SELECTED WORK
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Touring the North West Highlands
Leaving the beaten track is not an option but an essential when exploring the North West Highlands. Parking up and setting out on foot, I’m ready for the wide range of experiences that the landscape and the weather will throw at me.
As an artist, such experiences are a crucial component of successful endeavours in the studio, a guiding light as I splash around with my materials. As with my painting, a walk in a steep-sided glen, along a challenging mountain ridge or a meandering coastline, is a journey both of discovery and deep appreciation.
I don’t do any painting on the spot, as I find this restricts where I can go and inhibits the flow of experience that a walk brings, though I will do many quick pencil sketches, to tie down specific moments, and take photographs for reference.
The lochs north of Fort William are a favourite of mine, especially lonely Loch Arkaig, which becomes more wild and spectacular the further you venture along its beautiful wooded shores. Further north is Glen Garry, which takes the willing traveller past the munro-fringed Loch Quoich and onto the spectacular fjord-like Loch Hourn, whose surrounding hills provide some of the remotest and most sublime walking in the whole country.
Further north still, the justly famous mountains of Liathach, Beinn Eighe and Beinn Alligin, that together create the walker’s paradise that is Torridon, so called after the Torridonian sandstone that gives the mountains their bulk and character. This is a place that time, thankfully, has changed little over the centuries. The formidable Liathach has provided some of my most memorable (and terrifying) mountain experiences. Its three munro summits and very exposed ridges provide more than enough experiences for one day! Such mountain ridges, while demanding a lot from the hiker in terms of effort, skill and courage, always reward the vigilant with their treasure of spectacular views and sense of otherworldliness.
Yet further north, past the vast wilderness of Letterewe and Fisherfield, the landscape becomes more fractured and indented, with countless lochs, rivers and streams, invading the rocky heather moorland. The mountains here, again composed of Torridonian sandstone, become more individual entities. They stand as great handsome monuments to the far North West, none more so than Suilven and Quinag, whose isolated positions make any view, to or from them, simply incomparable.
Article and paintings
by artist Kevan McGinty