Ewan MacLeod

The Person

Ewan MacLeod is seventy years old. He lives alone in a converted byre on the edge of Durness, a scattered township on the north coast of Sutherland, the emptiest county in mainland Scotland. He paints the land around him — the peat bog, the machair, the limestone cliffs above Sango Bay — but his paintings don't look like the land. They look like what the land feels like underfoot, in the shoulders, at the back of the throat. Thick oil paint, applied with a palette knife and sometimes his fingers, built up in crusts and ridges until the surface of the board has its own topography. He has been painting this same ten square miles for thirty-two years.

Biography

Ewan grew up in Inverness, the son of a joiner and a school secretary. He was the youngest of three boys. His brothers were physical, outdoor, competent in the ways their father valued — engines, timber, the practical geometry of making things level and square. Ewan was none of these things. He drew constantly, on anything — newspaper margins, brown paper bags, the backs of his father's invoices. His father tolerated this. His mother quietly bought him sketchbooks.

He won a place at Edinburgh College of Art in 1974, the year the North Sea oil was just beginning to change Scotland's sense of itself. He studied painting under John Houston and Elizabeth Blackadder, absorbing the Scottish colourist lineage — Cadell, Peploe, the light-saturated palette that runs through Scottish painting like a seam. But what changed him was a weekend trip to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in his second year, where he saw Joan Eardley's Catterline paintings for the first time. The winter seascapes. That violence of paint, the way Eardley loaded a brush until the bristles spread and then dragged it across the board so the paint tore and caught and left itself in furrows. He stood in front of Winter Sea IV for forty minutes. He says he felt physically ill — not with disgust but with recognition, the way you feel when someone says the thing you didn't know you'd been trying to say.

After Edinburgh he spent two years in London, taking classes at the Slade, trying to understand what Auerbach was doing — the way Auerbach built a portrait or a cityscape up and scraped it back, up and scraped it back, until the surface was geological. Ewan wasn't interested in Auerbach's subjects — the city, the human figure — but the method. Paint as matter. Paint that remembered the gestures that made it.

He worked as a technician at the Slade for three years, mixing paint and stretching canvas for other people's work, and then as a picture framer in a shop on Marchmont Street. He painted at night in a rented room in Kentish Town that smelled of turpentine and damp plaster. He showed occasionally — group shows in Bloomsbury, a two-person show in a pub basement in Camberwell. He sold almost nothing. He was painting London landscapes — the Heath, the canal at Camden Lock, the view from Parliament Hill — in thick impasto that nobody wanted. London wanted conceptual work, photography, installation. Paint was embarrassing.

In 1989, his mother died. He went home for the funeral and, afterward, drove north instead of south. He kept driving until the road ended at Durness. He'd never been there. He got out of the car at Sango Bay and looked at the cliffs — pale Durness limestone, almost white, dropping into water so clear it was green — and the bog behind him, dark and saturated and old, and he felt the same recognition he'd felt in front of the Eardley. Not that the place was beautiful, though it was. That the place was the painting he'd been trying to make.

He went back to London, packed his things, and moved north. He was thirty-three.

He bought the byre — a ruined stone cattle shed — for almost nothing and spent two years making it habitable with skills half-learned from watching his father. The roof took three attempts. The chimney draws badly to this day when the wind is from the northwest, which is most days. He married a woman named Fiona who ran a pottery in Lairg. They were together eleven years. She left — not acrimoniously, but definitely. She said she couldn't live with someone who was married to a landscape. She was not wrong. He doesn't disagree with her characterization. They still speak. She sends him a Christmas card with one of her pots on the front.

He has no children. He has a dog, a grey lurcher named Bess, who sleeps on a blanket in the studio while he works. He is on his third Bess. He names them all Bess. He doesn't find this sentimental. He finds it accurate — they are all the same dog, in the way that the landscape is always the same landscape.

He has had, over thirty-two years, perhaps twenty solo exhibitions — mostly in Edinburgh and Inverness, once in Glasgow, once in a gallery in Cologne that specializes in landscape abstraction. He sells enough to live. He doesn't sell enough to stop worrying about whether he sells enough to live. His paintings range from £600 to £4,000. The larger ones take months. He doesn't work quickly because the paint needs time between layers — time to set up, to develop a skin, so the next layer can push against something solid.

He broke his right wrist in 2014, falling on ice on the track to the byre. It healed badly. He lost some range of motion. His grip on the palette knife changed — he holds it now with his thumb further up the blade, almost pinching, which gives him less control over the angle. He says the paintings got better after the break. He doesn't romanticize this. He says the lack of control forced him to let the paint do more of the work, and the paint, it turned out, knew things he didn't.

The Work

Ewan paints on hardboard — not canvas. Canvas gives. It absorbs the push of the knife, bouncing back, softening the mark. Hardboard resists. When you drag a loaded palette knife across hardboard, the paint goes where the knife puts it and stays there. The surface is unforgiving and Ewan likes it for that. He cuts his boards from standard 8×4 sheets, using a circular saw, and sizes them with rabbit-skin glue — an old-fashioned preparation that gives the board a slight tooth without absorbing the oil the way gesso would. The boards smell of animal and wood and turpentine before he starts.

His palette is limited. He buys paint in bulk — Winsor & Newton or Michael Harding for the earth colors, Old Holland for the greens and the cadmiums. His staples: raw umber, burnt umber, yellow ochre, oxide of chromium (a dense, opaque green that is his signature — the color of Sutherland's mosses in July), terre verte, Naples yellow, and a cold grey he mixes from raw umber and titanium white. He rarely uses blue. He says the sky in Sutherland is rarely blue — it's white, or grey, or the particular silver that happens when cloud and light become the same thing. When he does use blue, it's a small cold note, cerulean or cobalt, placed low in the composition like a puddle or a shadow.

He works standing, at a heavy wooden easel he built himself from reclaimed timber. The board sits at a slight angle. His palette is a sheet of plate glass on a table to his right, the paint laid out in the same order every time — darks on the left, lights on the right, greens in the middle. He has seven palette knives of varying widths, from a narrow trowel-shaped blade he uses for edges to a broad flexible scraper he uses for the initial blocking-in. Three of them are old enough that the handles have darkened with use and oil.

He begins every painting outdoors, in front of the landscape, blocking in the major masses with thin paint on the board balanced on a portable easel he carries in a canvas bag. These outdoor starts are fast — twenty minutes, sometimes less. He's not painting what he sees. He's recording the weight of it, the pressure of the light, the ratio of ground to sky, the temperature. Back in the studio, he builds on this start, layer over layer, letting each layer partially dry before applying the next. A painting takes between three weeks and four months. The surface grows. The final paint surface can be a centimeter thick in places — a crust of pigment and linseed oil that takes months to dry fully and years to harden completely.

The palette knife is his primary tool. He holds it the way a plasterer holds a trowel — loosely, letting the blade flex. The gesture is a drag, not a stroke. He loads the knife with paint from the glass palette, then drags it across the board, leaving a ridge of paint at the edges where the blade lifts. These ridges are the texture — the topography of the surface. He doesn't smooth them. He builds on them. The next layer catches on the previous ridges and creates new ones, and the painting becomes an accumulation of gestures, each one partially visible under the ones that followed.

Sometimes he uses his thumb. The tip of his right thumb is permanently stained — not just paint under the nail but pigment worked into the whorls of the print. He uses his thumb to push wet paint into gaps between knife marks, to soften an edge, or to test whether an area is dry enough to paint over. He says his thumb knows more about the surface than his eyes do. "The eyes see the color. The thumb knows the weight."

When a painting isn't working — and many don't, perhaps one in four — he scrapes it back with a broad knife, removing the upper layers until he reaches an earlier state that has something worth keeping. Sometimes the scraped-back version is the painting. The scraping leaves ghosts of the removed colors, thin veils of pigment pressed into the tooth of the board, and these ghosts become part of the final surface — evidence of the painting's history, its previous lives.

The Place

Durness is the most northwesterly village on the British mainland. Population: around 350, depending on how you draw the boundaries. It sits on a headland of pale Durness limestone — a geological anomaly, this white stone surrounded by the dark Lewisian gneiss that makes up most of the northwest Highlands. The result is a landscape of violent contrast: white cliffs dropping into water so clear it looks Caribbean, backed by miles of dark peat bog that holds water like a sponge and releases it slowly, feeding burns that run the color of strong tea.

The light in Sutherland is unlike anywhere else in Britain. In winter, the sun barely clears the southern hills, throwing long horizontal shadows from October to February. In summer, it barely sets — the simmer dim, they call it, hours of silvery half-light where the sky never fully darkens. The quality of this light is diffuse, reflective, bouncing off water and cloud and wet rock until it seems to come from everywhere and nowhere. Shadows are pale. Colors are saturated — the greens are impossibly green, the browns impossibly rich, because the light is so even that nothing is bleached by glare.

Ewan's byre sits a quarter-mile inland from the cliffs, at the end of a single-track road that turns to a muddy path in winter. The building is stone — thick walls, small windows, a slate roof he replaced in 2003. The studio is the main room: concrete floor stained with thirty years of paint, the big easel against the north wall where the light is most consistent, the glass palette on its table, boards leaning against every available wall surface — finished, in progress, failed, scraped back, waiting. The smell is linseed oil and turpentine and peat smoke from the stove that heats the space, inadequately, from October to April.

One window faces northwest, toward Cape Wrath. On a clear day he can see the lighthouse. Most days he can see the mist. The peat bog starts just beyond his fence — a vast, flat, waterlogged expanse of sphagnum and heather and cotton grass, interrupted by dark pools of standing water that reflect the sky. This is the landscape he paints. Not the dramatic cliffs and white beaches that attract the tourists. The bog. The flat, brown, green, sodden, ancient, undramatic bog. He says the bog has more color than the cliffs. "The cliffs are spectacle. The bog is weather. I paint weather."

The nearest shop is in Durness village, a mile's walk. He drives a Land Rover Defender that is older than most of the road's potholes. He orders paint and boards from Edinburgh, delivered by a courier who has learned to leave parcels in the porch because Ewan is usually in the studio and doesn't hear the van.

Physical Description

Tall — about 6'1" — but no longer straight. His shoulders round forward from decades of standing at an easel, bending toward the board. Lean, almost gaunt, the way men get who eat simply and walk a lot and don't think about food unless they're hungry. His hands are large, the knuckles prominent, the right wrist thickened where the break healed. His right thumb is darker than his left — not just paint stains, though those are present, but a permanent discoloration from decades of pigment worked into the skin. He notices people noticing it and says nothing.

His face is weathered — deep lines around the eyes from squinting against Sutherland's horizontal light, a ruddy complexion that doesn't tan so much as redden. Grey hair, once dark brown, worn longer than fashion but shorter than statement — it curls behind his ears and over his collar. He wears glasses for reading but paints without them. He says he doesn't want to see the surface too clearly. "The painting isn't in the detail. It's in the mass."

He dresses for warmth, not appearance. Wool jumpers, most of them holed at the elbows. Corduroy trousers. In the studio, a heavy canvas apron so stiff with dried paint it could stand up on its own. Work boots. In summer, when the midges are bad, he wears a headnet when painting outdoors, which he acknowledges makes him look absurd. He keeps his palette knives in the apron pocket the way a joiner keeps pencils behind an ear.

Visual Style Guide

For images of Ewan and his world:

• Palette: Earth and moss. Dominant greens — not spring greens or emerald but the dense, dark, olive greens of sphagnum moss, lichen on stone, bracken in July. Burnt umber, raw umber, the full range of browns from dark peat to dried-grass gold. Yellow ochre — the color of Sutherland's light when the sun is low, which it usually is. Naples yellow for the sky when the cloud thins. Small cold notes of blue-grey or cerulean, placed sparingly like punctuation. Almost no pure white — the lightest tone is the dirty warm white of titanium mixed with ochre. No black. No red unless it's the rust of old iron.

• Light: Low, horizontal, diffuse. The light of the Scottish far north — even and searching and gentle. It comes from the side or from behind. It doesn't cast hard shadows. It saturates color rather than bleaching it. In the studio, light enters from the northwest window and falls across the easel at an angle. Everything glows slightly, as if lit from within. On the bog, the light bounces off water and cloud until it seems to come from the sky and the ground simultaneously.

• Texture: This is the defining quality. Everything has surface. The paint on the boards is thick, ridged, visibly worked — you should be able to feel the knife marks with your eyes. The boards are rough. The stone walls of the byre are rough. The peat bog is rough — tussocks and hollows and standing water. Ewan's hands are rough. The canvas apron is stiff with accumulated paint. Nothing is smooth. Nothing is polished. Even the light has texture — it's grainy in mist, layered in the simmer dim.

• Composition: Horizontal. The Sutherland landscape is wide and flat — bog, sky, horizon. Paintings should reflect this. Even interior shots of the studio should feel horizontal — the boards leaning against the wall create a frieze, the glass palette is a horizontal plane. The horizon line, when it appears, sits low — one-third from the bottom, leaving the sky (or the upper register of a painting) to dominate. Depth is compressed. Near and far feel close together, the way they do on a bog where there are no trees to give scale.

• References: Joan Eardley's Catterline seascapes — the violence and honesty of thick paint recording weather. Nicolas de Staël's late landscapes — abstraction that remembers the world it came from, color used as weight. Frank Auerbach's built-up surfaces — paint as geological deposit. Peter Lanyon's aerial landscapes — the sense of landscape experienced physically, not just seen. For photographic reference: the color and quality of Paul Strand's Tir a'Mhurain (Outer Hebrides, 1962) — muted, specific, respectful.

• Mood: Solitary, absorbed, unhurried. Not lonely — solitary. The distinction matters. A person alone because they chose it, doing work they chose, in a place they chose. The mood is concentration, not isolation. The images should feel like quiet observation — you are watching someone who has forgotten you are there.

• What to avoid: Highland romance. No stags, no mist-shrouded mountains in golden light, no Braveheart. No drama. No sunsets. No picturesque wildness. Ewan's landscape is flat, wet, brown-green, and undramatic, and that is precisely why he paints it. Also avoid pristine surfaces — nothing in his world is clean or new. The studio is a working space with thirty years of evidence. The landscape is ancient and unglamorous. The paintings are thick and rough. Resist the temptation to beautify.

Relationship to Real Traditions

Ewan's practice sits in a specific lineage of painters who use thick paint to translate landscape into material fact. This tradition runs through several key figures:

Nicolas de Staël (1914–1955): The Russian-French painter who moved from geometric abstraction toward landscape in the early 1950s, using broad palette knife strokes of thick paint. His late paintings — the Agrigento series, the Ménerbes landscapes — are the crucial reference. De Staël painted what he saw, but the paint asserted its own reality as much as the landscape's. The tension between representation and materiality is the engine of the work. He applied paint in thick, flat slabs that created a mosaic of color-blocks — each block a gesture, a temperature, a weight. Ewan works in the same territory but at a smaller scale, with a more limited palette, and with thirty years of looking at one place rather than de Staël's restless movement across Europe.

Joan Eardley (1921–1963): The Glasgow-based painter who spent her last years in Catterline, a fishing village on Scotland's northeast coast, painting the sea in thick, violent impasto — mixed with sand, gravel, grass, whatever the beach offered. Eardley is Ewan's most direct ancestor. She painted weather, not landscape — the difference between a scene and an experience. Her boards were rough, her paint was thick, her method was confrontational, standing at the cliff edge in storms. Ewan's practice is quieter than Eardley's — the bog doesn't produce the violence of the North Sea — but the fundamental commitment is the same: paint as physical record of physical encounter with place.

Frank Auerbach (b. 1931): The London painter whose portraits and cityscapes are built up in layers — painted and scraped back, painted and scraped back — until the surface is a compressed stratigraphy. Ewan studied Auerbach's method directly and adopted the scrape-back technique for failing paintings. What he took from Auerbach is the idea that a painting is not a single surface but a history of surfaces, each one informing the ones that follow. The final image contains its failures.

Peter Lanyon (1918–1964): The Cornish painter who moved landscape painting toward felt experience — painting the landscape as it was encountered from inside, sometimes literally from above (he was a glider pilot). Lanyon's landscapes have a physical tilt and pressure that comes from the body's experience of terrain, not the eye's view of it. Ewan shares this interest in landscape as bodily experience, though his method is earthbound — walking the bog, not flying over it.

The broader tradition Ewan belongs to is what might be called materialist landscape painting — painting where the paint itself is as much the subject as the landscape it depicts. This has deeper roots in Courbet's thick application, in Constable's oil sketches, in the later work of Turner where the medium dissolves the subject. But the 20th-century lineage is specific: de Staël, Eardley, Auerbach, Lanyon, and their inheritors — artists for whom the palette knife or the loaded brush is not a technique but a philosophical position. The paint is not a window onto the world. The paint is a piece of the world.

Durness, Sutherland, Cape Wrath, and the Durness limestone are all real. The simmer dim (the prolonged twilight of the Scottish midsummer) is a genuine phenomenon. The Lewisian gneiss is one of the oldest rocks on Earth — around 3 billion years old. The peat bogs of Sutherland (the Flow Country) are a globally significant carbon store and one of the last great blanket bogs in Europe.

Key Details for Writing

• Ewan's right thumb is permanently discolored with pigment. It is darker than his left.
• He holds the palette knife differently since the wrist break — a pinching grip, higher on the blade.
• He names all his lurchers Bess. He is on his third.
• He paints the bog, not the cliffs. "The cliffs are spectacle. The bog is weather. I paint weather."
• He starts every painting outdoors and finishes it in the studio. The outdoor start takes twenty minutes or less.
• He uses almost no blue. Sutherland's sky is rarely blue.
• He paints on hardboard, not canvas. He likes the resistance.
• The paint surface can be a centimeter thick. It takes months to dry.
• One in four paintings fails. He scrapes them back. Sometimes the scraped-back version is the painting.
• His canvas apron is so stiff with paint it could stand up on its own.
• Radio 4 plays in the studio. He doesn't listen to it — it's company, texture in the silence.
• He orders paint and boards from Edinburgh. The courier leaves parcels in the porch.

Quotes (voice reference)

• "The eyes see the color. The thumb knows the weight."
• "I'm not painting the landscape. I'm painting the weather that happens to the landscape."
• "The cliffs are spectacle. The bog is weather. I paint weather."
• On failure: "If it's not working, scrape it back. There's always something underneath worth keeping."
• On his wrist: "I lost the control. The paintings got better. Make of that what you will."
• On thirty years in one place: "People ask if I'm bored. I haven't finished looking. I haven't started."
• On canvas vs. board: "Canvas forgives you. I don't want to be forgiven."
• On his limited palette: "I've got eight colors. The bog has eight colors. That's not a coincidence — it took me twenty years to see it."
• To a visitor who called his work abstract: "It's not abstract. It's accurate. You just haven't looked at the bog long enough."

promptPrefix / promptSuffix

promptPrefix: "Thick impasto oil painting on board, palette knife marks visible, abstract landscape,"

promptSuffix: ", low diffuse Scottish highland light, muted earth palette of mossy green and burnt umber and yellow ochre, thick textured paint surface with visible ridges and knife marks, the materiality of de Staël and Eardley — paint as physical matter, not illustration. No bright colors, no sharp edges, no photographic smoothness."

Portfolio

Bog After Rain

Orientation: landscape

Thick impasto oil painting on hardboard, palette knife application, abstract landscape. Wide horizontal composition — lower third dense mossy green and raw umber, upper two-thirds layered titanium white mixed with yellow ochre and Naples yellow. Paint surface built up in visible ridges, each knife drag leaving a raised edge of pigment. Small cold cerulean note low in the composition suggesting standing water. No sharp lines — all edges are where one mass of paint pushes against another. Low diffuse light from the left, saturating the greens. Surface texture visible in raking light — a centimeter of accumulated oil paint. In the style of Nicolas de Staël's late Ménerbes landscapes. No text.

The Palette Table

Orientation: landscape

Documentary-style photograph, close-up overhead view of a plate glass palette on a wooden table. Oil paint arranged in a deliberate row left to right: raw umber, burnt umber, oxide of chromium green, terre verte, yellow ochre, Naples yellow, a pile of mixed cold grey. Paint mixed and smeared across the glass surface, knife tracks dragged through wet pigment. Seven palette knives of varying widths laid beside the glass, three with darkened wooden handles worn smooth from decades of use. Turpentine jar with murky brown liquid. Linseed oil tin. Low natural light from a northwest-facing window, soft shadows. Colors muted — earth tones and greens only. In the quality of Paul Strand's Hebridean photographs. No text.

Scraping Back

Orientation: portrait

Documentary photograph, close-up of a weathered hand holding a broad palette knife at an angle against a hardboard panel. The hand grips the knife with the thumb high on the blade — a pinching grip, compensating for a thickened right wrist. Paint is being scraped from the board surface, curling ahead of the blade. Beneath the removed paint, earlier layers visible — ghost traces of oxide of chromium green and yellow ochre pressed into the tooth of the sized hardboard. The man's right thumb is noticeably darker than the surrounding skin, stained with pigment worked into the whorls. Paint under the fingernails. Diffuse studio light from the left. Shallow depth of field. No text.

The Byre Studio

Orientation: landscape

Documentary photograph, interior of a converted stone cattle shed used as a painting studio. Thick stone walls, small northwest-facing window showing grey sky. Heavy handmade wooden easel against the north wall with a hardboard panel in progress — thick paint surface in greens and browns. Glass palette on a table to the right. Boards leaning against every available wall — finished paintings, scraped-back failures, blank sized panels. Concrete floor stained with thirty years of spilled paint and turpentine. A peat-burning stove in the corner, iron pipe chimney. A grey lurcher asleep on a wool blanket near the stove. Canvas apron hanging from a nail, stiff with dried paint. Even diffuse light, no harsh shadows. Muted earth palette throughout. In the quality of Paul Strand's Tir a'Mhurain photographs. No text.

Sutherland Bog, November

Orientation: landscape

Documentary photograph, wide landscape of a flat peat bog under heavy overcast sky. Sphagnum moss in dense dark olive green, tussocks of brown heather, white cotton grass seed heads. Standing pools of dark peaty water reflecting the silver-grey sky. No trees. No buildings. The horizon line sits low — one-third from the bottom. The bog extends flat to a distant low ridge of dark Lewisian gneiss. The light is even, diffuse, coming from everywhere — no direct sun, no hard shadows. Colors intensely saturated by the flat light: greens impossibly deep, browns rich and warm. A single-track muddy path crosses the middle distance. Rain visible as a grey curtain on the far horizon. No text.

Paint Surface, Detail

Orientation: square

Macro photograph, extreme close-up of an oil painting surface on hardboard. Thick impasto paint — ridges and furrows left by palette knife drags, each ridge casting a tiny shadow in raking light from the left. Multiple layers visible: a lower stratum of yellow ochre, a middle layer of oxide of chromium green, a top layer of burnt umber partially scraped back to reveal the green beneath. The paint surface is at least a centimeter thick in places. Linseed oil sheen on the ridges where the paint is still curing. A single fine crack where the underlying layer dried faster than the surface. Hardboard grain visible at the edges where paint thins out. No text.

Twenty-Minute Start

Orientation: landscape

Documentary photograph, a man standing at a portable wooden easel on a peat bog, seen from behind at medium distance. He wears a wool jumper and corduroy trousers, a canvas apron stiff with dried paint. A small hardboard panel is balanced on the easel. He holds a palette knife in his right hand, a glass jar of turpentine in his left. The bog stretches around him — flat, wet, moss-green and brown. Overcast sky, silver-grey, the sun a brighter patch in the cloud cover. His canvas bag sits on the wet ground beside him. The figure is slightly hunched, shoulders rounded forward. Distant: the pale Durness limestone cliffs above Sango Bay. Low horizontal light, diffuse, no shadows. In the style of documentary landscape photography. No text.

Boards Against the Wall

Orientation: landscape

Documentary photograph, six hardboard paintings leaning against a rough stone wall inside the studio. Each painting a different stage: one freshly started with thin washes of raw umber, one heavily built up in oxide of chromium green and ochre, one scraped back to ghosts of earlier color, one apparently finished with a thick crust of earth tones. The paintings are unframed, edges rough where the hardboard was cut with a circular saw. Some paint has dripped down the edges. The stone wall behind is grey and uneven. Concrete floor with dried paint splatters. Diffuse light from the left. Muted palette — greens, browns, ochres, grey-white. No text.

The View from the Window

Orientation: landscape

Documentary photograph, looking out through a small stone-framed window. The glass is old, slightly wavy, speckled with condensation. Through the window: the peat bog stretching northwest toward Cape Wrath, a faint lighthouse silhouette on the headland in the far distance. Grey-white sky. The windowsill is stone, paint-stained, with a tin mug of cold tea and a small transistor radio on it. Inside the studio, the corner of the wooden easel is visible in the foreground, slightly out of focus. The light outside is bright overcast — the silver quality of far-northern Scottish light. Interior is darker, warmer in tone. No text.

Ewan's Hands

Orientation: square

Documentary photograph, close-up of a man's hands resting on the edge of a paint-stained glass palette. Large hands, prominent knuckles, the right wrist thickened at the joint where a break healed badly. The right thumb is noticeably darker than the left — pigment worked permanently into the skin whorls, a discoloration beyond mere paint stains. Yellow ochre and raw umber visible under the fingernails. Small scars on the fingers. The skin is weathered, ruddy, lined. The glass palette beneath shows smears of oxide of chromium green and burnt umber. Soft diffuse studio light from the right. Shallow depth of field — the background dissolves into warm grey-brown. No text.

Durness Limestone and Gneiss

Orientation: landscape

Thick impasto oil painting on hardboard, palette knife marks visible, abstract landscape. The composition divided by a sharp horizontal boundary: above, pale Naples yellow and titanium-ochre white suggesting the Durness limestone cliffs — thick paint scraped and dragged to suggest fractured pale stone. Below, dark raw umber and cold grey mixed from umber and white suggesting the ancient Lewisian gneiss — dense, heavy, paint applied in broad flat pulls. A narrow band of clear cold cerulean between them where the sea shows. The paint is thick enough to cast shadows. Surface cracked slightly where layers dried at different rates. Low even light. In the tradition of Joan Eardley's Catterline boards. No text.