Catching the light

THIS IMAGE: John Lowrie Morrison, or ‘Jolomo’, in his studio

Writer and poet Kenneth Steven profiles Scotland’s most celebrated living landscape artist

John Lowrie Morrison (known affectionately as Jolomo) is very much one of Scotland’s best-loved painters. Imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery: you only have to visit any one of a host of galleries to see the number of Jolomo-like prints and originals by the many artists who’ve sought to copy his distinctive style.

Often enough there’s a white house low to the ground; banks of moody grey island hills behind, a wild blue sea somewhere in between, and in the foreground a vivid mustard yellow or orange.

John didn’t begin his days in the west of Scotland. Rather, he was brought up in Glasgow and went to Glasgow schools; in the late 60s he studied at the famous Glasgow School of Art. That’s one side of the story. And yet in a way he did begin his days on the west coast of Scotland: his Hebridean roots are strong and of deep significance. That Morrison surname should offer the clue, for he has relations in Skye and the Outer Isles – but more than that, much more than that – it was here he visited as a child, experiencing everything about the west and the islands that he’s gone on to pour into innumerable canvases.

There was art in his family: his maternal grandfather Henry Lowrie was a brilliant watercolourist as well as being a man of strong faith. Those two links to the past are pillars of equal importance in John’s life.

Somehow you might well imagine that he has been painting all the time, creating his oilscapes since those days at Glasgow School of Art, and doing so somewhere on the west coast. But that’s not the case.

John has earned his apprenticeship without a doubt. For 20 years he taught art at Lochgilphead High School, and by the end of that time he had become Principal Teacher of Art. But he experienced a very real call to painting and to preaching, and in the end he cut his links to the world of education once and for all in 1996. Now at last he was free to become a painter, to devote precious time to the business of creating, and to sharing his faith as a lay preacher.

John and his family live in Tayvallich, surely one of the most magical locations in the whole of the Scottish west. It’s an area I first visited with friends only a few years ago. I was writing an article on the early chapels of Argyll; these tiny places of worship established by the Celtic Christians.

I had been used to summers spent in corners of north Argyll where the hills are higher and more rugged. I find it hard to capture what’s at the heart of south Argyll in words because as much as anything it’s about a feeling. Low-lying oakwoods and lochans; edges of sea that curl their way inland, and magnificent headlands with gnarled granite or what might be the ruins of some ancient fort. The sudden glimpses of open sea with water caught between blue and green, even on the most miserable of days in late October and November. Edges of islands and great banks of cloud lying behind – or perhaps they’re all island or all cloud? What’s certain is that it’s changing the whole time; coming and going in the light, in the power of this translucent west coast light so beloved by photograhers and painters alike.

It was then I encountered Kilmartin Glen for the first time too, not many miles from Tayvallich. Its low-lying meadows are filled with standing stones and chambered cairns, and there on the edge of it all Dunadd fort, the birthplace and cradle of Scotland. Moments of light coming and going all the time; never two the same.

That’s what I think of at the heart of so much of John Lowrie Morrison’s work.

They’re moments of light; sudden vivid illuminations or epiphanies. And so often that light is falling on a crofthouse: I feel myself back in South Uist at the age of three or four and see a collie flowing through the wind, blown out in black and whiteness, and the hens finding little bits of sustenance around the croft door. It’s that wildness I love in these paintings. There’s an honesty about them I value and respect very deeply. Land and sea and sky are all being tugged about in the wind; you can feel the wind. That captures something at the very heart of crofting existence: the sheer struggle. Too many drive through Harris or Skye on a benign and beguiling August day when there isn’t so much as a breath of wind; the occupants of the car, the tourists, will comment disparagingly about all that’s cluttered around the croft door: nets, broken paint pots and spades. But those tourists know nothing of the winter that went before when there was a near constant gale. They weren’t there when it was impossible to take a step outside to get a handful of peats because of the sheer power of that buffetting wind. They can’t see the reality of the days and the true nature of the struggle. I remember one of the first of John’s paintings that I encountered years ago at the Argyll Hotel on Iona. I had started to lead creative writing retreats there and loved the North Lounge more than any other room. To me it felt akin to being in a boat: stretched along the room’s back wall was a long canvas depicting a section of the northwest coast of Mull, with its boulders and cliffs. Every time I looked at it I felt I was standing there, sensing the very place that must have inspired it. It was nothing less than a complete bottling of the west; a capturing of every element. John produces a great number of canvases (sometimes he’ll Even the individual colours that he chooses finish several in a single day), but there’s much more hard for his work have a symbolic and a religious work lying behind them. He digs into the places he paints, to use the verb that poet Seamus Heaney famously found to significance. For this capturing of light and describe his search for words. John has to dig into those places to have a sense somehow of the depth of the soil. He capturing of wildscape is very much linked sketches places and he photographs them, and he researches to the faith journey them too – reads up on them and learns them. Even the individual colours that he chooses for his work have a symbolic and a religious significance. For this capturing of light and capturing of wildscape is very much linked to the faith journey: it’s an inherent part of it. And there’s many a Sunday when John is in the pulpit as a lay preacher; a much-needed task here in this part of Argyll where communities are small and scattered, and where a bare handful of ministers must travel further and further to care for congregations. So in the end I think of him as a kind of crofter too, as much as Seamus Heaney was with his pen. He’s dug into the landscape of his forebears and found rich colours and vivid depictions of a world buried deep and strong in heart and soul, and he’s put it beautifully onto canvases. He’s managed to capture the light. S

LEFT:

Fading Light Tayvallich by Jolomo, oil on canvas