Tag: art ideas

The Meanbh-Chuileag

Posted on August 30, 2026 by - Abstract Photography, Photographic Expressionism, Photography comment, Photography Ideas

Most evenings this week, there has come a moment when the wind has lain itself down on the machair and the island has fallen quiet. The rushes stop their small tin-hiss. The washing line stops its slow drift. Eddie, always alert despite seemingly deep in sleep, lifts his head from the mat and looks at me, because he can hear what I can hear, which is nothing. A stillness so complete it is almost audible. It is the kind of stillness the guidebooks call peaceful and the ferry brochures photograph.

It is not peaceful. It is a warning.

I have lived here now for just over a year, and I have learned what a still evening on North Uist actually means. It means the wind has dropped below the threshold, five or six miles an hour, maybe less, at which the meanbh-chuileag, what the rest of the world knows as the midge, can lift herself from the peat. And once she can lift, she rises in her thousands. Then her hundreds of thousands. Then in the numbers we only ever describe in weather, a cloud, a fog, a ceò, because the language of a single fly no longer holds. She comes up out of the moor as if the moor itself has decided to breathe out, and she wants blood, and she is not fussy about whose. But mainly she seems intent on mine.

I stand at the studio door in the good light of a windless August evening and understand that the evening I would have chosen to walk out with the camera has just been taken from me. Not by rain, which I love. Not by cloud, which I love more. But by a creature roughly a millimetre long, whose Gaelic name, meanbh-chuileag, tiny fly, is one of the great pieces of Highland understatement. It sits in the same family as a wee bit of a breeze that flattens your brassicas, or a nice soft day that soaks you to the bone in three minutes.

The trap of the calm day

I want to dwell on this for a moment, because it took me a while to see it. I am not very quick on the uptake. In my first months here I read the island the way an incomer reads it, the way I used to read the mainland weather when I was still teaching from a car park in the Peak District. Back in those far off days, a calm day was a working day. A calm day was an outdoor day. A calm day was the day you loaded the pack and drove out to the shore, because the light would not be rushed off the water and the long exposures you had been waiting for became finally possible.

I know now that on North Uist a calm July or August day is very often a midge day, and a midge day is not a working day outdoors. It is a warning painted onto the atmosphere in invisible ink. The moor is telling me, in the only language the moor speaks, that if I try to go out and stand in one place for the time a picture needs, five minutes, ten, half an hour, I will not be photographing the machair. I will be photographing my own capitulation, mid-slap, mid-grumble, walking back to the pick-up with tears streaming and a red rash climbing the back of my neck, destined to scratch for days.

It has taken me some months to accept that the still evening is not the gift my mainland eye once thought it was. It is a particular kind of Hebridean event, and it belongs to the meanbh-chuileag before it belongs to me. The sensible thing is to bow to the arrangement and go and do something else.

Not stronger than the moor

There is a temptation, when a working day is taken from you, to fight for it. To stand at the window and calculate. To reach for the head net and the smidge and the trousers tucked into socks, and to try to win. To be valiant, unbowed. Manly. To walk out anyway, because you had planned to walk out. I have done all of this. It never ends well. The retreat is rather pathetic and humiliating, frankly. It ends with a picture that isn’t really about the picture. It is about my determination to make a picture on a day the island had already declined to give.

I have arrived, slowly, at a small principle that I need to admit to, even though it will sound obvious to anyone who has lived here longer than a season. I am not stronger than the moor. I am not stronger than the weather. I am not going to negotiate my way past a species that has been in these islands for as long as anyone has been here to be bitten by them, and that has already outlasted every attempt to catch, poison, trap or repel it. She rises when the wind drops. That is the deal. She is neither cruel nor thoughtful. She is meanbh-chuileag, and she is doing what a fly does with a fly’s whole life, which is to feed and to breed and to leave more of herself behind before the cold comes.

I can rage at her, or I can rearrange the working day around her. Only one of those actually has any chance of success.

What she moves me to

So I am learning to let the midge edit me.

When the wind drops and the solasbreac of a still evening comes in through the bothy door, I close the bothy door, and I go and I paint, or edit some images. Not begrudgingly. Not as a second-best, waiting for the outdoor day to return. But with something that is beginning, at last, to feel like consent. A working consent to the shape the island has offered.

The paintings that come out of these forced-in evenings have a quality I could not have got standing in a windless field slapping at my ears. They are still. Their marks are slower. Their palettes are the palettes I remember from the walk that morning, rather than the palettes in front of me, which is, I am starting to think, the palette I actually want. The remembered dath, not the observed one. The moor at one remove.

I lay out primed panels I gessoed weeks ago. I put on the BBC, Radio 4. Calm descends. Eddie takes his place on the rug near the door. Elizabeth is upstairs in the cottage at her own craft work, and the sounds of nature outside, the cries of geese on the loch, a pair of Ravens cronking overhead, keeps me company through the wall. My hand finds the carborundum plate I was going to develop next week, and I bring it forward instead. I mix a run of colours I could not have come up with an hour ago: a peat black warmed with a rust the moor has been carrying all afternoon, a bone the colour of the lower sky over Balranald, a machair straw that is really the inside of a shell more than the outside of a grass.

The midge has decided my medium for the evenings work. And I am, oddly, grateful.

The editor at the window

Here is the part I did not expect. The meanbh-chuileag is, for me, becoming a kind of editor. Not the editor with the red pencil who trims the sentence. The editor before the editor, the one who says: not this evening, this evening you make something else. She is the first cut. She removes an option before I have to.

Anyone who has tried to hold a working practice steady over years knows how tiring the option of ‘everything is possible’ becomes. On a mainland studio day I had to decide, unaided, what to do with the light I had been given. On a still North Uist evening the midge has already decided. My job is to accept the shape of the decision, walk twenty paces to a different door, and get to work.

There are worse editors. And there is a lesson in the small thing making the large decision, a lesson about scale and about who gets to shape a day, that keeps returning to me as I paint. I stood in our garden three mornings ago in the early light, looking out toward Loch Sandarraigh beyond our drystone wall, and watched a hen harrier lift over the peat and change the whole feeling of a hundred acres just by being there. Now I am watching a creature the length of a full stop rearrange a hundred acres of my working week. Both are teaching the same thing. The size of the mover is not the size of the movement. Small things move large things all the time on this island, if you are prepared to be moved.

The Gaelic word does the work

I keep returning to the Gaelic. (the seemingly impossible language I am trying very badly to learn) Meanbh-chuileag. Tiny fly. Nothing dramatic about it, nothing romantic, no exaggeration of the misery the creature actually causes. Gaelic naming, so far as I can read the little I can read of it, tends to this quiet accuracy. It is the same accuracy that gives us ceò for mist and dìle bhàite for the kind of downpour that drowns things, without any need for a Homeric adjective. The word describes what the thing is, and lets the thing be what it is.

I think this is why the language keeps drawing me. Not because it is beautiful, though it often is, but because it names things with the confidence of long acquaintance. English tries to sell you a feeling. Gaelic points at the thing. If I keep spending time with these words, carefully, as a beginner, without pretending fluency I do not have, I think my pictures might learn a little of the same discipline. Point at the thing. Do not embellish. Trust that the thing, well pointed at, will contain its own weight.

Perhaps this is one of the small gifts of the meanbh-chuileag week. She has driven me out of the outdoor sentence and into the indoor one, and in the indoor one I have had time to read for an hour before painting, and to sit with the Gaelic name and feel the fit of it.

The rhythm the island keeps

None of what I am saying is new. Anyone who has lived on North Uist, South Uist, Barra, Lewis or Harris longer than a season knows about the midges and has arranged their year around them. Peat is cut before the midge comes up in earnest, or late enough that a breeze off the Minch can be relied on. Fencing, roof work, garden work; all of it is done with an eye on the wind gauge as much as on the rain gauge. The islanders’ calendar is not the calendar of a mainland gardener. It is a calendar built around what the weather permits and what the weather actively refuses.

I am, I hope, learning to live inside that calendar rather than beside it. I no longer sulk at a windless evening. I no longer regard a meanbh-chuileag week as a lost week. I regard it as a week the island has scheduled for me, and my job is to look at the schedule, put the camera down, and find the studio door.

There is a stubborn old habit in me, an English mainland habit, that wants to make a day into what I had planned it to be. To bend a working day to my will. This place is, gently and repeatedly, curing me of that. The wind drops and the midge rises and I put down the camera and pick up a brush. I am not defeated. I am rearranged.

The still day, revisited

I want to come back to that stillness at the door.

I hear it differently now. I hear it the way I hope I might, in time, hear all the small changes on this island: not as invitations to my own plans, but as information about what the day is actually asking. A still evening in August is a meanbh-chuileag evening. A hard rattling south-westerly is a shoreline evening, when the spray stings your face and the panorama can wrap you inside the wind. A soft uisge mìn is a lochans evening, when the small waters take the drizzle and give it back as reflection. Each condition asks for a different door.

The teachers, I think, are always the small ones. The tiny fly that decides where you cannot stand. The stone lichen that decides the palette of your carborundum plate. The single feather Eddie brings home from the beach that becomes tomorrows mark making tool. I keep thinking, half-jokingly, that if I ever get around to writing a real ars poetica for this island, it will begin: do what the smallest thing tells you. The moor cannot be argued with. The sea cannot be argued with. And the meanbh-chuileag, blessedly, will not entertain your argument for a second.

Coda: the working week

For anyone keeping an odd sort of count. This week I have not photographed outdoors since last Tuesday. I have painted three panels I almost don’t hate and one I’m really quite cross with, made a small carborundum proof, badly, walked the loch walk six times, the walk Eddie loves so much because he gets to swim in four different places and got a good short set of frames that might not get deleted, and read half a book about Peter Lanyon and some wonderful Sorley Maclean poetry (in English. Sadly the original Gaelic translations which I have, are far beyond me and, I fear, always will be, but they look beautiful nonetheless, as I cast my eye across them) in the evenings while the moor gave up its warm breath and the midges rose. When the gaoth mhìn finally comes back, a soft working wind, not the kind that flattens your hair against your skull, just enough to keep the meanbh-chuileag pinned to the peat, I will be out again. Ready. And oddly rested.

I have not lost the days. The days have simply been given a different shape by a creature the size of a comma.

She is my editor this week. And I have learned, at last, not to argue with her.

On Noticing

Posted on August 1, 2026 by - Abstract Photography, Photographic Expressionism, Photography comment, Photography Ideas

There is a particular quality of light that arrives on Uist in the late afternoon of a clear day in autumn — low, slanting, the colour of weak whisky — that lasts perhaps eleven minutes before it shifts again. If you are inside the house when it comes, you miss it. If you are outside but looking at your phone, you miss it. If you are walking the machair with someone and deep in conversation, you miss it. The light does not announce itself. It does not wait. It simply arrives, holds for a breath, and is gone.

This, I have come to believe, is the whole business of being an artist. Not technique, not gear, not even ideas in the first instance. Noticing.

I talk a great deal to my students about seeing — about learning to see abstractly, to see beyond the obvious subject, to see the shape inside the thing rather than the thing itself. But seeing is the second act. The first is noticing that there is something worth seeing in the first place. And noticing, I am increasingly convinced, is one of the rarest faculties most of us possess and one we so sadly lose.

The faculty we are taught to lose

Children notice everything. A puddle is an event. A beetle on a stone holds them for half an hour. The way frost forms a feather on the inside of a window in winter is, to a child, plainly miraculous, because they have not yet been told it is ordinary (although I am with the children: frost feathers are wondrous things still). Somewhere between five and fifteen we are quietly taught that most things are not worth looking at, that the world has been catalogued already, that to stop and stare is faintly embarrassing. Far better to concentrate on becoming an accountant. Or a Dentist. (And I mean no offence to either profession; I know we need both. It is just so sad that the children who crave a life in art are so often firmly directed elsewhere, with all good intentions, I am sure). And so we walk through our days half-blind, sleepwalking past the small wonders, saving our attention for the screen, the schedule, the next thing.

The painter Joan Eardley, walking the cliffs at Catterline in all weathers, understood this. She would stand in a storm, wearing her workmen’s overalls, with her easel weighted down by stones, lashed by the same sea spray her neighbours were sheltering from, and paint what she saw and felt. The villagers, kindly enough, thought her a little mad, but loved her anyway. She thought them, I suspect, a little asleep. Her work survives — those great heavy paintings of grey sea and grey sky and the small bright clothes of the Samson children — because she was willing to be the only one in the village still looking when everyone else had gone indoors.

To make abstract work that comes from somewhere true rather than somewhere borrowed, we have to undo this gradual closing-down of the eye. We have to become, again, the kind of person who stops on a wet pavement because a slick of oil from a passing car has bloomed into a small Helen Frankenthaler at our feet. The kind of person who notices that the rust on a harbour bollard has the exact ochre of a piece of Antoni Tàpies, and stays there long enough to photograph it badly three times before getting the frame they wanted. The kind of person who sees that the shadow of a fence post on grass in March is not grey but a complicated, restless blue.

What the great noticers had in common

The photographers and artists whose work moves me most are not, on the whole, the ones with the most expensive cameras or the cleverest software. They are the ones who appear to have decided, quietly and without fuss, to pay closer attention than anyone else in the room.

Agnes Martin walked alone in the New Mexico desert for hours at a time, looking at the line of the horizon until she could draw it from the inside. Her grids, which to a casual eye look almost identical, are in fact the residue of a lifetime of looking at very small differences — the difference between one pale band of sky and the pale band beneath it, the difference between this morning and yesterday morning. The work is the noticing made visible.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham went to Switzerland in 1949 and stood inside the Grindelwald glacier. She wrote afterwards of feeling its weight, its interior light, the way the ice held blue and green and white all at once. The drawings and paintings that followed — those marvellous ringed and folded forms — were not invented. They were noticed, and then translated.

Hamish Fulton, who calls himself a walking artist, has made a long career out of essentially one act: walking, and counting that as the work. No sculptures, no installations in the usual sense. Just walks, documented in spare text and the occasional photograph. He has said he is not interested in walking as a means to make art; the walking is the art. What he is really saying, I think, is that the noticing is the art, and the walking is merely the discipline that makes noticing possible.

Closer to my own field, Raymond Moore — that quiet English photographer of edges and margins, of caravan parks and harbour walls and the awkward joins between things — spent his life photographing what no one else thought worth photographing. He once said that the photographs he made were of “things found, not things sought”. The distinction is everything. A thing sought is a thing already imagined. A thing found is a thing that was waiting for someone awake enough to see it.

Or take Saul Leiter, who lived in the same few blocks of New York’s East Village for sixty years and never ran out of pictures. The same streets, the same windows, the same red and yellow umbrellas in the same falling snow. What he had was not novelty of subject but depth of attention. He looked harder than anyone else at the place he happened to be.

There is a thread running through all these artists, and it is not technique. It is patience of the eye.

The Hebridean education

Out here on North Uist, noticing is made easier by emptiness. There is less to distract you. A single skylark over the dunes can hold your attention for the whole of a morning. The Atlantic does not move the way the North Sea moves, and once you have noticed that, you cannot unsee it. The sky changes character three or four times an hour, and after a year of living under it you begin to know its moods the way you know the moods of a person you live with and love.

The Gaelic-speaking poets of these islands understood noticing as a serious discipline, long before any of us came to it through cameras. There is a word in Gaelic, dùthchas, that has no clean English equivalent — it means something like a deep, inherited belonging to a particular place, a knowing of it in the bones. The Uist poet Aonghas MacNeacail and, before him, Sorley MacLean from Raasay, wrote out of that kind of knowing. Their poems are full of small, exact noticings — a particular stone, a particular angle of light on a particular slope, the way the wind comes off a specific stretch of water — that could only have been written by someone who had stood in that place long enough to be quiet inside it.

This is the lesson the island teaches, slowly, to anyone who will listen. That noticing is not a quick flick of the eye. It is a kind of staying. You have to be willing to remain in front of a thing long enough for it to begin to speak. The first thirty seconds tell you almost nothing. The first thirty seconds are mostly your own mind, still chattering, still labelling, still moving on. It is the second minute, and the third, and the fouth hour, and the ninth week, where the thing in front of you begins to come forward and reveal what it actually is.

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön talks about staying — staying with discomfort, staying with boredom, staying with whatever is in front of you instead of fleeing into the next thing. I think the artist’s version of staying is exactly this. To remain in front of an ordinary subject long enough for it to stop being ordinary. To outlast your own boredom. To let the world begin to disclose itself.

Noticing without an island

But you do not need an island. You need a willingness. Noticing is, in the end, a small daily act of disobedience. It is refusing the speed the world is asking of you.

It is standing in front of the kitchen sink in the morning and seeing that the water coming from the tap, lit by the window, holds within it every silver Hiroshi Sugimoto ever made. It is walking the same lane you have walked for ten years and finding, today, that the moss on the stone wall is a different green than it was last week, and wondering why. It is sitting in the car park outside the supermarket for a minute longer than you need to, because the puddle by the trolley bay has a sky in it. It is the bus shelter at dusk. The condensation on the windscreen. The way the strip light in the corridor at the dentist makes the carpet look like a Mark Rothko, if Rothko had ever painted carpet.

The Surrealists, for all their theatrical nonsense, were right about one thing: that the marvellous is hiding inside the ordinary, and that most of us walk past it because we have been trained to. André Breton’s idea of le merveilleux quotidien — the everyday marvellous — is a phrase worth keeping. It is not that extraordinary things are happening in extraordinary places. It is that extraordinary things are happening everywhere, all the time, and our job is to be the one person on the street who saw it.

The American poet Mary Oliver, who built an entire body of work out of walking the same New England woods over and over, put it as plainly as anyone ever has. “Attention,” she wrote, “is the beginning of devotion.” Not a bad sentence to keep pinned somewhere in the studio.

Why the camera comes second

There is a danger, of course, in being an artist who works with a camera, which is that the camera can become a substitute for the eye. We can lift it before we have looked. We can begin clicking before we have noticed. We can produce a great quantity of images without ever having paid attention to anything.

This is the difference, I think, between a photograph made by someone who was barely there and a photograph made by someone who stopped, and breathed, and saw. The first kind is everywhere — Instagram is largely a vast warehouse of them. The second kind is rare, and you know it when you encounter it, because it carries something across to you that no amount of technique can fake. There is a person behind it. There is someone who was awake.

This is why I keep returning to the idea that the picture is only ever as deep as the looking that led to it. A photograph made in haste, by an eye that has not paused, will look like exactly that — no matter how perfectly exposed, no matter how cleverly processed. And a photograph made by someone who has noticed, deeply, before lifting the camera, will carry that depth into the print. Other people will feel it even if they cannot say why.

Robert Adams, the great American landscape photographer, wrote that “form is beauty made visible”. I would add to that, very gently, that form is also noticing made visible. The form of a good photograph is the trace of an act of attention. You can read the quality of the looking in the bones of the picture.

So, as we walk out, slow down and find ourselves captivated by something the world is hurrying by, it is not because we are odd or somehow special; it is because we have remembered something old. That the world is, and always has been, quietly extraordinary. That most people are not looking. And that the small, stubborn act of looking anyway — of being the one who notices the eleven minutes of whisky-coloured light, the oil slick on the pavement, the moss that has changed colour since last week — is, perhaps, one of the most important things we do as artists.

Everything else, in the end, is only the work of carrying that noticing across to someone else.