The Journey – A Scottish Tale of Poetry in Five Landscapes
As a landscape artist, I have always wanted to appeal to the viewer’s imagination in finding a place to go in their visual exploration around the canvas. This need was heightened by viewing a friend’s video on the occasion of my art exhibition.
He focused on one of my landscape paintings and went to the point where the frame was obliterated and the sense was, we had entered the painting.
The sense of being within this painting was so intense I knew I had to explore the concept further. On discussion with my musician husband, he became totally caught up in the musical interpretation of the five paintings and the story they tell.
We both feel the images depict a story of evolvement. ‘The Journey’ seemed an appropriate title for the traveller to make their own emotional journey through the landscapes depicting images influenced by the Isle of Skye.
Read Amy Simmons review of The Journey Below.
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.
(Film Critic – Amy Simmons)