Minch Song
Alison Dunlop RSW
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INNER SOUND: DRIFT 12
oil on canvas
100 x 110 cm
£4500
2.
INNER SOUND: DRIFT 12 (study) oil on canvas
51 x 51 cm
£1800
3.
INNER SOUND: DRIFT 10
oil on canvas
61 x 61 cm
£1800
4.
EBB AND FLOW (study)
oil on canvas
41 x 41 cm
£1200
5.
INNER SOUND: DRIFT 8
oil on canvas
61 x 61 cm
£1800
6.
INNER SOUND: DRIFT 14
oil on canvas
45.5 x 61 cm
£1800
​
7.
INNER SOUND DRIFT 15
oil on canvas
41 x 41 cm
£1200
8.
INNER SOUND: DRIFT 16
oil on canvas
41 x 41 cm
£1200
9.
INNER SOUND: DRIFT 17
oil on canvas
41 x 41 cm
£1200
10.
EBB AND FLOW
oil on canvas
61 x 91 cm
£3000
11.
INNER SOUND: SKYE BOUND
oil on canvas
143 x 203 cm
£15,000 reserved
12.
WAVE
oil on canvas
100 x 162 cm
£8000
13.
INNER SOUND: DRIFT 8 V.2
oil on canvas
61 x 61 cm
£1800
14.
Cloud Dance, The Minch 35
watercolour
38 x 57 cm
£1500
15.
Cloud Dance, The Minch 40
watercolour
38 x 57 cm
£1500
16.
Cloud Dance, The Minch 64
watercolour
38 x 57 cm
£1500
​
Artist's Statement
"Every day, my eye is drawn to the horizon, to that beguiling line where the sea and sky meet out there in The Minch.
It sings to me. It always has.
Like a siren call, it urges me to imagine that place where the known world touches the unknown, to learn what lies beyond. I am always trying to paint it, to understand it, and to discover what draws me to it.
In the oil paintings, I explore the visual tension of that horizon line, which draws the eye outward, suggesting both stability and the pull toward the infinite. A certain stillness feels charged with ambiguity, as if the paint holds its breath, suspended between states of being.
When you can see that line, on a clear day, you sense certainty and definition, but the more you look at it and the harder you try to grasp it, it shifts and changes. Before long, the light and the sky here in the North-West will change. It is in a state of almost constant flux, no doubt down to geography and the presence of the Gulf Stream. Maybe it’s the presence of islands too, just off-shore, that encourage this extraordinary interplay of light, land, and water, and the sky here is far more dynamic than any I have ever experienced. My watercolours explore that dramatic flux of energy over The Minch, as squalls bear down upon us from both North and South and as sunshine yields to mists and cloudbursts.
The North-West of Scotland is a vast, ‘wild’, open landscape, with a powerful underlying spirit and energy, in so many ways like Canada, where I grew up. ‘North’, to me, is a frame of mind. Not simply a place somewhere near the upper edges of a map, but one that can also be found on an inner map of the self.
It can be a place of quiet, and one of contemplation. Some might say of emptiness, or loneliness. But here, in “the North” and in my imagination, in all of my work, there is a deep and acute awareness of the immensity of nature, of its elemental forces and its indifference to all of us. A place where one is confronted by the overwhelmingly incomprehensible, boundless essence of life.
A place where the spirit is free to roam."
Alison Dunlop