by Jenny Lupton
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3 November 2023
In March of this year, I’d been teaching an art class in Chambers St Museum, studying the section on the witch trials during James I and VI’s reign. Later in the day, I went down to an exhibition of women in art and film in the City Arts Centre. One of the photographers was Margaret Fay Shaw, an American musician who had travelled to the Hebrides in 1929 to listen to, and document, the songs and lore of the Islands. She bided with Mairi (1883 – 1972) and Peigi Macrae (1874 – 1969) in their wee croft at North Glendale, South Uist for six years. I was mesmerised by her photos of the Island women and the harsh simplicity of their lives, pretty much unchanged for centuries. A big part of their lives was spinning, dying and weaving wool. Brooms, cats, cauldrons, singing (chanting), herbs to heal (potions) and gossiping were part of their fabric of life. The parallels with how witches were depicted were chilling and resonated with me. There’s a part of me that woke up that day, firing this new direction of painting. I based the initial pieces on different photos, in one Mairi holds up a lobster, and the other a salted cod. Feasts. The photos were black and white and stark. I wanted to tell a story with them, to flesh them with colour, to give them a presence and power that steps across generations. For so long, women were portrayed as objects or possessions of men, yet these women ran their own lives, and I wanted a snapshot of their lives to be seen the way male figures have been portrayed against landscape for centuries. When I began the first painting, The Fish, I set myself the task of only using materials I had to hand, as an artist in that era would also have done. I used an old frame (63 x 89 cm) from a skip, some linen I had folded away, and sized the fabric with rabbit glue granules from forty years ago at Art College, and it’s stood the test of time and still works! I work with acrylics on paper palettes, that I originally just threw away when covered with paint. Working on such a big scale, I was using a lot of palettes, and I really liked the effect the dried paint made on them, so I started to keep them. A flash of inspiration had me use them, torn up and stuck down with rabbit glue, for her clothes. I love the lack of control but the gorgeous effect collage gives. Because I was pretty much feeling my way with the piece, I kept changing the background until it felt right. I initially had her against the house with the cod, but it felt wrong, so she has a backdrop of hills and water. On the cod I used heavy acrylic gel, with onion netting brushed across it then lifted off to create the scale effect, then indulged my love of pearlescent gold paint and made the fish sparkle! The water has silvery pearlescent paint, which glows in a low light, as do her buttons and the cats’ eyes with a pale gold. I’ve taken proverbs from the book by Margaret Faye Shaw, ‘Folksongs and Folklore of the Outer Hebrides’, that I think fit each painting, and written them in Gaelic along the water. “Tha miann a’ chait ’san tràch, ‘s cha doire e fhéin as e" “What the cat wants is on the shore, but he won’t take it out himself” I started The Lobster (90 x 60 cm) before I’d finished The Fish, as I needed to go back fresh to finish her, it’s easy to get too close to a piece. I took the texture idea further, and used sand from the beach, that I washed clean, and mixed with heavy gel to create the wall of the house. I had a really bright palette dried and shouting to be used, so her frock is again collage. For each piece I do, I want the colours to be totally different, so in this I indulged my passion for Payne’s Gray. The cats were painted over several times, I couldn’t get the feel right to begin with. The cat on the bottom left was ginger, but she didn’t fit, so I washed some grey stipes over her, and I like the accidental effect that created. The cat on the right went from grey, to ginger then back to grey again. The lobster is raised with modelling gel, and also coloured with palette and rabbit glue, with paint on top. “Cha n-fhan muir ri uallach, ‘s cha dean bean luath maorach” “The sea does not wait for a burden, and a hasty woman will not get shellfish” Both these are now finished, and I’m working on a bigger one, with a farmer’s wife leading a horse carrying seaweed up from the beach. All these will be available as prints and cards shortly!