New JoLoMo exhibition on Scottish Lighthouses

It looks as if the surprise in the new exhibition at Oban’s Kranenburg Fine Art by acclaimed Scottish colourist, JoLoMo – aka John Lowrie Morrison – is, wait for it – a large (40 x 46) and dramatic black and white canvas of the legendary Bell Rock Light off Arbroath on the east coast.

JoLoMo, in whose work the waters of Scotland’s west coast and islands often feature, has obviously – and enviably – been taking to the water itself for this collection. Otherwise he would not have seen some of the remote lights his paintings portray – like the Bell Rock itself; like Dubh Artach, built on the Torran rocks, offshore to the south of the Ross of Mull; like the beautiful Skerryvore, 12 miles south of the Atlantic Isle of Tiree; and like Muckle Flugga, the most northerly headland in Scotland, on an island reef off the north of the Isle of Unst in Shetland.

Some are on inshore island headlands, from the Argyll islands like Lismore; Loch Indaal on Islay; then north to  Neist Point on Skye; and to Eilean Glas on Scalpay in Harris.

Some are on mainland headlands like Toward in Cowal;  Corran in Lochaber; and Rattray Head and Buchan Ness, respectively guarding the northern and southern approaches to Peterhead harbour on the east coast,  north of Aberdeen.

The paintings generally show the lights in the sort of conditions you need them for in the first place, some in nighttime storms. One – of Islay’s Loch Indaaal, is the sole one infused with tranquillity, in a sunset tonally hot but redolent of ease. Another, appropriately the inshore Corrran Light north in Loch Linnhe, is the only one to have the comfort of the almost realistic marron grasses around the base of the light and above the sand on the shore.

The great monochromatic canvas of the Bell Rock suits the history and the feel of the light – the Inaccessible Pinnacle of lighthouses -  the sweat and, literally, the blood spilled in the unrelenting physical challenge of its building.

In its surprising starkness, amidst the familiar blazing energy of Morrison’s colour work, it will be the main attraction of the exhibition.

The artist and the lighthouses are well matched, in the former’s instinctive understanding of the primal energy of the forces the lighthouses must withstand.

For some reason beyond understanding, though, the exhibition lashes together the paintings  of the lighthouses with still-life flower paintings.

If you like this sort of thing, they’re fine and they still carry something of the restless energies the artist senses in the world around him – but actually, Morrison’s spirit is never going to be containable in vases of flowers nor expressed through them.

So go for the lighthouses, see what the artist sees in them and think about the men who built them.

And note that this preview is being written on the day  – 30th September 2011 – that the UK government, based in metropolitan London, has decreed that the Clyde and Forth Coastguard Stations, which guard our coasts knowledgeably, will close; and on the day it is removing from service  the two Emergency Towing Vessels based in Stornoway and Kirkwall, which protect shipping in the dangerous northern approaches.