Outer Hebrides

Painting on the Island of Barra

Catalogue Publication: Letters from Barra

Foreward: Guy Peploe

2011

Geoff Uglow was raised on a North Cornish farm between Exmoor and Dartmoor and close to the smugglers' coast of Boscastle and Tintagel that throngs with tourists in the summer but provides good surf all year round. There is something in Uglow's mindset as a painter which could be the inheritance of his practical, rural boyhood. He understands that toil is part of the process of making art; that hard work will be rewarded and that there is something in the materials of his craft: his paint, brushes and the clean, rectangular surfaces on which he works that is akin to a farmer's soil and good seed. He has clarity of vision which helps him know when a picture is working; that he can trust the process of making marks. In the same spirit he has laid out an Italian rose garden beside the fast-rising studio he is building on his father's farm - planned in the certainty that what he is doing is valuable. Hard work and vision are the parents of creativity.

While he is now back in his native country for most of the last decade he has lived in Scotland and Italy. He has enjoyed considerable commercial success and gathered some of the glittering prizes that his prodigious talent has justified Most recently he won the Alastair Salvesen Prize which culminated with an exhibition at the RSA in Edinburgh for which he travelled in the footsteps of William Daniell whose great project to record the highlights of the British coastline was published in books of aquatints from 1814. The project was not grandiose being rather rooted in the artist's love of the drama of the sea. It did however necessitate an extraordinary serial engagement with some of the most dramatic and remote places on the Scottish coast. The results were spectacular and the experience will yield material, particularly etchings, for which Uglow has plans to publish books of images like Daniell, for many years to come.

In the aftermath and with his forthcoming show here very much in mind the artist sought something different - a counterpoint to the frenetic seeing and painting which characterised his coastal journey - a deeper engagement with one place. Through a happy introduction he and his sculptor wife Emma moved into a house at North Bay on Barra for six weeks in November last year and Uglow was able to immerse himself in one magical isle. To walk the island, beachcomb, catch pollock off the rocks, talk to the fishermen in the Castlebay hotel and let the particular light available only in a Hebridean Winter seep into his soul. And he worked; the son of the soil has no time to luxuriate in idleness somehow in anticipation of inspiration, happily or unhappily awaited. No, Uglow understands his subject and sees its poetry revealed through work.

Practical considerations meant that it was impossible to paint in oils but Uglow brought instead a giant roll of high quality paper and acrylic paints and blocks of handmade watercolour paper and set to. The eight monumental paintings which form the basis of this show are made in a confident new language; each has a motif, each belongs to a particular day but they are all far from topographical. In some works elements of the real landscape is apparent; the ancient burial ground at Borve with the Atlantic view opening up beyond, or the brief, brilliant morning sunshine over Seal Bay. Otherwise the work is abstract; the motif is the colour of the wrack against the light, tossed by the breakers, or the brown/purple light of a Hebridean dusk. These paintings are not tentative or imaginative nor are they a reaction against the landscape. They are as certain of their location both emotional and poetic and as confident in their chosen language as Rothko or Pollock.

The smaller works are perfectly-formed depictions of a particular moment; when the old crofter next door lights his kitchen window at dusk;

Kisimul Castle looming in the twilight bay; the few trees by the burn coming down to North Bay point the way into the interior hills; the shadow masses of off-shore islands mark cool-time on the horizon.

These are the artist's Letters from Barra, each a poetic contemplation of time and place made permanent.

Guy Peploe

The Scottish Gallery