I’m currently working as a teacher in France as part of my university studies. I remember signing up for the programme, dreaming of weekends on Alpine peaks and endless days climbing after work. In reality, my placement is quite far from the hills, and the whole experience is not quite what I had hoped for. Painting Scottish landscapes has become my connection to the world that I miss, and it provides a routine that I have become very fond of.
This painting was done in my quiet bedroom in the relatively flat east of France while I recalled a day winter climbing on the imposing Pinnacle Buttress of Coire Àrdair, Creag Meagaidh. My bedroom has no contours, no summit, no wind and no snow. Outside lies burnt grass and uniform housing surrounded by miles and miles of farmland. Any local hill I have spied as a challenge has a road cut into its side and a red-awninged restaurant marking its peak.
To me, this painting represents a memory of an exceptional day ascending the ephemeral Smith’s Gully. Leaving the crag, I looked back as the afternoon cloud curled over the tops of the coire and made white what was blue just minutes before. My blistered heels nipped with every step down towards the car but did not remove the smile from my face. It was my first proper excursion into the Scottish hills since moving to France, squeezed in during the school holidays after a week of catching up with friends and family. Walking out, I knew the day held memories that I would recount sitting at my desk for weeks to come.
Just days later, I was back in my quiet bedroom looking onto the same uninspiring landscape. But what was forming in front of me was a memory reincarnated in paint and water. Each white line marking the features of the buttress held in its stroke the solid placement of an axe into the glassy ice that had poured down Creag Meagaidh that day. I detailed the gully where our tired legs had descended with the vivid taste of the sweets I had eaten while removing my crampons. I brushed the coire rim with thin pigment, the same colour I had watched engulf the blue sky as we headed towards the comfort of the car.
I hope that when I return to Scotland in the summer, a set of paints and a notebook finds its way into my rucksack more often. To colour a memory onto a blank page is to immortalise a landscape and an experience in a way I believe nothing else can. Every time I flick through my notebook, it is as if I am reliving a hundred walk-ins and walk-outs, a hundred belays and intricate pitches of rock, and a hundred smiles sitting atop a hill watching the land and the sky fold in on itself towards the horizon.