Here the tangible has become completely lost and diffused by the elements - the atmosphere has completely broken the landscape down. I’m interested in how the solid landscape becomes something indefinable, something unexplained, something mysterious and not understandable. I like the suggestion within the painting that things are ever shifting and moving and cannot be pinned down. I want there to be a tension between the paint and how it suggests atmosphere, how paint can suggest something that is meant to be solid but isn’t.    

During the summer of 2017 and January 2018 Margaret Uttley and David Knight began producing a body of drawings and paintings at Gallan Head, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, the most north westerly point of the UK. These drawings and paintings, produced on location, formed the basis of a major joint exhibition ‘Edge of Sight’, held during the summer 2018 at the Arts Centre an Lanntair, Stornoway. This was one year before Maragret and David moved to the Isle of Lewis to live and work full time, and set up their studio at Cliff, just a short drive away from Gallan Head.   

"We were already familiar with Gallan Head from previous visits to the Isle of Lewis and both of us particularly liked the gritty, mysterious, remoteness of the landscape, which dramatically towered out towards the Atlantic Ocean. This piece of land, previously owned by the MOD and used for surveillance during the ‘cold war’ period, has a wonderful eerie sense of abandonment, where nature has, inevitably, and rightly, claimed the landscape back. (Perhaps those neglected, collapsing, MOD buildings also suggested a familiar element of industrial abandonment, perhaps they were also echoing and connecting with those empty abandoned textiles buildings and mills dotted around the West Riding of Yorkshire moorland, these are symbols of abandonment extremely familiar to both of us).  

The empty buildings, almost comically futile in the way they hug the landscape, including large blocks of concrete used to anchor an enormous satellite dish, now left almost rolling around the landscape, act as evidence of human activity, but now completely exposed, weathered and corroded by the extremely harsh weather conditions. It was this human/nature juxtaposition that particularly interested us, how the wind, rain, the elements had inevitably taken over and constantly reshaping and reforming the landscape. "

Whilst the work produced at Gallan Head formed the initial ideas for the ‘Edge of Sight’ exhibition at an Lanntair in 2018, the idea of all-encompassing nature constantly forming and changing the landscape has remained an underlying theme with the work of both David and Margaret since living and working full time on the Isle of Lewis. 

Initial drawn marks observed from the landscape are used as a structure for the paint to run and flow across just as rain and water does as it erodes the landscape. The water-soluble graphite used to produce the initial drawing softens and melts as it reacts with the wet paint suggesting the process of erosion and how the solid ground is carved out by water. There is a sense in the painting the sky is invading the landscape implying a natural synergy between land and sky. When standing within the Gallan Head landscape there is a powerful sense the landscape is being thrust up into the sky and the sea. Within the painting I’m suggesting how the tangible landscape becomes broken down by the more ephemeral elements.

"We were already familiar with Gallan Head from previous visits to the Isle of Lewis and both of us particularly liked the gritty, mysterious, remoteness of the landscape, which dramatically towered out towards the Atlantic Ocean. This piece of land, previously owned by the MOD and used for surveillance during the ‘cold war’ period, has a wonderful eerie sense of abandonment, where nature has, inevitably, and rightly, claimed the landscape back. (Perhaps those neglected, collapsing, MOD buildings also suggested a familiar element of industrial abandonment, perhaps they were also echoing and connecting with those empty abandoned textiles buildings and mills dotted around the West Riding of Yorkshire moorland, these are symbols of abandonment extremely familiar to both of us).  

The empty buildings, almost comically futile in the way they hug the landscape, including large blocks of concrete used to anchor an enormous satellite dish, now left almost rolling around the landscape, act as evidence of human activity, but now completely exposed, weathered and corroded by the extremely harsh weather conditions. It was this human/nature juxtaposition that particularly interested us, how the wind, rain, the elements had inevitably taken over and constantly reshaping and reforming the landscape. "

Whilst the work produced at Gallan Head formed the initial ideas for the ‘Edge of Sight’ exhibition at an Lanntair in 2018, the idea of all-encompassing nature constantly forming and changing the landscape has remained an underlying theme with the work of both David and Margaret since living and working full time on the Isle of Lewis. 

‘Coastal Echoes’ has many interconnected layers. Within the assembled collaged structure there are glimpses of light, colour, edges, surfaces and spaces; this forms a dynamic movement, and tension, between the richly textured surfaces and the spatial structures. A coastal landscape in flux, never static, always changing.

I find the landscape a very sonorous entity, for me sound is always evident both within the landscape, and within painting. Musical analogies are a good way to describe both painting, and the landscape as music is beautifully unfettered and completely abstract, yet real and powerfully emotional. For me music/sound has always played an import role in both painting and walking in the landscape. And music was there before my paintings.

During the summer 2023 my father died. One of his favourite albums was Meddle by Pink Floyd. I remember him buying it when it came out in 1971 from Bradley’s Records, Halifax, I would have been ten years old. I also remember playing it a lot myself, particularly ‘Echoes’, an epic soundscape with vast, wonderfully implied open dynamic and mysterious spaces. I was particularly intrigued with how music could describe the landscape (echo) in purely emotional terms.

I asked my mother if I could have Dad’s copy of ‘Meddle’, but unfortunately we couldn’t find it, I thought it would have been a great memory of him. I did think of buying a new copy from HMV but somehow a new remastered version wasn’t going to be the same. Recently I mentioned this to a friend Andy (Laffan). Amazingly Andy said I have two original copies and very kindly gave one to me!

‘Coastal Echoes’ is both a response to the Isle of Lewis coastal landscape and ‘Echoes’ the epic Pink Floyd track that helped me all those years ago begin seeing, and describing, the landscape in a different, more abstract, more emotional way.   

I am more than delighted to give Andy ‘Coastal Echoes’ as a thank you for reuniting me with an original (like Dad’s) ‘Meddle’. 

David Knight 2025.