Written by Sarah Bold, Artist
Painting the landscape
I am an artist living on the west coast of the Isle of Skye in Scotland. My art has also always been about the environment, particularly in rural locations. Concerns such as biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, the fishing industry and deforestation have all been woven into my previous and ongoing work. I am mainly a landscape painter, which, for me, also incorporates the sea. We live a stone’s throw from the ocean, which constantly changes. Here, the ocean’s movements are driven by prevailing south westerly winds or slammed by big storms in the winter that come in from the west.
I also love painting the Scottish landscape and it is easy to be seduced by the enormous romantic beauty of the Highlands and Islands. This romantic vision is something that I return to within my painting, it is almost a solace, a reprieve from the nitty gritty that is evident in the landscape when you’re prepared to see it. For me however, there came a point in my painting when I needed to look beyond the obvious aesthetic beauty of where I live.
Shifting Baselines
One winter we had a tremendous succession of storms. During this time, I had been reading about shifting baseline syndrome: when each generation sets an observed standard as a baseline for measuring natural ecosystems, but with each generation re-setting the baseline we eventually lose sight of the original ecosystem.
Each generation creates a new normal, so the rate of degradation from the original ecosystem is never truly measured but instead continues to shift.
The winter storms heaved up an incredible amount of plastic onto our shoreline and I thought about how the shifting baseline syndrome would apply to our beaches. I saw our little beach and thought that at one point in history, this beach would have been pristine. Now it is littered with plastic and rubbish - yet my kids would look at this beach and simply see a normal beach. They could see the detritus, but this was their normal, this is how a beach looks within their generation. Yet within our little bay amongst the tangle of seaweed, plastic and detritus, they somehow still see beauty.
However, if we begin to accept these new baselines, we risk to slowly lose site of the original environment and what we have truly lost. So, as a departure from my usual landscapes I started to paint the shore, seaweed, plastic and detritus. I enjoyed poking about in the weeds, taking photos, breathing the sea air, feeling grateful even though it was a heartbreaking sight. Although we are aware of the gravity and widespread effect of plastic pollution, it is nonetheless astonishing to see it first-hand.
Amidst the huge amounts of plastic, the more you look, the more you see, until it all just becomes a jumble of colour and scrap.
Sometimes it is overwhelming when I see the state of our shores or the degradation of our landscapes. I understand the despair that folk feel about the climate emergency, but I am reminded there is still so much beauty and inspiring work being done for us to feel grateful for and to shout about. I know I am extremely lucky to live in the beautiful landscape that I do and for that reason I feel a responsibility as an artist to not only share this beauty but also document how it is evolving. In response to these changing landscapes I produced a series of paintings titled ‘Seaweed, Plastic and Detritus’. These paintings are a reflection on our shorelines today. They document the influx of plastic that we now see in this generational baseline. However, I hope to remind the viewer of the surrounding natural beauty that we must never lose sight of.
Boundaries
Once I started to consider the shoreline in my work, this naturally led me onto thinking about the ocean and that which we cannot see. I started to think about the Marine Protected Areas, not just around the coast of Scotland, but also across the wider ocean. I wondered about the use of mapping and designation of these zones upon a fluid moving body of water such as the ocean, and how we determine or contain a specific area when there are no boundaries - what is 'within', what is 'without', what is 'protected', what 'is not'. Furthermore, how we see ourselves in relation to the ocean - separate or connected within the whole. There is a lot of emotion surrounding these designations, ideas of right or wrong, good or bad, more or less.
We often talk about the ocean as a metaphor for our emotional body - if this is the case then emotions are like tidal currents within, rippling and intertwined, not one without the other, but all fluid and connected.
The feelings hidden in a painting
Right now, I’m back to painting what I can only describe as the joy of the landscape. I live on an island croft - a croft in Scotland is a parcel of relatively small rural land, similar to a smallholding - of which the ocean is at either end. Our lives are wholly dictated by the weather and the changing moods of the sea. The ocean is a vital source of inspiration for my work and every day reminds me of the connection it has to the land. One cannot be without the other and the relationship shared is never still, it is always changing. As I walk the croft I am constantly observing and absorbing the changing tides, the ocean swell, wind direction, the angle of the sun, the light on the hills, and the incredible shifts in colour.
The ocean and landscape are intertwined, and it is this relationship and connection to each other that I try to incorporate into my paintings. This is sometimes done in an abstract way and at other times more figuratively. When beginning a painting the starting point is always the colour, inspired by the sea or landscape. From there I consider what energy I want to bring to the painting. However, ultimately the desire is to paint without thinking, to let go. Although I may have an initial idea, I am happy to release full control of the outcome. The main objective is to pour all that I am feeling into the work, so although you may see an ocean or a mountain or the transient light, it is the feeling of that particular time and place that I want to share. How it is translated or received is then completely individual, yet at the same time I hope for a kind of unity or shared experience.
I feel the joy of the landscape is about finding your own special place, and the gratitude and connection to the natural world that comes with it. It is the joy that I have found in what a friend described as the ‘thin places’.
When she described my work to me in this way it felt like a gift, for I interpret it as that place you find in nature, a kind of portal, where you hum and vibrate, you dissolve, you are nothing and everything, pure joy, for a moment in time.
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