I'm coming off of a profoundly rich summer - two months leading small group music tours in Scotland with my singer-songwriter partner and his company, Scotland Folk Tours. As I unpack, I'm sifting through the piles of drawings and mini-paintings I made as we traveled through the islands of the Outer Hebrides, where the water color changes with the light; and the Orkney Islands, where our dear guide, Murray, got up with us at 4am to drive out to the ancient Standing Stones circle so we could feel the rising sun try to poke through the drizzly morning to warm those sentinel rocks. Some of the vistas in the Scottish Highands and the Lake District were so majestic that they made me want to drink in their size, colors and textures like savoring a glass of whisky, rolling it around on my tongue and swallowing around the lump that kept forming in my throat. It felt so reassuring, all this beauty. Even while political America is mired in agonizing election turmoil, the purple heather still grows on these mountains, and the waterfalls rush down through the bogs into the lochs.
In each hotel, I immediately set up a little art space - a desk, a bedside table, or a window ledge - and in odd moments I reached for my minimal art supplies and tried to scratch my experience of the day onto the page. These little paintings became a sort of visual journal, a way of trying to process the wild landscapes of Scotland - a place where the light on the mountains changes so quickly that it's hard to capture a particular moment in a photograph. I take a lot of pictures, but the Scottish scenery feels more expansive than any photograph I can take, and so for me it needs a different medium.
In Shakespeare, the characters must break into soaring verse to express themselves, because the size of their emotions are too heightened for mere prose. I discovered Shakespeare in middle school, when the size of the feelings beating in my chest every day felt so giant that they matched the size of the poetry in Romeo and Juliet, which we were reading in English class. There, Shakespeare captured what life felt like to a thirteen year-old girl, not what life literally sounded like on the streets of London. My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.
I loved it immediately. And with paint, I find that can try to expand or contract what I see, try to expand and distill these places to their essence. By choosing bright colors, I'm trying to express not exactly what these places look like, but what they feel like when I close my eyes and see them on the underside of my eyelids before sleep.
Across the room from me, my partner Tim does the same thing with his guitar.
These little piles of paintings make me wonder: why is this my impulse at the end of every travel day? Why am I painting? Why is Tim writing songs? Why do any of us make art?
At its core, art is an attempt to capture a moment, and an attempt to find communion. The creation of a dance, the writing or acting of a play, putting pen or paintbrush to the page - these are all ways of saying: this is what the experience of living in this world feels like to me. And when we share our art with others, it's a way of asking, Do you recognize this humanity? Can you see what I see? Does it feel like this to you?
I believe that every human is a storyteller. People have been telling stories to each other since the dawn of time, scratching storyboards on cave walls, acting out adventures around the fire at night. Before books, these oral and visual experessions were the way to preserve our communal knowledge and honor our shared history.
Art was, and remains, an attempt to crystalize and share the beauty and the mystery, the wonder and the grief, of this fleeting human experience. These are my latest attempts.
I'd love to see yours, too.
The mini-paintings in my Highlands & Islands series will soon be added to my paintings page, and will also be available for purchase at some Tim Grimm concerts. Or, contact me here with inquiries, comments or requests.
Thanks for journeying with me.
Love,
Alissa
Comments