3rd July - 8th August

Salvesen Prizewinner Eòghann MacColl exhibited recent work in PPG for his first exhibition in East Lothian in mid 2009. His sublime work is embedded within a long tradition of landscape painting, drawing and assemblage inspired by the land.


Arrival and departure points feature strongly in the work, and allude to Eòghann’s sharp awareness of Scots history and the survival of smaller cultures within larger, more dominant ones.


Eòghann is one of Scotland’s most prolific young painters and has shot to critical acclaim in recent years having been shortlisted for the Sovereign Art Prize in 2008 and the Aspect Prize in 2007, in addition to receiving the massive accolade of winning the Alistair Salvesen Scholarship in 2005.


This exhibition contained work inspired by his travels as well as spontaneous live paintings.


All art is a collaboration of sorts. For every stream of new knowledge there are hundreds of tiny tributaries that fee the flow. In Eoghann MacColl’s case the collaboration with his late Great Grandfather Alexander Thom stretches across not just four generations of his family but back 120 generations to the ancient ancestors who built the Neolithic standing stones.


On a moonlit night in August 1933, Alexander Thom stepped off the yacht Hadassah, and climbed ashore to the Calanais Stones on the Isle of Lewis. This moment led to him recognising the lunar and solar significance of the layout of the great Neolithic site.


Thom, a Professor of Engineering at Oxford, began a project that lasted some 50 years, mapping the stones of Scotland, Wales, England, Brittany and Ireland, leading to the development of the new, and at times controversial, field of archeo-astronomy.


Eoghann studied Painting at Dundee; today he works in a barn on the Ayrshire farm that belonged to his Great Grandfather and is restoring the original farmhouse as a family home.


His paintings and drawings are landscapes that incorporate topographical information, maps and charts, and the loosest impressions of moonlight, highland rain and the rich textures of stone and soil. Elements of the assemblages in this exhibition were found on his Great Grandfather’s farm, providing a tangible, physical shared link.


They are invariably pictures of distance: distance between lands, between ancient and modern ways of seeing the world and about time: archaeological time, astronomical time, time spent in the studio and in the field.


Many of these works were developed after Eoghann’s Salvesen Scholarship travels where he visited the destinations of Gaelic speakers throughout the world.