Thresholds by Philip Marsden

Richard Hoare is a painter who lives his paintings. For three decades or more he has followed his own sun-splashed, pilgrim-path across the earth’s surface. Long-distance walks have punctuated those years, in Turkey and Spain, France and Romania. He has spent extended periods in Chile, Japan, Nepal, Cyprus – always painting or drawing, invariably outside.

The latest journeys have seen him set up his easel on the Atlantic seaboard, at a number of sites along the west coasts of Scotland and Ireland. He did not pre-plan the specific places to work in but relied on exploring, following single-track lanes in a ex removal van, a white 2011 Mercedes Sprinter. He’d converted the van to a mobile studio – or rather, he got as far as cutting and perspexing a skylight in the roof while more elaborate plans (for windows, power, water) remain on hold while he actually uses it. He strapped canvases to the inside, loaded crates of paint and brushes and threw in a sleeping bag and camping stove. ‘I do not have to enter another room to sleep,’ he explains, as if this was one of life’s bigger hurdles, ‘and my routine is not broken by meal times.’

Hoare is a gregarious soul, highly animated when placed in any sort of gathering, and a loving friend – but he is also an expert loner, unphased by physical hardship or the spartan demands of life on the move. Privation and isolation are simply waypoints on the path to his given purpose, to step out into the wild wind, into the raw of the world, and render it on paper or linen or board.

One evening on this trip, he made a time-lapse film entitled ‘Preparing to paint the Hunter’s Moon’. It is after dark, and a yellowy light spills from the van’s door, glowing through its thin sides. In silent-comedy speed, Richard – boiler-suited and brim-hatted – flits between van and easel. The real drama though is overhead where a mass of silver- edged clouds slides across the sky. Hidden in them, the moon sheds a bluish hue that seeps down through the folds and gaps. When Hoare is ready to paint, silhouetted by the easel, the cloud opens and the moon itself is about to appear, its shape almost visible… The film stops, work begins.

The paintings in this collection were made with particular focus on two distinct areas. Driving north from Glasgow, Hoare reports crossing the bridge at the top of Glen Kinglas and ‘going in’. For the next few weeks, before coming out, his immersion was total, a sustained period of monkish living and painting. He and the Sprinter wound their way up past Jura and Mull, out to Ardnamurchan, on up to Mallaig, seeking out the thin places (p.31,39,40,41). In Ireland, he confined himself to a smaller but no less spectacular area, around Clew Bay in County Mayo – bordered to the south by Croagh Patrick, and with Cliara island’s thrusting profile out at the bay’s entrance, on the edge of the Atlantic.

There is much that is kindred between the west coasts of Scotland and Ireland – language, beliefs, historic loyalties, geology, even genetics (the M222 Y-DNA marker reveals in ancient Ulster a single shared ancestor for many individuals now living in north-west Ireland and south-west Scotland). What is common too is the perennial capacity of the seaboard to generate some colourful projections, to blur the space between the real and the abstract. As the coastline fractures into a thousand islands, islets, breakers and rocks, so the actual frays into the imaginary.

The open waters of the Atlantic were once littered with non-existent islands – Tir na nÓg (‘land of the young’), Hy Brasil (a large fictitious island marked on charts until the mid-19th century), the Green Island (floating in Hebridean and Irish waters), Inish Bofin (once a mirage island off the Connemara coast, now a short ferry-ride from Cleggan). The profusion of prehistoric sites – Bronze Age burial cairns, Neolithic standing stones and stone circles, cliff castles – shows that the numinous here is very old, that the setting sun and the ocean combine in some simple cosmic equation, as clear now as it was five thousand years ago. Beyond the shore, beyond the span of our own lives, is nothing but a great watery void. Best to scatter it hopefully with landing-spots, to stave off the horror with imagined land below the horizon, a place of permanent sun, immortal youth or blessed eternity.

The shoreline itself is a fractal continent of bays and headlands and sea-lochs. Storm-battered beaches and cliffs rise from them to high treeless slopes. The land too has its evocations. Dinnseanchas is a branch of early Irish literature in which topography and mythology meet. Hills and lakes, caves and rivers all create their own stories. Many of these tales emerged in the shadowy world of pre-Christian Ireland and were then written down during the golden age of Irish letters, before the Viking invasions. They were learnt by rote, repeated and modified by the filí, the caste of itinerant bards. They survive in place-names and the recesses of collective memory, adding layers to the bare land, half-buried pointers to other worlds.

The Children of Lir were turned into swans and spent three hundred years on Loch Derravaragh in County Westmeath, three hundred years in the Straits of Moyle between Ireland and Scotland, and three hundred years on Inisglora off the coast of County Mayo. In Buile Shuibhne ‘The Madness of Sweeney’, the hero is transformed into an owl. For many years he flies through the named valleys and remoter slopes of Ireland before his wanderings take him north to Scotland, to St Donnán’s cave on the Hebridean island of Eigg, and on to Ailsa Craig.

All these places are just places, the random legacy of erosion and deposition, ancient volcanic activity, isostatic rise. When we look at the mountains, we see shape and monumental stillness animated, if at all, by the weather: passing rain-showers, the smudges of fog and cloud, sudden bursts of sunlight. But we would not be human if we did not do what our species has always done in these empty, dramatic locales. We ponder the big questions. We reach for story. We people the wilderness with ancestors, with vanished communities, those forced into exile in clearance or famine, or earlier groups who erected dolmens and megaliths, giants and ogres who formed islands by throwing rocks at each other, or prayer-filled mystics pushing off from the shore in tiny vessels, in search of what isn’t there, what can never be reached in this life.

Richard Hoare’s images are rooted in the real. They celebrate the physical shapes encountered on these coasts, the skyline of island and mountain, and they are moments – freeze-frames of the ever-shifting atmospheric drama, the angle and intensity of light. But they play too with the ambiguities. These hardest and most resistant of coasts have always been softened by suggestion. It is a matter of personal taste where exactly you allow your imagination to lead you – into the world of faeries and selkies, of hard-pressed crofters and heartless landowners, of early monks and their white martyrdoms, or back further to an age of monstrous Fomorians or an antiquated priesthood doing sacred things in a sacred stone circle.

What is common is the starting point, the landscape itself. Hoare has his own well-hewn ideas and beliefs, and his journeys are always filled with reading – in this case, works of archaeology, toponymy, poetry and early history which made him curious, among other things, about traditional beliefs of the solar cycle. Each painting in this series is ink- punched with a number, the number of days that had elapsed since the winter solstice when the picture was made.

But the images themselves are renditions of what can be seen. In this lies their universality and power. They are devotions, driven by an inexpressible reverence for topography and all it brings out in us, all that can be seen in it and through it and beyond it. In his Sprinter, Richard Hoare takes us along the shores of Argyll and Inverness-shire and Mayo, and leaves us on the threshold.

 

by Philip Marsden

Philip Marsden’s account of his solo sea-voyage along the west coast of Ireland and Scotland is told in The Summer Isles; A Voyage of the Imagination (Granta 2020).

|

Register Interest

First Name*
Last Name*
Email*
* denotes required fields

We will process the personal data you have supplied in accordance with our privacy policy. You can unsubscribe or change your preferences at any time by clicking the link in our emails.

Thank You

We look forward to sending you advance information and keeping you up to date. Please check your email inbox for further information from Messums.org