Books & Paintings: A Visit to Edinburgh

Mount Adams, Pacific Crest Trail

A few days down south in Edinburgh recently included a meeting with a publisher, an art exhibition and a talk at a book festival as well as time with family.

The publisher was Sandstone Press and my meeting with head man Bob Davidson and designer Heather MacPherson of Raspberry Creative Type was to finalise details for my book on the Pacific Crest Trail, Rattlesnakesand Bald Eagles. I now know the format, how many words (I’d better start writing!), and the picture requirements. My photos are all Kodachrome 64 slides, the walk taking place long before digital, and I’ve just spent an evening sorting out 200 to send to Bob and Heather so a cover and around 150 for inside can be selected and scanned. For hours now I’ve been back in 1982 on that glorious walk.

Two days after my book meeting I was talking about wilderness writing and reading from Grizzly Bears and Razor Clams at the Portobello Book Festival. I shared the event with Kellan MacInnes, author of Caleb’sList, and it was interesting hearing how another writer works – not so differently it seems, except that he’s writing before I’m usually awake. After the event a stroll along the sea front and a pint in a pub with fellow outdoor writers David Lintern and Phil Turner was a good way to unwind.

Between the publisher and the book festival I visited the Peter Doig exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery. I didn’t know much about this artist but I was attracted by the big banners and painted pillars outside the gallery. Doig is an artist who does big, bold paintings with dense deep colours and solid powerful images. He’s a very ‘painterly’ painter in that whilst his works aren’t abstract they aren’t naturalistic either and you can see the daubs of paint and the trickles where it has run. This exhibition was about his work since moving to Trinidad in 2002 and the landscapes were lush and tropical. I liked the colour and the power and the size of the paintings. He’s an artist I’ll look out for in the future.

Landscapes in Space and Time

Last weekend was spent celebrating another decade of life passing by. Ten years ago a group of friends gathered in the hills of the Lake District for my fiftieth birthday. This year we went to one of the flattest places in northern England, the seaside resort of Southport on the Lancashire coast. I was brought up near here at Formby and my mother and one of my brothers and his family still live in the area. It was so that my mother could be present that I went to Southport. Saturday we gathered in a function room in a pub – the Blundell Arms – for talking, drinking and eating. Many of my old friends had not seen each other for many years and the air was thick with reminiscing. Ten years previously we had been in the Old Dungeon Ghyll in Langdale. And the next day some of us had headed up onto the fells. This year the only hills within many miles were the little sand dunes abutting the wide flat expanse of the vast beach that spreads from Southport to Liverpool. It was to the beach we went, to Crosby where the 100 iron men of Anthony Gormley’s Another Place are dotted over the sand from high to low water. Once identical these figures are showing the slow effects of time in changes wrought by the weather and the sea. The iron is rusting, barnacles cover those parts more in water than air, seaweed crawls up legs and twists round feet, faces lose definition and become spooky and alien. Wind blown sand has started to bury some of the figures while with others the wind has scoured away the sand revealing the plinths on which they stand. Beyond the motionless, rigid, dark figures giant pale wind turbines rise out of the sea, slightly hazy, slightly ghostly. These too were still, despite a breeze. Beyond the turbines to the north the sand and sea spreads out to the sky and the simple trilogy of golden rippled sand, dark wave streaked water and paler cloud streaked air is vast, fading into the distance without ending. Turning south the landscape changes and becomes jumbled, complicated, a mass of confusing shapes that are all angles and hard lines. This is Liverpool and the shapes are cranes, cathedrals, sky scrapers and more wind turbines, these ones turning. It’s a much more intense, closed-in landscape than the spaciousness of the sea and skyscape. Turning from one to the other was turning from the freedom and wildness of nature to the restrictions and confinements of the city, both available at a glance. The first is where I live in my head and where I have spent much of my life but I would not be without the second. My friends and family had come together from all over Britain, some travelling long distances. I am aware that modern urban civilisation had made this possible. Reconciling the urban with the wild is a never ending, never completed task, a constant balancing of desires and dislikes as I move through both landscapes in time as well as space.

Photo info: Iron Men & Wind Turbines, Crosby Beach. Canon EOS 450D, Canon EF-S 18-55 IS@55mm, 1/640 @ f5.6, ISO 100, raw file converted to JPEG in Lightroom 2.4.