How do you feel about the paintings you made of Edinburgh in the past?

GU: In 2002 the subject itself, the city of Edinburgh, dominated me. Understandably. It was the great capital city and I was not long out of art school. I think perhaps I felt a certain sense of duty to paint Edinburgh with some degree of geographical truth and integrity. At the time, I had less actual painting experience than I have now and so it was helpful for me to use those re-assuring structural features to support the compositions of my paintings. Using that method was advantageous at the time.  

Topography and architecture gave me the confidence to access the subject and initiate a journey of exploration. I could freely test out ways of describing what I was looking at, knowing that I had laid down a strong compositional bedrock to begin with and that the overall image would maintain a satisfying unity. It was a determined process of discovering and tying down and I do see that there was serious intention there.

In 2007 I’d spent several years living in Italy and my interests and experience had expanded exponentially. I was painting the ancient city of Rome and the surrounding countryside and it was full of ruins. Ruins everywhere. Ruined cities and towns and villages. Ruins of ancient monuments, amphitheatres, architecture, artefacts and sculpture…Even a super-civilisation like the Roman Empire had fallen to ruins. And so, with exposure to this, what I had perceived in the city early on, an invincible heroism, steadily lost its authority over my drawing and composition. A lot of time was spent painting things that were broken. Fragmented. Come apart. It had a profound effect on my approach to painting the subject of the cityscape. A more personal response toward my subject entered into the work from this point. A city became a hook on which to hang the light of a time of day, or a memory or mood.

The methods I employ now are more in line with this.

I do not place a grid. There is no under-pinning framework. Not allowing any mark or image to be pinned down is my aim…I like marks to appear to be in suspension, opening or circulating. My painting ability as it is now, after over thirty years of practise, allows me to work without such structures. I’m taking away things that feel solid or fixed…I’m letting go of hard edges. I omit restrictive architectonic drawing and instead loosen every part of the painting. Topography, even gravity, is not a concern. If painting a place, I aim to channel into each piece all the depth of personal understanding I have of that place, both from the experience and the memory of it, as well as what my eye observes in the moment. All the lines in my paintings curve…there are few straight lines. Physically my paintings are heavy with materials, so I like the image within them to appear weightless in opposition of that.  My current paintings of Edinburgh focus more on a viewpoint of the city as a person…a character, or a feeling. I’m searching for a sound or a song…a voice. I aim to draw out emotive colour and mark from what I sense in the cityscape and I try to allow that vernacular to freely surrender itself onto the picture plane.

I see the body of the city as delicate. To the east you see Arthurs Seat and the Salisbury Crags – brooding occupants. Black. Impenetrable. By comparison the city is the opposite. On the ground level and as you move through it, it feels strong and resistant, but when observing it afar from an elevated position, the image of it flutters and renews every moment. It’s full of space and glass and reflection.

An essential component of the city is the populace that inhabit it. The living, breathing creatures within it and the fluctuating light and air that move and animate the space between the stones. I think about those great civilisations of the world that have risen and fallen and changed…nothing is permanent. A city is changing and adjusting continuously, and I feel this renders it parts to be fragile. This is why I chose to paint with liquid fluidity and with a sense of sway in the marks. This can be seen in both the older and newer works, but it is the viscosity of the paint that has changed. Recent consistency is less dense and flows more gracefully.

When I look at certain older paintings of mine, they seem to me to be like rocks you might stumble across when out hillwalking – brawny and weathered and full of age-old grit with the traces of a geological record patterned across them. And the colours are sturdy and sincere, like those seen in the local sandstone or dolerite. On the contrary, the drawing in a new painting is open, dissolved…with space and light surfacing from behind and between the marks. The palette is ethereal by comparison evoking moods of transcendence and contemplation. When considering painting a cityscape now, I’m interested in eternal notions of its existence - the poetry of the subject – but not how many chimney pots I must be sure to include in the rendering of a certain roof.  

And the palette..?

GU: Thinking about palette, I believe that colours and their frequencies connect with subconscious emotion; they have a physiological and emotional impact on your feelings and behaviour. Each painting I make discloses details about the relationship between the colour in my subject and my own sentiments of feeling.

By looking back over this work, do you see progression in your practice?

GU: Things just change, that’s all. Progression suggests that something is getting better from worse, more from less; that it’s advancing. But a painting to me, whether it’s an earlier one or one that was made more recently, is uniquely of its own moment. In older paintings, the colours are sombre and there’s less buoyancy in the marks because of the clotted viscosity of the paint. They’re different from any subsequent paintings made of Edinburgh, because they are of their time, and I was a different person then. They’re especially meaningful because of those qualities. I couldn’t recreate them. (The company who manufactured the paint I used at that time no longer even exists.)

By studying Edinburgh’s natural topography as it is today, geologists have some understanding of the dynamic movements of magma and the flow of glaciers that formed it. The landscape was, far back in its prehistory past, in a state of flux. There was lava intrusion deep underground which rose up and spread out horizontally, finding its way between existing rock. The igneous rocks of the city and the surrounding area crystallised from liquid magma into solid after being pushed and pulled by various pressures and forces, the arrangements and shapes of which were then left to cool and set solid. I think of the development of my paintings as going through a similar journey. The curious merging of medium, illusion and emotion that come as a result of the interplay between me and my subject, is captured in the flow of the liquid paint. It’s pushed and pulled by the force and pressure of my energy and my brush and at some chosen point, left to harden in the air. Emotion and meaning can be deciphered by reading the pace and patterns of the heaped-up dry paint.

As time passes certain abilities will be taken away from you, but it also brings an increase in other areas. You might lose physical strength but on the other hand you gain valuable experience. As a painter it’s important for me to retain and protect a sense of innocence throughout and believe that the most meaningful painting I’ll make will be tomorrow. There’s an inevitability of failure and eventual demise, but I’ll try to keep re-discovering myself, even if it’s in a small way. I think about honesty in painting rather than progression. Really great painting, for me, doesn’t have to be about ‘artfulness’. It’s about allowing whatever is at the core of you to come out honestly in your work - with childlike openness and without vanity. There are many great painters of the past who weren’t the most gifted technically, but when you look closely at their work you know it was by their very own hand and possessed trueness and passion that was distinctly their own. They painted with integrity and humility. I connect with that. I embrace the incorruptible authenticity of the artists own hand as well as the physical object itself - the painting - and all the meaning treasured in it. I value paintings that move me emotionally and are full of that elusive, enigmatic power which suspends my disbelief.

We live in a world which encourages a focus on second-hand knowledge and information. This sort, much of it misleading and even divisive, is quickly passed around from person to person, especially through technology. We feed on it habitually even though it’s information that cannot be directly known or subjectively experienced. It’s manufactured, styled and often deceptive. Shrewd discernment is required to filter it. Nature, on the other hand, is an abundant primary resource that cannot be permanently altered by the corrupt hand of man. The seed is already in the ground and will renew itself. Most of the painters I look up to are long dead, but they understood the great value of connectedness to the wild, natural world. The unadulterated vitality they drew out of it shows in their work. I need that in my own work.

In 2007 you painted from Nelson’s Tower on Calton Hill. Can you explain how you managed to access permission to do that?

GU: I simply asked if I could paint there.

Fortunately, the council weren’t using the tower for anything at the time and the rooms inside were empty. It was an opportunity that came out of good timing. Calton Hill has always been the most informative vantage point from which to view the city. It presents extensive views by which its history can be appreciated. I spent six months in the tower and often slept there, painting the city at night. The period spent in Nelsons Tower in 2007 was the lengthiest and most intensive I’ve spent so far. Otherwise I’ve studied or painted in sessions of few days or weeks.

You have chosen to paint this particular subject more than once…

GU: Yes, reasons why are quite simple – Edinburgh is one of Northern Europe’s finest cities, for so many reasons. For me painting a subject never ends – it’s ongoing. It is a relationship. My paintings offer a glimpse of a shared dialogue between my practice and my feelings about the city as time goes on, and I age as a man. I’m never finished with a subject no matter what it is. I cannot begin any interaction without the accompaniment of steadfast devotion. I could never end my relationship with Edinburgh or Scotland or any of my subjects. I’ll continue to paint them and nurture the relationships until I’m no longer living. The more you work with a landscape, the more you see and the more you learn, and understand. My personal behaviour is to seek to develop depth in relationships; and to maintain them. Looking at a city is like being with a person. By painting it you have a conversation with it. Over time your relationship changes and develops. The city changes and your feelings for the city change. You bring your thoughts to the conversation and it speaks back to you. There is an interchange, and this is all captured in the painting. At some point, the conversation becomes exhausted, so you stop and maybe go back to it another time.

If you do this over the course of many years you accumulate knowledge of that subject. Whenever you do return to it, all the visual and emotional details from previous years of interaction return. At this point I’m usually able to hold all the information of a subject in my eye and can turn away from it to paint it. I’ll emphasise specific things that happen to interest me in that moment. When so attuned and practised like this I’m be able to handle the paint with a more dextrous pace and freshness. Making the painting is more like writing a note. Just a few lines of communication are all that’s needed to convey the message…the newer paintings are definitely like that. They’re like letters I think…because there’s intimacy and devotion.

What location/s did you paint from this last time?

GU: I painted from Observatory House, which is a magnificent 18th century building on top of Calton Hill. It was designed and once inhabited by the New Town architect James Craig and is one of the best surviving examples of Craig’s architecture. Although it was originally built as a family house, the building was at one point used by astronomers for a short period of time until the famous William Playfair built the City Observatory building nearby in 1818. I also painted from a large rock in front of Nelsons Monument.

In the titles of the paintings, names have been used…?

GU: I took a walk through the Old Calton Burial Ground one day and found all those names waiting for me.

By definition, a city is an area of land where a large number of people live near to one another. Everything else grows from this. The people who have lived in a place are what define it. They are the beating heart of it; as long as the people are there the city is alive. I become quite conscious of my own mortality when I look at a city. When pondering an epitaph of someone who has passed, I imagine the life of that person. Their character, their endeavours, their story. Using the names of past residents is an acknowledgement of those things – a payment of homage – because every human life is precious, no matter our failings. Also, the sounds of the names themselves are beautiful and thought-provoking. Like the first line of a novel or poem, they stir up feelings and impressions. So many of the names I came across exude an expression of Romanticism. That was the dominating artistic movement at the time when the cemetery was opened in 1718. This really appealed to me. Most of the people laid to rest there passed during the Romantic period. It was when JMW Turner was working. The legacy he left helped to lead other painters on to impressionism. Impressionism led to expressionism. These are three movements of painting that have had a profound effect on my development as a painter. Turner, Bonnard, Monet…Van Gogh – I’ve spent a lot of time studying artists like these and continue to learn from them now. Samuel Peploe and Joan Eardley in terms of Scottish painting. The French painters of that period influenced Peploe, and Eardley takes painting back to something much more earthy and grounded and unmistakably Scottish. I align myself with these movements and these painters because that is the type of painter I am. I relate to them. I feel connected to them because I’m interested in timelessness. I don’t much care if something was made yesterday or a thousand years ago. I’m only interested in whether or not it moves me…lights up my human soul.

Really meaningful painting comes as a result of life experience and some prolonged, thoughtful reflection. It’s a slow, contemplative occupation. It’s hard for an artist not to be self-conscious, that’s why I’ve always lived and worked remotely in rural surroundings. It’s helpful sometimes, to be surrounded by the influences of unrestrained nature. Nature is not controllable. The experiences it throws at you are not predictable. There’s no one-upmanship with nature; it humbles you. I am a man, alive, in search of ways by which to express the experiences of a life lived, and the aspirations of my human spirit. I am not striving to become a professional artist. Painting, for me, is a very simple act which connects me right back to the very beginnings of human civilisation. It’s instinctive. I could never believe that a day will come when people will weep in front of a painting that a machine had made…but as human, to perceive another person’s heart imbued into the fabric of a painting - their vision of life, their joys and sorrows...their beliefs - is very moving. Human life is so worthy of being cherished.

I returned to using the names again with my most recent paintings. They add a whole other dimension of meaning and I like that they are an aide-memoire to the fragility and unpredictability of a life. I’ll continue to name yet more in this way in the future…it just works, and there are so many names. A lot of roses have been named after people too…it is a similar use of metaphor.

Geoff Uglow

Edinburgh 2024