O Caledonia!
In the last of his series, Scotland’s great landscape painter, James Morrison,
pays tribute to the lonely beauty of the north-western Highlands.
O Caledonia! Stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood;
Land of the mountain and the flood
A
lthough Sir Walter Scott never saw insignificant in its silence. When I paint up here in
this remote north-western corner the plain air, I’m often pummelled by sudden rain
of Scotland, he certainly captured squalls and buffeted by sharp, cold gusts of wind and
its untamed grandeur in this stanza those natural forces make their own marks upon the
from his most famous poem, The Lay of the canvas, adding qualities that no amount of work in a
Last Minstrel. This landscape is for me the most studio can ever capture.
moving, the most mystical, the most magical part Some people will no doubt look at this work and
of Scotland. I love its sublime solitude, the almost shudder at what might seem to be a bleak infinity of
overwhelming sense of being alone and utterly bog, but this is to me the very essence of Scotland.
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