This is my first venture into using my paintings within a film format....read more
THE JOURNEY
Artists Notes
We have used a specific series of paintings strongly influenced by The Isle of Skye. Our response to this journey is initially evolvement, and then travelling through dark and confusing times of our lives with contrasting periods of joy and pain. Culminating in a tranquil and reflective state before drifting out of life. We have used the visual images and the music to heighten the sense of becoming absorbed within the sounds and the paintings.
Literary Revue by Aonghas Padraig Caimbeul Angus Peter Campbell
'I think there is wonderful vitality in this short film. Art at every level, especially in relation to the marvellous skies above Skye. ‘Pellucid’ was the word that came to me while I watched this short film. Diana Mackie’s paintings, Alan Cleobury-Jones’s music,and Anna Taylor's’s filming make this a Skye which I recognize, intimately. Saoilidh mi gu bheil beòthaileachd iongantach anns an fhiolm bheag seo. Ealain aig gach ìre, gu h-àraid mu mhìorbhail nan speuran os cionn an Eilein Sgitheanaich.
The Journey Amy Simmons,film critic
Through an inventive collaboration incorporating oil painting, music and digital techniques, Diana Mackie and Alan Cleobury-Jones have created a cinematic love letter to the dramatic coastal scenery, ever-shifting weather patterns and light conditions of the Scottish highlands. The Journey is composed of five main sections where a dynamic exchange between painter (Mackie) and musician (Cleobury-Jones) adds a profound dimension of time and space to the mood of land and seascape within each painting. With the added fusion of digital aesthetics, there is a sense of movement and total immersion into the core of the paintings, where we come up close to their elements and get a rare experience of a particular aspect of their nature. As a result, the viewer does not experience the work in isolation but as part of a narrative space that surrounds it. The opening and closing sections of The Journey, with the gradual thickening and thinning of the harmonies reflect this sense of stepping forward into and backward out of the works and reflects the extraordinary, teeming interior life of the brush-strokes. Jones’s richly structured musical score creates spatial and compositional ambiguities, visual beauty and emotional impact, while Mackie’s paintings are arranged in a manner that parallels his own innovations and aims to create a bridge between music and the visual arts. Certainly, the kinship between these two artists is a special example of the intellectual affinity of artists in search of new vehicles for expressing their inner emotions.
