IN the first of two conversations prompted by Will Maclean’s current exhibition Narratives, Alan Riach, Sandy Moffat Maclean himself explore the significance of painting, sculpture and poetry in the Highlands and Islands, and how history informs the currency of the arts.

Alan Riach: Myth has a greater power than history. There’s a history of the Highland Clearances and there’s a mythology of the Highland Clearances. The mythology carries the heart of the event while the history holds the facts. The myth of the Clearances had a powerful impact especially for artists, poets and writers of all kinds, and that impact continued to have its effect for generations, into the present day.

Sandy Moffat: What we see in the Emigrant Ship paintings by William McTaggart is the landscape of memory and loss anticipating the kind of “political” painting which would emerge in the late 20th century. Think of Anselm Kiefer, who almost a century later would embark upon a great series of historical landscapes dealing with German cultural identity. In the aftermath of World War Two, where was a German identity to be found? Had the roots been burned? Could ashes render the land fertile? Kiefer shares with certain 19th-century painters such as Turner and Caspar David Friedrich – and McTaggart – a belief that painting, and in particular landscape painting, can be a means of presenting fundamental human emotions. The Sailing of the Emigrant Ship (1895) bears this out. Avoiding both the sentimentality and the story-telling aspects of his late Victorian English counterparts, McTaggart’s expressive brush binds the painting’s meaning with the music of a lament. In fact, the painting itself is a lament, a pibroch. In her masterly book on McTaggart, Lindsay Errington points out: “All McTaggart’s strong feelings and Celtic inheritance, so often noted by critics – James Bone called him the ‘greatest Highland poet since Ossian’ – went into the making of The Emigrants and the St Columba pictures. Thereafter he painted large pictures and important ones, but never again did he attempt anything with such profound or complex themes.”

Alan: It’s unimaginable coming from anywhere else but Scotland. And it’s deeply historical, in the context of empire and colonisation.

Sandy: And yet how is this represented in the official British version of art history? If you would like an example of the Tate’s version of Scottish art, their William McTaggart exhibition in 1935 proved, in the words of the current Tate catalogue, “a revelation to those who had been inclined to regard his northern reputation as a matter of regional patriotism”. Their categorisation of McTaggart as “regional patriot” remains at the root of their idea of Scottish art. And that historical relegation of McTaggart and Scottish art comes right into the present. Carry this story through in terms of Highland art. McTaggart is crucial for a contemporary Highland artist such as Will MacLean but are the Highland Clearances ever discussed in terms of British History in England?

For a long time, the idea that there was a Highland Art would have seemed absurd. But Scotland has moved on. We’re no longer prepared to neglect our art and culture. Murdo Macdonald, Emeritus Professor of the History of Scottish Art at the University of Dundee, played a leading role in re-claiming the forgotten past of Scottish art and he takes us straight to the heart of the matter: “Highland Art is one of the defining currents of Scottish art. This is true whether one looks back to prehistoric rock art – which has inspired so many contemporary artists – or to major works of the Scottish Gaidhealtachd such as the Book of Kells and the great crosses of Iona and Islay, or to the work of William McTaggart, the Gaelic speaker who pioneered modern art in Scotland. How are memory and history represented visually? How do artists respond to geography? How does visual culture develop through periods of demographic change?”

Alan: These questions are addressed in Murdo’s book, Rethinking Highland Art: The Visual Significance of Gaelic Culture (2013). A stereotype of the Highlands as a land of mountain and mist, a romantic spectacle, was created by artists in the 19th century. This was further replicated in images of tartan-clad Highlanders and kilted warriors. On the other hand there’s little in art about the land rights of the Gaels, the suppression of the Gaelhealtachd and consequent emigration, until McTaggart.

Sandy: And then later, it was those particular issues that provided a rich source for Will Maclean, who was born in 1941, and whose body of work, made over a long career, is of the greatest importance. Maclean draws on his personal Highland heritage – his family were involved in the Clearances (his paternal family were cleared from Coigach and his maternal great grand aunt was the Portree post-mistress who defied Sheriff Ivory during the Battle of the Braes in Skye) – and also the myths, legends and beliefs of his forbears. In the mid-1990s Maclean collaborated with a number of local craftsmen to erect three large memorial cairns on Lewis, commemorating episodes in the struggle between crofters and landlords a century ago. As he says: “It was a privilege to be part of the Lewis Land struggle memorials project Cuimhneachain nan Gaisgeach. I was introduced to the chairman and driving force of the project Angus MacLeod MBE, to the local historian and stonemason James Crawford, and to John Norgrove, civil engineer, who made sense of my initial drawings. Just as the history of the raids was researched by Angus and Joni Buchanan in her book Na Gaisgich, so Jim’s knowledge of archaeology and building techniques informed and gave substance to the sculptures. The communities of Ballallan, Gress/Coll and Aignish each came together for the opening days, three of the most memorable days of my life as an artist. The opening celebrations were an integral part of a project that gave continuity to the history of the island and its people.”

Alan: And a further fourth cairn was completed at Reef on the west of Lewis in 2013, celebrating the return of the land to the people of Uig. I said once that I thought the most essential character of Scotland is do with its variety, its variations of language and place. It’s a wholeness made up of diversity. This is a different thing from the idea of a single, imperial story. In a way Maclean’s memorial cairns exemplify this, especially if we think of them as part of the poetic traditions of the Highlands alongside the writings of Neil Gunn and Sorley MacLean. And if we widen the context to include the growing number of artists who work in the land with the landscape (Iain Hamilton Finlay’s legendary garden Little Sparta in the foothills of the Pentlands near Dunsyre comes to mind) we begin to glimpse how a new generation of Scottish artists might show us ways in which we may go on, what we might value in difference, and how things might be otherwise than they are.

Sandy: The subject of Highland history and culture occurred to Will Maclean in the figure composition class at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen in the early 1960s, after his initial contact with Ian McLeod, a Burntisland shipyard worker who became one of the Scottish Realists and John Bellany. Both were young artists finding ways of using personal narratives in their painting. Hugh MacDiarmid was a vitally important influence on Bellany at that stage, especially his use of the Scots language, which takes us straight to Sorley MacLean. Maclean perhaps had an even greater influence on your work, Will. When did you first discover Sorley’s poetry and how did you respond to the fact that he wrote in Gaelic?

Will Maclean: I knew Sorley from my early teens. Sorley maintained that our families were related through my maternal grandmother who was a Nicholson from Portree. My father, John Maclean, a native Gaelic speaker from Coigach encouraged and educated me in other aspects of the culture, but Gaelic was not the language of our home. At that time Inverness Royal Academy in the Highland capital offered Gaelic to native speakers only, continuing the educational policy of isolation and marginalisation of the language. This was something else that Sorley fought against. Of all MacLean’s poems Hallaig had the greatest impact on me. Here was a blueprint, a visual essay encompassing aspects of tradition, narrative, surrealism and the vernacular. Although we shared a background in the fishing community, John Bellany, I feel, follows a tradition that has its roots in David Allan and the lowland vernacular poets; Gaelic has a very different resonance.

Sandy: You stress the influence of your father here, who I believe also handed down a written memoir of his childhood. Many will think we’re simply talking about history, about things which have no relevance in today’s world, but when Sorley spoke of the past, it was a living past. When he talked about his ancestors for example they were “not remote figures in a history-book, but as part of one’s own flesh and blood”. The impact of Hallaig, your experience of it as a visual essay seems of huge significance.

Alan: Isn’t that the crucial thing, this relation between the literary and the visual, and beyond that, behind both, the relation between history, memory and the present, the present tense?

Sandy: We’ll come back to that.

Will MacLean’s exhibition Narratives runs 20 April-12 May at the Fine Art Society, 6 Dundas Street, Edinburgh