You turn suddenly on to the winding road to Stoer, past the rusted bunkers (grey, iron oxide) and then the gorse begins. Abrupt, insistent. A wide field of dazzling yellow that burns a double image on the retina - so bright, almost fuzzy in its luminescence. It makes me think of the colour of dogwood stalks, dark crimson on the winter hedge, I do not know why – the bright colour calls to its companion. Supported by red-brown stalks, paint brush bristles of pine green, the pale pink that would be sickly anywhere else but seems to leach out of the stone here to contrast with the cold, hard, silver grey of rock, water and sky.
COLOURSCAPE
pink
silver grey
dots of dark green, almost black
yellow gorse, intense acid, but warm
bright chestnut
dark red, like dogwood stalks
I don’t know what the composition is. I don’t feel the urge to draw landscape or have any narrative in mind. Maybe this is where the abstract patterns from the moth wings come in – they can be a framework for the colour play? Or, collage a layout together from somewhere unrelated and use that as a springboard?
The pink and grey are rock. The pink is a chalky, salmon-germolene, the Old Red Sandstone, exposed. The silver is sparkly mica, like the pebbles from the Stockhom archipelago. We are North. The green is the close, coniferous darkness of small spiky leaves, among the bright yellow flowers. Chesnut and dogwood are glimpses of wood beneath the vegetation.
Old map of Lewisian basement, ancient geological landscape
Geology is at the back of everything. In The Stone Book Quartet Alan Garner said "The smith is at the back of everything" but geology is at the back of the smith. The fire wielder, mineral melter may have been the archetype of the magician, the person who could change earth into iron, smelting human power from the rock, but - there had to be the rock.
Ben Peach's section through the Moine thrust Belt at Kempie, Loch Eriboll
I should read that William Smith 'Strata' book.
From The Scenery of Scotland by Archibald Geikie, 1887
Early Tooth-striped moth © David Painter
I dropped from the sky onto this leaf
My balloon caught by its hairy upturned palm
I bounced, and stuck fast
And now I grow
You can see the rocks, the mountains and the tides in my body
The rivulets of ancient time, the compression and erosion of strata run through my wings.
I embody them.
My sulphur is extracted from the bitter juice of gorse. Fleeting - permanent.
This shale was soft. This schist hard. We eat everything and nothing. I have no mouth.
Splayed in a concave shell of ivy, I overwinter, endure. Hiding my saffron under its dark waxiness. Becoming the reverse. See through me.
Feel it turning slowly, the rock, the earth, the angle of the light.
Dust blown away - clouds, powder, scale. Smell the mineral in the opening of the flower
Exhale, escape.
Chevron © Ian Kimber
The particular habitat of the montane scrub
Common Heath moth Suil Ven © Katherine Pogson
Sutherland rock - colour story © Katherine Pogson