Suilven from Achmelvich

 

"Suilven from Achmelvich" - placemat photographed in Kinloch Rannoch, digital light-jet print, Aug 2021

Midwinter in the Black Wood of Rannoch

Images copyright Lesley Punton

Below, the rocks plunged into darkness

still from "a darkening" super 16mm digital film, 4'33"

Here's a link to my current exhibition at the studio pavilion at the house for an art lover.
https://www.houseforanartlover.co.uk/arts/exhibitions-projects/studio-pavilion-exhibiton

suilven

a great film of a great hill by James Anderson & Niall Walker (click to expand to full screen as a thumbnail doesn't do it any justice).

liath, dearg, dubh.

Pieces of grey, red and black granite found very close to each other by a stream that flows into Loch Ossian, from the slopes of Carn Dearg, whilst making an anti-clockwise walk of the loch in bad weather, March 2015

weight

A rock found in the abandoned lead mines at Strontian, containing intrusions of galena, July 2014. Strontiante was first discovered here in 1790 and it's from this mineral that the element Strontium was first isolated. Galena is sometimes known as "lead glance", and is an important source of silver.

flake

Quartz interspersed with sheets of flaking mica, found amongst the rubble of a dis-used steading in the Cairngorms,  Sept. 2014

a glossary of coloured hills

L Punton, archival inkjet print on fabriano, 29.7x42cm, 2015

A glossary of new word paintings gathering some mountains that refer to colour. Thanks to Alec Finlay for the suggestions and dialogue around how to best translate from the Gaelic.

pages from a book

mountains without end

My new book, "Lesley Punton - mountains without end" has come back from the printers. Here's a preview of a few spreads from the book. Sandie Macrae, Director of ROOM, and ROOMBOOKS - the gallery's publishing arm, has written the foreword. Thomas A Clark has written an essay on my practice entitled On Looking at Mountains, as has Dr David Watson in his piece Walking as Knowing, and Alec Finlay has contributed a poem Pataphysical Cuillin. Some of my own writings, fragments of which appear within this blog, are included in texts at the end that collectively come under the heading notebook.

ISBN 978-0-9549915-6-2

edition of 1000

64pp, full colour, soft-back, burst bound, lithographically printed, 246x189mm

Contributors (text) Thomas A Clark (UK), Dr David Watson (Australia), Alec Finlay (UK), Sandie Macrae (UK) & Lesley Punton (UK)

Published by ROOMBOOKS

Date : September 2013

£10 + p&p available directly from my website and at Aye Aye Books, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow.

my heart's in the highlands

with thanks to R.F.

the attraction of mountains - Schiehallion

plaque photographed at the foot of Schiehallion, L Punton, July 2013

two views of the same deer

back to the things themselves, part 2

Installation views of Back to the things themselves, Lesley Punton & Judy Spark, at the Briggait 20 April - 7 May, Glasgow International Festival, 2012

photo credits : L Punton

Revisiting An Caisteal part 2.

In November, I climbed An Caisteal, a hill I’ve been up many times, in order to make another summit photograph. Having realised that I’d often inadvertently made the same image upon reaching the cairn, I’ve subsequently decided to consciously record the various conditions of weather and light from this viewpoint whenever I revisited the mountain.

13.11.11

Having a small child, my hill-walking opportunities are fewer than they used to be and I hadn’t climbed a Munro for quite some time. Many of the feelings  I’ve often experienced during such walks consequently came flooding back.  The greatest sense was of freedom, and a relief to be away from cities, noise, distractions, and to be entirely at one with the effort of ascending the boggy, tussocky grass on the lower slopes which admittedly are always a bit of a trudge on this hill. The smell of the damp earth was strangely comforting. Slowly and carefully pacing myself, finding a rhythm in my step, walking becomes effortless. Thoughts hone into the here and now. I enjoy the silence. In fact, I need the silence. Work pressures dissipate. The land opens out to show something more enduring, more stoic.

Familiarity is a fine thing sometimes, for without the hindrance of a map (well, of the need to actually use it anyway), close knowledge of the mountain’s geography enabled me to persevere through the early trudge to reach the wonderful long ridge of Twistin’ Hill, the best part of the mountain. This takes you, eventually, to the rocky boulders and “castle” that gives a little scramble before the final cairn is reached soon after.

As seen in my previous post, I’ve climbed this hill in beautiful winter conditions many times. It’s not a difficult hill and is climbed usually in around 5 hours, up and down. Determined to make the most of a free day and to make a new photograph regardless of the weather, we found ourselves (Jim & me) however, climbing on a day with 80mph gusts of wind and with the summit engulfed in cloud. These were by far the most difficult conditions I’d been up on this hill in. Had I not had the desire to make an image from the top, I’d have been tempted to return once we reached a point where the wind on the narrows of the exposed summit ridge meant I had to crawl on hands and knees to be sure I wasn’t blown off in a sudden and unpredictable gust. Miraculously, the rock of the scrambling portions provided some shelter and allowed the “trickier” moves to be made in relative safety. The summit image was rushed. I was barely able to take my camera out and hold it still for long enough to make a sharp image. Jim attempted to shield me of the worst of the wind so I could steady myself. The damp of the cloud we were surrounded in meant visibility was reduced to only around 10 metres and the vista towards Loch Katrine completely absent. Point click, escape…

Nevertheless, despite the difficult conditions, the pleasure of being out in wide open space, of reaching the top with relative ease despite concerns about how hill-fit I might otherwise be, even of managing despite such difficult, and lets face it, unpleasant conditions, I was still so happy to be out on the hill, to be somewhere that I felt I belonged. It seems a cliché, but I felt that I was home, and that I was doing something so intrinsically core and central to my being that this return to An Caisteal nourished me in ways not many other things are capable of. The photograph is a disappointment, though somehow I don’t really mind.

the reverend removed

The Reverend Removed : after Raeburn, L Punton, Dec 2011

stob coire nan lochan

Stob Coire nan Lochan, Glencoe
Image from the SAIS Glencoe

A recent image from the Glencoe Scottish Avalanche Information Service blog showing snow conditions last week on the cliffs below Stob Coire nan Lochan. Springtime hits the mountains late here in Scotland.

fond remembrance of places

Thinking of Ravilious, I'm reminded of a trip I made to Barra to visit a close friend who was staying in the croft house that was owned by Ravilious' old friend, the designer and artist Peggy Angus. Ravilious didn't visit Barra as far as I'm aware, but made much work at Peggy's other house "Furlongs" on the South Downs.

Eric Ravilious - Furlongs

exterior of Furlongs

I think familiar, well loved places are of great importance to a great many artists, particularly those concerned with landscape, and it seems that Furlongs was one such place for Ravilious.

I'd never been to Barra before. We arrived at Peggy's house at twilight off the surprisingly long ferry journey from Oban, cycling along the single track road just being able to make out the house in the fading light, to find my friend in a magically evocative place lit by candles and the light from a log fire, cooking on a portable gas stove, and surrounded by years of accumulated objects of interest gathered by Peggy. It's a primitive space (Jim and I slept on an extremely smoky platform above the "kitchen" area), and not one for those looking for luxury (indeed, it's not much more luxurious than many a bothy) but it's spartan qualities are made up for with an abundance of character. The house is just as she left it before she died, and is still used by the family for holidays (my friend is close to the family). Unfortunately I didn't take any decent pictures of the house, but I do understand how places become closely linked with the creation of artworks, and have had similar experiences with places I've become intimately acquainted with over the years in Scotland.

There's a house in the West coast that, due to the generosity of an aunt and uncle, I was able to regularly visit throughout the 1990's and early 2000's, and where I made much of my first photographic work. In part, it's joys stemmed from a simple escape from the city. The place itself, with no road access - the easiest way to reach it was by rowing across the loch - a place where time and the pace of life seemed to slow down, where there was no TV, telephone, (and latterly, mobile reception) encouraged a reflectiveness that nourished my creativity. I visited usually around three times per year, most often bringing friends, but also sometimes visited alone. This was probably the only place  where I've gone a whole week without uttering a word to another human and experienced real solitude, bar hearing a voice on the radio.

L Punton, where deer sleep, silver gelatin print, 1996

Back in Barra, we climbed the island's highest hill, the relatively small Heaval, enjoying the view around the island down to Castlebay, a view presumably familiar to Peggy Angus and to those that would have
regularly come to visit.

view from the summit of Heaval, Barra

the hidden place II

Thanks to Peter Foolen for putting this piece of work by Tom Clark on his blog. A beautiful work citing the translations of many a Scottish place name from their roots in Gaelic, Pictish, Norse, English, French, Latin and Scots, revealing a physical, poetically descriptive and lived connectedness to landscape. As a hill walker, I've grown to know the original Gaelic names but, having only a smattering of Gaelic words in my vocabulary, was always struck by the starkly simple descriptiveness of a great many hill names in translation (Ben More = big hill, Beinn Dearg = red hill, Sgurr Mohr = big rocky hill, and so on) so this piece brings some poetry and lyricism back to my understanding of our map and reveals to me a new depth to the naming of my land.

Thomas A Clark : the hidden place II, 2010

wanderings around Scotland

Browsing in a bookshop yesterday, I noticed this collection of works by the amateur photographer Erskine Beveridge entitled wanderings around Scotland. In the 1960s, Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland surveyors discovered an incredible collection of over 750 glass plate negatives. Taken between 1880 and 1919, the photographs show Scotland on the brink of major social and economic change. There are images which document ways of life which are almost shocking in their technological primitiveness especially when one realises they have been made in the relatively recent, photographable past.


But what struck me most about these images was the clarity and detail of the images rendered, as they are, in even high key tones, and in some instances, the convincing contemporariness of the photographs. They reminded me of a Scottish cross between the images of the American Photographic Survey, and the New Topographics photographers from the 1970's.

Looking over to the observatory on the summit of Ben Nevis, 1883

Vallay House in North Uist in 1901 shortly after construction - Beveridge's summer house.

The lighthouse at Corran Narrows where the Corran ferry currently operates between nether Lochaber and Ardgour. This image could have been made today rather than in 1886 when it was, in fact, created.

Archaelogical excavations on North Uist, with Vallay House in the background, 1919.

...a donkey. 1884

An image made in less than ideal conditions ion the Isle of Eigg - especially when working with large, glass plate negatives. Image made end of September, 1883