Ramsay Gibb

Cast like a loose net across the British Isles, connecting a variety of isolated locations, many of them islands or coastal promontories, are a series of routes which share a common purpose: these were once the pilgrim trails followed over some five centuries by travellers to our holy places. A tireless, purposeful walker, and a painter focused always on the ‘archaeology’ of landscape, the history which lies beneath, the Scottish painter Ramsay Gibb has for some three years been walking the pilgrim roads across some of this country’s most unchanged landscape from Lindisfarne in Northumberland to St Cwyfans in Anglesey, Iona and St Andrews in Scotland and Skellig Michael and Croagh Patrick in Ireland’s far west.

‘Iona’, Gibb reflects, ‘is a liminal or ‘thin’ place: the journey there is interrupted by a crossing, a disconnection with one land to enter another. To arrive there is to leave the realm of the everyday for a place of spirituality’. For Gibb these journeys, or pilgrimages, taking him ‘per ager’ (across the land), have been as much about the journey as the goal. Traditionally, pilgrims may have undertaken their journeys as a penance for a perceived misdeed, either self-imposed, or required by the Church. There may also have been a therapeutic intention, to be activated by contact at journey’s end with a miraculous relic associated with a saint. But for the early traveller the sense of wonder, of entering a new and enlightening area of experience, would have started far sooner, closer to the outset of his journey, for a pilgrimage may well have given him his only opportunity (short of natural calamity or the disruptions of war) to liberate himself briefly from his familiar, narrow environment.

Taking their lead from the deprivations suffered by the ‘desert fathers’, some of Europe’s early monks established themselves in self-imposed exile in ferocious environments which remain as challenging today as they ever were. On Skellig Michael, a precipitous rock off the west Irish coast, Gibb climbed treacherous slate steps to crouch in the monks’ stone beehive cells perched several hundred feet over a turbulent sea. Visiting Bardsey Island in Wales (a journey considered so arduous that the pilgrimage there carried the same weight in indulgences as three pilgrimages to Rome), for the final stage Gibb had to wait for fair weather for the crossing by small craft. To reach the hill-fort and oratory on the summit of Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s holiest mountain, the pilgrim must negotiate screes of loose rock. Going on from Patrick’s Causeway, Gibb travelled to Caher Island, where he saw carved stones endowed with magical properties, evidence of far earlier pre-Christian practices.

In deep thrall as ever to the potential of water in his subjects, (perhaps a throwback to his beginnings as a virtuoso landscape watercolourist), Gibb has spent much time in Hebridian waters. Following St Brendan’s route from Skye to the outer islands, he has found subjects on Raasay, Vallay, Uist and Pabbay, an area dense with associations with early hermit saints who there lived out lives of asceticism (‘white martyrdom’).

Tracing a link between the Irish background and his native Scottish roots, Gibb travelled to Bass Rock, whose first inhabitant may have been the Irish missionary Baldred. From there he went on to St Andrews, among the holiest places in the medieval world, drawing pilgrims from throughout Europe. The only location considered to rival St Andrews was Canterbury itself, which Gibb chose to approach on All Hallows’ Eve along its oldest pathway, the ‘quintessence of the pilgrim experience’, enriched by the imagination of Geoffrey Chaucer. Making further demands on his imagination, Gibb set out to pin down in Bedfordshire the path taken by Christian in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, battling past Doubting Castle to find the Delectable Mountains in the form of the Chilterns, still associated today with a quest for recreation and spiritual renewal.

As a painter with a marked preference for subjects from the northern world, Ramsay Gibb has spoken of his fondness for landscape ‘without surface noise’, where there is no abundance of visual incident to distract the eye from absorbing a vast horizon and it seems specially fitting that on these pilgrim trails he has been able to satisfy his strong sense of the infinite beyond the given locality. Where better than on a pilgrim trail to savour the redemptive dimension of landscape, brought powerfully into focus by the artist’s skills in handling a low northern light, often coming from directly ahead, silhouetting his subjects in a dramatic contre-jour as if emanating from a welcoming beacon?

‘That man is little to be envied whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona’

Dr Samuel Johnson

‘Don’t lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away every illness. I walk myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. If one just keeps walking everything will be alright’. 
Søren Kierkegaard

‘Alle, as seith Seynt Paul, be thei riche, be thei poore, be thei wise other fooles, be thei kynges other queens, alle thei ben pilgrimes’

from PILGRIMAGE OF THE LYFE OF MANHOOD

‘the point of travelling is not
to arrive, but to return home
laden with pollen you shall work up
into the honey the mind feeds on.’

from SOMEWHERE by RS Thomas

Biography

RAMSAY GIBB was born in Irvine, Ayrshire in 1965, spending his early years on the coast near Troon. Later his family moved to Lancashire, where he studied first at Bolton and then at the University of Brighton. From 1985 he based himself on the Sussex coast, finding subjects in the landscape encompassed by the rivers Adur, Ouse and Cuckmere. In 1998 he moved to East Anglia, drawn to the rivers, coastline and woodlands of Norfolk and Suffolk, with a sympathy for the region’s archaeology manifest in surviving traces of early occupation and agricultural activity. In recent years Gibb has become increasingly interested in exploring his Scottish roots, favouring subjects on the West Coast, with a particular predilection for the islands, along with a growing fascination for the North, the seas once dominated by the Vikings.

 Since 1994 Ramsay Gibb has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery, participating first in the Jazz exhibition (1995), a project for which he travelled to the Mississippi Delta to interpret in watercolour a sequence of classic settings, urban as well as rural. Subsequently, he was a major participant in the Gallery’s exhibition devoted to woodland: Per una selva oscura - artists take to the forest (1995). From 1995 onwards he has worked mainly in oils, contributing to many of the Gallery’s theme exhibitions, including The Saxon Shore: a portrait of East Anglia in the perspective of history (1997), Everyone Sang: a view of Siegfried Sassoon and his world (2006) and That gong-tormented sea: contemporary painters pursue the idea and reality of Byzantium (2009). Since 2003 Gibb has been developing his approach to landscape in Britain as well as exploring aspects of the northern seas with working visits to the Outer Hebrides, the Shetland Islands, the Faroes, the Lofoten Islands, Finland and the Barents Sea.Seven one-person exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery since 1998, including Waterscapes (2004) and In the Northern Seas (2006).

Please click here to view Ramsay Gibb's other subjects.

Please click here to view Country Life feature by Mary Miers (October 2011)

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