The arts of the Highlands and Islands: Part Two

Sandy Moffat: Let’s continue exploring the relationship of history and memory. You’ve already mentioned the influence of your father and the impact of Sorley MacLean’s great poem Hallaig …

Will Maclean: My father passed on to me a knowledge and a passion for the culture. As you say, it was “part of one’s own flesh and blood”. The “transcription of ideas” is a huge question. I suppose that it’s the sum of parts that include the collections of the Highland folklorists, JF Campbell, RC Maclagan and Alexander Carmichael, the poetry of MacLean, George Campbell Hay and Angus Martin, the painting of Giorgio De Chirico, William McTaggart, Amselm Kiefer, and the sculpture of Joseph Cornell, Fred Stiven and H C Westermann. Then the Art of the Sailor, and the people of the seaboard tribes. Alexander Mackenzie’s History of the Highland Clearances was a book my father said should always be beside the Bible at my bedside, and Donald Macleod’s Gloomy Memories and later James Hunter’s Making of the Crofting Community and the art critic, Edward Gage. Then there’s the landscape itself. In Skye, Dun Caan, Camus Mallaig and Suisnish and in Coigach, Stac Pollaigh, Badentarbert and Achnahaird.

So I can give you ingredients, but as an artist Sandy you are well aware that the way they mix and the way they finally evolve is the great mystery of our trade. I can say that whatever the final image, it’s a balance between the story and the making. Edward Gage described it as “working poetically, dauntlessly pursuing the telling metaphor”. Perhaps these days, doggedly would be more appropriate!

It took some time after art school to develop drawing as a research tool, as a means of navigation through the process of constructing and refining an idea. In common with many artists, notebooks are a treasured archive and source of ideas. The narrative varies, sometimes it is clear from the start, but often the narrative reveals itself through the found object or in the process of making. I try to move on and not be caught in a circle of repetition, but some events like my time in the Herring fishing are always present.

Sandy: Now you’ve given me a lot to think about! We should try to explore a number of the important points you make, but there is something we have to tackle sooner or later, and that is the combination of William McTaggart and the Highland Clearances. The notion that McTaggart was a late Victorian who painted rosy-cheeked wee lassies and pretty landscapes persisted for long enough rather than the great proto-modern painter of The Sailing of the Emigrant Ship. Duncan MacMillan sees in McTaggart’s work “the possibility of a truly Highland art”. What are your thoughts on first coming across McTaggart and how his paintings affected your own work about the Clearances?

Will: Duncan is absolutely correct. I came to McTaggart’s work from several different directions. When I was collecting material for the Ring Net Herring Fishing project in 1971, I spent some time in Campbeltown with the writer and poet Angus Martin. Part of the project was the study of fishing craft. This led me to McTaggart’s drawings and studies of Loch Fyne skiffs. These studies reflect a knowledge and understanding of how boats work, and how they work with the sea, that is unrivalled in Scottish art. With my own family involvement in the Highland Clearances (my paternal family were cleared from Coigach and my maternal great grand aunt was the Portree post-mistress who defied Sheriff Ivory during the Battle of the Braes in Skye), the great series of The Sailing of the Emigrant Ship has long been an inspiration. Lindsay Errington in her catalogue notes for the McTaggart exhibition of 1989 gives us the story of an unseen piper playing a farewell on the stern of the departing ship, and Per Kvaerne introduces his book with the tale that the McTaggarts, sons of the priest, had, alone, command of an eighth colour of the seven known colours of the prism. These stories bind the man to his culture. McTaggart’s early career was not an easy one, his family minister’s advice to his parents was that art was a “dravelin trade” of vanity and wickedness connected with the church of Rome, a land of fiddlers, painters and such like. On the other hand, local patronage and, crucially, access to a private library were the keys to his future, as it was with other Highland artists such as Munro, Mackenzie and MacKinnon. It is tragic that such a significant figure, one of the fathers of modern painting, has no dedicated national collection or study centre.

Sandy: There’s a great deal of work to be done in Scotland in terms of properly recognising and promoting our great artists – unfortunately we’ve inherited a legacy of shameful neglect, especially with regard to the artists of the Highlands, which I know that you personally are actively addressing. I visited Lochinver a few years ago where I took part with the poet Alan Riach in the centenary celebrations for Norman MacCaig and where I spoke a little about Highland art. McTaggart, of course, but I included William Dyce, before showing slides of your three great memorial cairns erected in Lewis in the mid-1990s, commemorating episodes in the struggle between crofters and landlords at the end of the 19th century. One of the questions afterwards was about how a strong sense of history and identity seems to be the defining feature of the Highland artist and that your work exemplified this. With this in mind I’d like to bring up your collaboration with a number of local craftsmen in the building of the cairns and it would be good to know how you went about this ... how your ideas progressed from pages in a sketchbook to the completed public monuments.

Will: McTaggart is not alone in the catalogue of neglect. Take for example Alexander Munro, an Invernessian at the centre of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and friend of Gladstone, or The McIans, who were the first artists to use the clearances as subject matter in their work – they regularly dined with Charles Dickens. Where was their work to be seen during the recent Year of the Highlands celebrations?

It was a great privilege to be part of The Lewis Land Struggle memorials project, Cuimhneachain nan Gaisgeach. It came about with an invitation from Roddy Murray of An Lanntair Gallery and Malcolm Maclean of Proiseact nan Ealan to submit some proposal drawings for memorials to the 19th and early 20th-century land raids in Lewis. I was introduced to the chairman and driving force of the project Angus Macleod MBE, to the local historian and stone mason 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 by 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 Balallan, 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 in the mid-1990s were an integral part of a project that gave continuity to the history of the island and its people. A fourth structure at Reef on the west of Lewis was again led by the local community, designed jointly with Marian Leven RSA, this time celebrating the return of the land to the people of Uig. Angus and Annie Macleod have sadly passed away, but their vision and their memory will live on in these land works.

Sandy: Looking back over your long career as an artist and reflecting upon the main themes you have pursued during that time, emigration, Arctic exploration, whaling and fishing – all related to the mythologies and epic tales of those who live and work by the sea. As an artist and mariner, do you plan any new voyages in the foreseeable future, and as a Scottish artist who has successfully exported his work beyond these shores (a rare enough achievement), not by merely following fashion but simply by being yourself? Have these experiences encouraged you to dig deeper into your own history, including the history of your own people, and at the same time the history of art in Scotland?

Will: New voyages, new travels are always hoped for. Our last voyage was to St Kilda, Iceland and the Faroes. Greenland, north Norway and the Lofoten Islands would be at the top of a future wish list. New voyages in the works? It’s time for me to trust the vocabulary that has evolved over the years – as the poet Novalis puts it, “impulses that come from the material itself transforming it from object to subject”. New work that digs deeper into the narratives you’ve outlined.

Sandy: More to be done, then.

Will: Always. More to be done.