To the Sea, From the Land
and coming to land through a sea of clouds
Hello Friends
I’ve just got home from a short trip down to Fife for the preview of the exhibition To the Sea, From the Land, now on show in the beautiful space at Tatha Gallery, overlooking the broad expanse of the River Tay. I am very proud to be showing alongside exquisite monoprints by Lin Chau and hypnotic paintings by David Cass, a combination skilfully brought together by gallery director Lindsay Bennett and curator Clare Mackie.
Fife is one of the places that artists gravitate towards for more space and lower overheads than the cities, so the opening was a chance for me to catch up with old Edinburgh friends I hadn’t seen much since they moved here, in some cases many years ago. Plenty of new faces came along too.
One of the things I enjoy about these occasions is the way that you can experience webs of relationship being woven and deepened in real time. The art world is pretty small, at least my corner is, even after forty years at this game. And so, as people arrived through the door to join the fray, we kept discovering they already knew someone else or were a friend of a friend already. If you’ve heard of the game ‘six degrees of Kevin Bacon’ you’ll get the gist. As we mapped out who knew who from when and how, we could always find a point of connection, even if at some remove, and so the weave grew denser, pulled a little tighter. This is community.
The work I’m showing here is all new, made in my studio over the course of the last few months. It’s been an intensive summer of painting flat out, so it was useful for me to have this chance to pause and step back and see the relationships between the different works. It was also wonderful to talk with people who came, to hear their responses, and understand how the work landed for them. I learn so much from these conversations.
My studio is too small and cluttered to see the bigger pieces together, so new conversations and relationships are struck up between paintings too. I especially appreciated the way that Lindsay and Clare had hung two of the bigger pieces, ‘Night Waves’ and ‘Plunge’, side by side in the main gallery, the darker one pulling you into its depths and the paler one sparkling with light.
The smaller side room offered a more intimate space to spend time with the deep blues of “Suspension’ and the warm gold tones of ‘Beach’ (top) and ‘A sea for my friend’ (bottom).
The exhibition runs until November 15th and if you can’t make it along you can view all of the works I have in the show online here:
I spent the rest of the weekend enjoying Dundee’s famously sunny climate, catching up with more old friends, gazing out over the River Tay, and exploring the spectacular V&A Dundee.
I’m just home, so I better get with unpacking and sorting myself out, as there’s not long to gather my wits before I head off on a much bigger trip; a month-long residency in Japan (more on this soon!)
But here’s the sight that greeted me as we dropped into Kirkwall, leaving blue skies behind as we slipped back under a thick sea of Stratocumulus that stretched as far as the eye could see, hugging the curve of the Earth.
The Life Raft Co-Creating Community
You are warmly welcomed to join our weekly creative co-working session on Zoom. Our meetings are a little Life Raft of shared creativity in these stormy times. It’s very simple. We just say hello at the start and say what we plan to work on and then leave our cameras on and work together in companionable silence. We start at 3pm UK time and finish around 4.30pm. Just click the link below to join us. If you can’t make it live I share a recording to the paid subscriber chat each week.
That’s all for this week!
Sam
Your work leaves me in awe of your skill and of the art's immense beauty. "Plunge" immediately drew my attention, and deepens my interest the more I look at it. It's gorgeous. Your blues knock me out. There is both simplicity and complexity in the layering of colors among that net-like overlay. I would so love to add one of your works to my collection.
I can't wait to see how Japan might inspire you.
Wonderful paintings, the exhibition looks fabulous. Just saying Wow to Japan!