The story so far!
In my last blog I talked about the forthcoming exhibition of Painting with Sound that Graham, Drew and I were holding at the Barony Centre in West Kilbride between 29th Sept and 22nd October 2022. I’m really pleased to report that it all went very well and although I’m not usually one to ‘blow my own trumpet’, this show was definitely our best yet and proved a real success. Of course, of course, it really helps if you have a great venue in which to exhibit your work and in the Barony Centre we certainly had that.
For anyone who hasn’t visited the centre, it is a large old church that has been converted into a really impressive arts venue…….and it must be one of the best in Ayrshire I think. As our work included large paintings and soundscapes, the space was just about perfect. The acoustics in this old church were excellent and the soundscapes playing through Graham’s Bose system came across really well.
“Painting with Sound – the story continues”
The full title for the exhibition was “Painting with Sound – the story continues” and this refers to the fact that the Barony Centre has been supporting our developments in audio visual landscape work since the autumn of 2017 when they gave us the use of the space for several days to test out our first experimental ‘audio painting’ as part of their annual Vertex Festival. They then offered us a full exhibition the following March in which we exhibited the completed piece along with around 30 of my standard landscapes.
This most recent exhibition was to have taken place in 2020 but of course, the pandemic and all the related restrictions meant that we had to cancel both these 2020 dates and the rearranged dates in 2021. Strangely, this worked well in that during this time we continued to develop the work and by September this year we had completed 12 audio paintings …… a good few more than we had in 2020. You can see and hear these pieces by clicking on the link at the bottom of this blog.
I visited the exhibition on several occasions throughout the course of the show and it was great watching visitors looking at the paintings and listening to the soundscapes, indeed, apparently over 1400 people visited the Barony Centre during the course of the show and seven paintings sold …..we must have all been doing something right!
I want to take this opportunity to thank Claire Edgar and all her staff and volunteers for helping to make this show the success it was. THANK YOU from Graham, Drew and I.
It has been a long time since I first approached Graham and asked his advice about using sound with my work. That was back in November 2014 when I was creating the big Glen Rosa drawing as part of my exhibition at the Harbour Arts Centre. This first collaboration led through a good friend and colleague, Seattle based independent film maker Dan Thornton, to us becoming involved with a hugely interesting hi-tech audio- visual arts project being developed by Microsoft researcher Neel Joshi.
The work which used scanning cameras to identify a persons’ proximity to a painting and then deliver a series of audio interpretive responses, was in its early stages and they wanted to start working with an artist to help them create a finished piece of art. Dan introduced me to Neel and the rest as they say… You can read the article commissioned by Microsoft about the finished Oregon Project by following the link here. This article also contains a link to a short video that Microsoft made at the same time:
And now for 2023…..
So then, with the exhibition finished, it’s back to work again …..and I really have to get going! Our next audio- visual exhibition starts in the autumn 2023 at the Scottish Maritime Museum. The show will include a series of new works based on different coastal locations both in NW Scotland and here in SW Scotland. It’s very exciting but, there’s so much work to do. Full details nearer the time.
Back to the hills
With all the work lately, Nita and I haven’t got out into the hills much, but here is one photo I snapped just the other day as we were making our way along the beach at Brodick Bay on the Isle of Arran, heading for the main path up Goatfell. We never went all the way to the top, the heavy showers were very heavy higher up and so we turned back about half way and headed for a pint of Arran Blonde instead! It’s good to be flexible!
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You can see and hear some more of the paintings and sound in this video exhibition: Follow the link or watch below: https://youtu.be/FuoalSuqSTE
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