Tag: scotland

Iain Faulkner

Iain Faulkner, “Morning Coffee”, 2003, Oil on Canvas

Iain Faulkner was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1973 where he was raised and educated. As a child Faulkner was encouraged and guided by his father, an electrical engineer, for whom drawing was both job and pastime. Faulkner went on to Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1996 with a BA (Honours) Degree in Fine Art. Faulkner is, however, largely self-taught and from the start of his professional career chose to follow the difficult and demanding path of figurative painting.

Source: allotherthingsintheworld

Calendar: August 22

A Year: Day to Day Men: 22nd of August

Sunlight Through Lace

On this day, August 22, 565, Saint Columba is said to have encountered the Loch Ness Monster.

Saint Columba was an Irish abbot, missionary and scholar who helped spread Christianity in Scotland. He was also a statesman, a diplomat, an historical scholar, an author and a poet. Among Saint Columba’s many  accomplishments is the founding of multiple abbeys and monasteries — including the Abbey at Iona, which remained an important spiritual, academic, social and political institution for many centuries. He is highly regarded by both Scots and the Irish, regardless of their religious persuasion.

Saint Columba’s monstrous encounter is contained in the seventh-century book “The Life of Saint Columba”, written by his contemporary biographer Abbot Adamnan of the Abbey at Iona. This is the first recorded account of the Loch Ness Monster:

“While standing upon the bank of the River Ness which flows out of Loch Ness, in northern Scotland, Columba contemplated the best way to cross to the other side. As he considered the problem before him, he came across a group of heathenish Picts who were busy burying a friend who had been attacked by an enormous “water beast” while swimming in the river.

When Columba heard the story from the assembled mourners, he laid his staff across the dead man’s chest and, miraculously, the man stood up, hale and hearty. Against common sense, Columba ordered Brother Lugne Mocumin, one of his fellow monks, to swim across the loch and bring back a small boat which was moored on the opposite shore. Without hesitation, Lugne stripped off his tunic and immediately jumped into the water.

The monster, alerted by Lugne’s splashing around, surfaced and raced towards the hapless monk, eager for a bite. The monster roared a might roar, darting towards the swimming monk with its mouth wide open, as Lugne was in the middle of the stream. Everyone on the shore cried out hoping to warn the monk of his impending doom. However, Columba was unmoved. Instead, the saint stepped forward boldly to the edge of the loch and, making the sign of the cross while invoking the Name of the Lord, spoke in a commanding voice. ‘You will go no further!’ he demanded of the monster. ‘Do not touch the man! Leave at once!’

Even though the monster was no more than a spear’s length away from the swimming monk, at the sound of the saint’s words, it stopped and immediately fled the scene terrified. The monster quickly absconded to the depths of the loch behind him, allowing Brother Lugne to paddled the boat back unharmed. Everyone was astonished. If the heathens at the funeral weren’t sufficiently impressed with Columba bringing their friend back to life, they were thoroughly impressed with how the monster obeyed the saint.”

Edwin Morgan: “Clydegrad, Sonnets from Scotland”

Images from a Collection: Just…Muckin’ Aboot

“It was so fine we lingered there for hours.
The long broad streets shone strongly after rain.
Sunset blinded the tremble of the crane
we watched from, dazed the heliport-towers.
The mile-high buildings flashed, flushed, greyed, went dark,
greyed, flushed, flashed, chameleons under flak
of cloud and sun. The last far thunder-sack
ripped and spilled its grumble. Ziggurat-stark,
a power-house reflected in the lead
of the old twilight river leapt alive
lit up at every window, and a boat
of students rowed past, slid from black to red
into the blaze. But where will they arrive
with all, boat, city, earth, like them, afloat?”

—Edwin Morgan, Clydegrad, Sonnets from Scotland, 1984

Born in Glasgow’s West End in April of 1920, Scottish poet and translator  Edwin George Morgan was associated with the Scottish Renaissance, the modernist literary movement which incorporated folk influences and held a strong concern for Scotland’s declining languages.

Edwin Morgan entered the University of Glasgow in 1937, where he studied Russian and French. During World WAr II, his studies were interrupted by his service as a conscientious objector member of the Royal Army Medical Corps in Egypt, the Lebanon, and Palestine. Morgan continued his studies after the war and graduated in 1947 with a first class Honors degree in English Language and Literature. Upon graduating, he took an offer as a lecturer in the English Department of Glasgow University; he was appointed a full professor in 1975 and retired from the university in 1980.

Morgan first published his work in the High School of Glasgow Magazine in 1936 under the name ‘Kaa’, and continued that nom de plume for his published work in the Glasgow University Magazine. Working after the war as translator and reviewer, he reverted to his own name in works published in a variety of periodicals. Morgan’s first collection of poems entitled “The Vision of Cathkin Braes” and his translation of “Beowulf” were both published in 1952. For fifty years, he continued the dual task of publishing his own work and translating others’ work from Russian, French, Italian, and Old English.

Edwin Morgan’s “A Second Life”, published in 1968, contained subjects which ranged from the marginalized populations of Glasgow and the misery of the tenements to times of laughter in the city and the famous lives of personalities such as Edith Pilaf and Marilyn Monroe. “A Second Life” became the volume that established his importance and signaled a private change and a public achievement in his life. In 1963 Morgan met and had fallen in love with John Scott, to whom he remained attached until Scott’s death in 1978. Though a concealed love due to the laws at the time, this union and Morgan’s discovery of the Beat poets’ writings formed a new awakening for him.

Morgan’s wide reading habit, his love of the cinema, and his defined musical taste all contributed to his poetry. He was always inquisitive and interested in the changes to technology and science, the whole history of the earth, and the dynamism of invention. A master of the classic form of poetry, Morgan continued through his career to invent new verse forms from his first concrete poems in 1963, which relies for part of its effect on the visual impact in the arrangement of words and spaces on the page, to the new stanzaic forms in his 2002 “Cathures”, with its poems’ cadence set to music, both classical and jaxx.

Throughout his early career Edwin Morgan had kept his sexuality hidden as homosexuality was not decriminalized in Scotland until 1980. At the age of seventy, he revealed his sexuality in the 1990 work “Nothing Not Giving Messages”, a collection of talks, poems and interviews, in which was included an interview with the Scottish poet and novelist Christopher Whyte about Morgan’s life and orientation.

Edwin Morgan’s work has received a number of prestigious accolades and has assumed an increasingly public role. In 1999 he became Glasgow’s first official Poet Laureate and a year later received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In 2004, Morgan became Scotland’s first official national poet or ‘Scots Makar’, who is charged with ‘representing and promoting Scots poetry’.

In the years after his appointment to the Glasgow laureateship, Morgan was an active supporter of the repeal of Section 28, a law passed in 1988 that stopped councils and schools from “promoting the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. In many public appearances he criticized Church and business leaders for their support of the ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign. This endorsement of gay rights and inclusive attitudes to social and cultural difference characterized Morgan’s publicly liberal stance in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Edwin Morgan died in Glasgow on August 19, 2010.

Additional information on the life of Edwin Morgan, as well as a small collection of complete poems, can be found at the Scottish Poetry Library located at: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/edwin-morgan/

Hendrick’s Gin

Hendrick’s Gin Poster

Mr William Grant with his seven sons and two daughhters built their family distillery in Scotland. In 1860 the Bennet Still used by the distillery was made by coppersmiths in London. Although few of these Bennet Stills are produced, they yield a spirit that is robust and flavorful. The John Dore and Company manufactured a Carter-Head Still for Hendrick’s in 1948 with a vapor-driven flavor basket atop a long neck, yeilding a subtle and delicate spirit. This type of still is quite rare today; only a few are known to exist.

Hendrick’s Gin has a rather unusual website which includes videos on the distilling process as well as the story of Horatio, the distilling pig. Enjoy. The Hendrick’s Gin website is:  https://us.hendricksgin.com

Calendar: January 17

Year: Day to Day Men: January 17

A Sunny Day

The seventeenth of January in the year 1761 marks the birth date of Sir James Hall of Dunglass, 4th Baronet, who was a Scottish geologist and geophysicist. He was the first to use an analogue modeling synthesizer to investigate the formation of folds in the earth’s layers. Hall’s discoveries in this field were published in 1815.

Born at Dunglass Castle in East Lothian,  James Hall was the only son and heir of Sir John Hall, 3rd Baronet who had served on the Grand Jury for the 1748 Edinburgh trial of those involved in the 1745 Jacobite uprising. James Hall studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and the University of Edinburgh during the 1780s. At Edinburgh, he studied under Professor of Medicine and Chemistry Joseph Black and Regius Professor of Natural History John Walker, one of the main scientific consultants of his day.

From attending Walker’s courses, Hall learned how to use the chemical compositions of minerals to determine the relative age of the earth’s layers. Walker also emphasized in his classes the importance of chemistry to the study of geology. After his studies, Hall travelled Europe to seek book dealers who dealt in works on mineralogy, geology and chemistry. His travels to France brought him into contact with nobleman and chemist Antoine-Laurant de Lavoisier who wrote the first extensive list of elements. Lavoisier was also instrumental in the development of the metric system as well as the reformation of chemical nomenclature through a set of rules for the generation of systematic names. 

Upon his return to his home in Scotland, Sir James Hall continued his studies in the fields of chemistry and geology. During the 1780s and 1790s, he was interested in geologist James Hutton’s ‘Theory of the Earth” which suggested that the strata of the planet was continually being worn or melted down, thus making the planet a giant system of circulating material. Hall traveled with Hutton and professor John Playfair in the spring of 1788 on a boat trip to Siccar Point on Scotland’s Berwickshire coast. At Siccar Point, they discovered a rock formation that became known as Hutton’s Unconformity. This geological phenomenon marked the location where rock formations, created at different times and by different forces, joined together. Other locations in Scotland were later identified by Hutton. 

Initially skeptical of the chemical viability of Hutton’s theory, Hall soon published several papers on the chemical composition of the strata. He experimented on granite to prove that it was possible for molten rock to form a continuous sequence of deposits, typically in parallel layers. By melting basalt in an iron furnace, Hall demonstrated its return to the original form when cooled; his melted limestone proved that, melted under pressure, limestone did not decompose. These findings were published by Hall in the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s scientific journal “Transactions”. 

Sir John Hall traveled throughout Europe to examine the geological formations of Mount Etna and the Alps mountain range, both areas formed from the collision of the planet’s tectonic plates. He also studied the similarity of lava flows in Italy to geological sites in Scotland. Hall, in addition to his works in the field of science, was also the author of various works on architecture among which was his 1797 “Essay on the Origins and Principles of Gothic Architecture”. Sir John Hall, 4th Baronet, died at home in the central area of Edinburgh survived by a wife and six children. He is buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard in central Edinburgh. 

Doune Castle

Doune Castle, Stirling, Scotland

Doune Castle is a medieval stronghold near the village of Doune, in the Stirling district of central Scotland. The castle is sited on a wooded bend where the Ardoch Burn flows into the River Teith. It lies 8 miles (13 km) north-west of Stirling, where the Teith flows into the River Forth. Upstream, 8 miles (13 km) further north-west, the town of Callander lies at the edge of the Trossachs, on the fringe of the Scottish Highlands.

Recent research has shown that Doune Castle was originally built in the thirteenth century, then probably damaged in the Scotties Wars of Independence before being rebuilt in its present form in the late 14th century by Robert Stewart, Duke of Albany (c.1340–1420), the son of King Robert II of Scotland, and Regent of Scotland from 1388 until his death. Duke Robert’s stronghold has survived relatively unchanged and complete, and the whole castle was traditionally thought of as the result of a single period of construction at this time. The castle passed to the crown in 1425, when Albany’s son was executed, and was used as a royal hunting lodge and dower house

For the television series ‘Game of Thrones’, a variety of locations were used to create Winterfell as it appears on screen. For the pilot episode, Doune Castle in Scotland  was used for some exterior shots and the great feast held when King Robert Baratheon and his party arrive.

The Dunmore Pineapple

John Murray, The Pineapple Dome, Dunmore Park, Stirlingshire, Scotland

Dunmore Park, the ancestral home of the Earls of Dunmore, includes a large country mansion, Dunmore House, and grounds which contain two large walled gardens. These walled gardens, built with high stone or brick walls, sheltered the gardens from wind and frost, with the possibility of creating a microclimate in which the ambient temperature could be raised a few degrees above that of the surrounding landscape.

A building containing a hothouse was built into one of these walls in 1761 by John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore. The hothouse, which is located on the ground floor of this building, was used, among other things to grow pineapples. The hothouse was heated by a furnace system that circulated hot air through cavities in the wall construction of the building.

John Murray left Scotland after the initail building was built to become the last Colonial Governor of Virginia in America. Upon his return to Dunmore, he added the upper-floor pavilion or summerhouse with its pineapple-shaped cupola and the Palladian lower-floor portico to the building’s structure.

The pineapple is around 14 metres (46 ft) high and constitutes a stunning example of the stonemason’s craft, being a remarkably accurate depiction of a pineapple. Each of the curving stone leaves is separately drained to prevent frost damage, and the stiff serrated edges of the lowest and topmost leaves and the plum berry-like fruits are all cunningly graded so that water cannot accumulate anywhere, ensuring that frozen trapped water cannot damage the delicate stonework.

 

Mike McCormick

Mike McCormick, Candy Anatomy Series

The Candy Anatomy project by Scottish Mike McCormick, a medical student,  continues to learn the human anatomy with colorful candies. An amazing technique that works apparently, since Mike McCormick is now in second year, and continues to recreate his biology and anatomy diagrams with candy

New Year’s Eve

Scotland: Festival of Hogmanay, New Year’s Eve

Every December 31st in Scotland, there is held an annual festival “Festival of Hogmanay”. Almost all adult males become festival participants, and they were paraded through the main streets, holding torches. As a result, balls of fire fill the Scotland air throughout the new year’s eve. This Festival is a tradition from generation to generation since the days of the Vikings gained control of Scandinavia.

An example of a local Hogmanay custom is the fireball swinging that takes place in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, in northeast Scotland. This involves local people making up “balls” of chicken wire filled with old newspaper, sticks, rags, and other dry flammable material up to a diameter of 2 feet (0.61 m), each attached to about 3 feet (0.91 m) of wire, chain or nonflammable rope. As the Old Town House bell sounds to mark the new year, the balls are set alight and the swingers set off up the High Street from the Mercat Cross to the Cannon and back, swinging the burning balls around their heads as they go.

At the end of the ceremony, any fireballs that are still burning are cast into the harbour. Many people enjoy this display, and large crowds flock to see it, with 12,000 attending the 2007/2008 event. In recent years, additional attractions have been added to entertain the crowds as they wait for midnight, such as fire poi, a pipe band, street drumming and a firework display after the last fireball is cast into the sea. The festivities are now streamed live over the Internet.

Ernesto Neto

Fabric Sculptures by Ernesto Neto

Ernesto Neto began exhibiting in Scotland in 1988 and has had solo exhibitions abroad since 1995. He represented with Vik Muniz their country in 2001 Venice Biennale, his installations were featured in Brazil’s national pavilion and in the international group exhibition at the Arsenale.

Neto’s work has been described as “beyond abstract minimalism”. His installations are large, soft, biomorphic sculptures that fill an exhibition space that viewers can touch, poke, and walk on or through. They are made of white, stretchy material – amorphous forms stuffed with Styrofoam pellets or, on occasion, aromatic spices. In some installations, he has also used this material to create translucent scrims that transform the space’s walls and floor. His sculptures can be regarded as expression of traditional abstract form, but in their interaction with the viewer, they work on another level as well.

Andy Scott: The Maryhill Footbridge

Design for the Maryhill, Glasgow, Scotland Footbridge by Andy Scott

This £4.5M landmark footbridge will incorporate a major piece of public artwork from local artist/sculptor Andy Scott.  All aspects of the structural engineering have been undertaken by Glasgow based civil engineering firm, Halcrow.

The sculpture will appear to lift the bridge and support the central “hub” above the canal.  It has been calculated that to perform this function adequately the Bigman will have to stand around 30 metres tall from water level.  The sculpture will therefore become a very prominent and striking feature on the skyline, as well as performing the engineering role required of him.

We commissioned local artist Andy Scott to design a new bridge for Stockingfield Junction. The Bigman is a sculpted steel feature that will appear to lift the bridge up from the banks of the canal. Illuminated at night, the statue will be a striking landmark, embodying the spirit and resilience of Maryhill and the city.

The project has been developed in response to the recognised need for a crossing and improved environmental design around the Stockingfield Junction of the Forth & Clyde Canal.

Andy Goldsworthy

Sculptures by Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy, OBE, born in July of 1956, is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist producing site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. He lives and works in Scotland.

Photography plays a crucial role in Goldsworthy’s art due to its often ephemeral and transient state. According to Goldsworthy, “Each work grows, stays, decays – integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its heights, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit.”