How does landscape feel?  And to the depth of 3 billion years, the dreadful elevator descent of the imagination…oddly I do not press the buttons for the upper stories.

When I was (once upon a time) a project manager in the offshore oil industry I had a salutary lesson from an offshore construction superintendent.  We were ‘discussing’ the constructability of a modification and were brought up short by his insistence that a column, not documented in drawings or 3D computer models, obstructed the ‘design corridor’.  I insisted that the design was feasible…his was response was “I don’t ******* care what your computer model says, I’ve got a reality model in front of me!”

Why landscape?  The mountain stands before us! 

But that, my friend, is a moment from now…and you are not me.

In our examination of the scrutiny of others we see their humanity – like us or not – likeable or not – this is what they see/say about the world.  We connect with the creator and, if we are lucky, we see something we hadn’t noticed, didn’t know and was worthy of our scrutiny.

Something emerges from this…that that which we cannot see must be passed over in silence…cannot, to build on Wittgenstein’s formula, be spoken of.  There is no point repainting a photograph taken from the Hubble telescope or an electron microscope…that seeing which can only be mediated through machines is not seen, it is processed, it is data…all we see is the machine – the feed.  Imagine stars and microbes…inform yourself of their ‘configuration’ – understand anatomy, astrophysics, crystallography, plate tectonics, hydrology – but this knowing only informs scrutiny.  You can’t see what you know any more than you can know what you see.

Our scrutiny expresses desire, compassion, disgust in its emphasis on the telling detail, in its distortion of a limb, the twisting of a tale, the detailing of an eye.

Truism or not, the core discipline of art is looking not making.  Making – craft – is absolutely essential to the realisation of art – to say what you see skilfully and authentically – true to the intent – but making is meaningless without looking.  Looking – not imagining – or if imagining, only in so far as that is looking beyond the conventionally apparent into some unnoticed relation or aspect – the stuff of dreams or kinaesthesia or paranoia. 

So then, isn’t ‘art’ experience focussed through a human lens – the phenomenon of scrutiny.  The analogy to the camera seems paradoxical.  Lens, focus, art creates a mechanistic grammar for a far more numinous process of acquisition, incorporation, transformation, temporisation, narrativisation and production.  What happens is not the instantaneous bending of light but the transmutation of experience – splat! onto the paper, into the throbbing air, onto the screen, into the clay or fabric, stone or steel.

Does it matter?  It is not matter it is code.  There is that old debate, isn’t there?  Truth and beauty – their correlation?  Can crafty cynicism produce a thing of beauty?  Isn’t there always a truth in there…sometimes an ugly truth which radiates?

In the pursuit of likeness then, we must invest scrutiny in the world and in the work – and the more knowingly  we scrutinise, the harder we work it, the more we transmute and essentialise the objects of our scrutiny, the greater will be the expressive value of the result.  It has to be raw, unmediated – no collaborations, no reproduction (that’s another matter entirely).  The thing itself is raw.  Raw scrutiny.  The image of one of Goya’s black paintings – Saturn eating his own children – comes to me now.  The image haunted my childhood – a colour plate in Classical Myth and Legend.  I was not terrified for the dismembered child but for Saturn…and of course it should have been for Franscisco Goya.  Raw scrutiny.  That which we ingest to shit gold.  Sorry.  No way around that statement. 

Odd – to find my way from David Hockney, who seems such a nice, well-scrubbed, sorted sort of a man, to Goya and Saturn.  But somehow the trajectory takes us through Rembrandt’s eyes…consider for example his self-portrait of c.1665…yes, I know it is a reproduction!  But look at his eyes and see what he saw.  Be told!

When I was a boy of about fourteen I was quite good at drawing.  I had a knack of drawing fighter planes and such…got high marks in exams until my art master (allegedly ex-RAF) leaning over my shoulder to see what I was doing, said,  “That’s very good.  Are you thinking about doing art next year?”

“No,” I said.  “Latin.”  (One couldn’t really ‘do’ art and ‘academic’ subjects together – you were one or other.)

“Oh,” he said.  That year I almost failed my art exam.

I returned to painting about 10 years ago – landscape watercolours –  but gave it up again because it was taking up too much of my writing time…it’s gratifications were too immediate…it was a distraction from the big task – TO BE A WRITER!

Now, I have Fredric to thank for my reconnection with drawing and painting. 

It started as a sort of meditation. 

I had a psychotherapist who said, in the context of my writing and my life, that I refuse to gratify.  I withhold – not truth, not even pleasure but hope and reassurance.  Comfort.   My writing is a telling of tales – clyping we say in Scotland – at best a bearing of witness. 

This occurs.  This is how it is.  You should know this.  And/but…

My work could only be worthwhile (I thought) if it achieved ‘likeness’ – though the likeness I achieved was rarely ‘likeable’: it failed to gratify.  And this prejudice was stronger in drawing and painting (where I had invested little in learning and practice) than in writing.  Though my  taste is for Schiele, Goya, Picasso, Rothko, Emin, Breugel,  Currin, Koons, Serra, Freud I wanted to draw and paint ‘likeness’.  Which leads to the inevitable question – like WHAT?

In part, of course, it is a matter of craftsmanship – draughtsmanship and mastery of colour.  Picasso apparently emphasised the importance of ‘drawing’ in ‘an artists’ development, though perhaps he meant ‘looking’.  But then he was more of a draughtsman than (say) Matisse or Gauguin and perhaps less of a painter.  But both elements (and any consideration of colour must surely extend to texture) must be integrated in pursuit of likeness – the value invested in the reader’s recognition – for a graphic image is read/decoded just as surely as a text. 

Ah!  THAT is what it is like!

A dissonant chord.  A sensation of vertigo.  A focus on the fetish.  A colour beyond nature but apprehended.

And then there is the matter of form…

Ezra Pound in his 1962 Paris Review Interview commented on the ‘enormous correlation of particulars’ inherent in the camera and observed that this threw up the question of ‘what needs to be done and what is superfluous?’  Mechanically captured images and recorded sounds saturate experience.  Almost everyone has seen or heard (or can see or hear) everything ‘public’ encapsulated in one or other of the canonical forms of reproduction.  The world of stuff is continuously mined for ‘images’ and the images traded globally, essences extracted, derivatives devised and by this populist/corporate mapping and cross-referencing of the space, reality is fractured not healed.    

And yet, as artists, we must offer resonant likeness, the subject’s realisation of how-it-seems/ how-it-feels that evokes an entirely novel increment of solidarity in the reader – a moment in the physical not temporal sense – an opening up of space, the creation of reality through new recognitions.  An art-work is a device after all – Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

I suppose, name-dropping again, it’s the Gramsci thing – the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will…or Beckett’s ‘Fail again. Fail better.’

I hate stories.  They are not true.  Life’s not like that.  And yet they are all we have.  We.  The bedrock of solidarity..a make-it-that contingency, an ironic smirk.  Our only access to shared ‘reality’.  Ah well!

Back to the drawing board.