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THE OPPOSITE SHORE

Andrew Mackenzie

‘But trees warp time, or rather create a variety of times: here dense and abrupt, there calm and sinuous – never plodding, mechanical, inescapably monotonous. I can still feel this as soon as I enter one of the countless secret little woods in the Devon-Dorset border country where I now live; it is almost like leaving land to go into water, another medium, another dimension. When I was younger, this sensation was acute. Slinking into trees was always slinking into heaven.’ John Fowles, The Tree, Little Toller, p 17

The Opposite Shore is a series of new paintings and drawings which celebrate the relationship between woodland and water, punctuated by strident geometric linear forms reminiscent of snow poles, street lights, signs, buildings, walls, windows, boardwalks or tree tubes.

This focus has its starting point in my daily commute to the studio by foot in the Scottish Borders; across a field, through a wood and past a couple of small man-made ponds, a journey which has become increasingly important to me over the last few years. The work represents an everyday awareness of the places I inhabit. It is an attempt to notice things, to pay attention, to think about what landscape is in terms of both nature and culture, at the same time as being in the studio making paintings. All the time spent outside (recorded through photography, drawing and note-making) has to translate into the act of painting, creating objects which somehow reflect those experiences and thought processes.

For example, in Verge Revisited I am absorbing the patterns and rhythms of winter trees (Alder, Willow, Birch, Aspen, Rowan) at the edge of the road to the studio, passed often in the dark by torchlight, or at dusk. A line from John Fowles - like leaving land to go into water - began to permeate my thinking, reflected in the process of applying and removing paint repeatedly, submerging the trees and then revealing them again, slightly altered. Snow (water) is suggested through tiny repeated blue lines, weaving through and across the painting. The act of future planting is hinted at by sparse orange vertical lines. The colour balance and composition took many months to arrive at and traces of previous decisions are left visible in the surface.

My interest in the interplay between trees and water also stems from an ambitious public art project I am currently producing for the Hawick Flood Protection Scheme, in collaboration with Alec Finlay and Gill Russell, which examines correlations between branching patterns of the Teviot watershed, tree forms and river culture. The project includes tree planting on the tributaries themselves to encourage thinking around natural flood management. Three paintings in this show (Flood Wall 1, 2 and 3) present considerations of woodland in relation to schematic drawings of hard engineering.

Four paintings are titled The Opposite Shore. Three are based on memories of various reservoirs across Scotland – Harlaw in the Pentlands, Loch Glascarnoch in the Highlands, Talla in the Borders – but are distilled to a horizontal edge of silver paint behind trees. The boardwalk drawings, indicating human interaction, are ‘imported’ from the Ettrick Marshes. Opposite Shore (Loch)shows the unromanticised shore of Loch Ness. The blue/grey of the water has been used instead on the shore side trees, making clear the interconnection between trees and water. On the opposite shore is the road between Inverness and Drumnadrochit which I travelled often as a child to visit family in the Great Glen.

River Painting 7 and 8 show the awe-inspiring gorge of the River Findhorn, prone to spate. The layered diagrammatic line drawings here suggest the presense of human space, but are left deliberately ambiguous. They are 'frameworks', perhaps referring to how we construct our sense of place, as an exchange between what is there and what we bring to it through our prior knowledge and experience.

To end again with John Fowles, written in 1979: “We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this.”

The Tree, Little Toller, p 61

ANDREW MACKENZIE

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