Artist help trees to live on after they die
THE work of an artist capturing likenesses of great elm and chestnut trees as they slowly succumb to the ravages of disease and time is set to go on show close to the spot in Ross-shire where they have stood for hundreds of years.
Australian artist Ian Westacott has spent the last two years chronicling the trees of the Cromarty Estate, sketching in the tradition of Rembrandt and Turner.
Credited with providing "an extraordinary evocation of a vanishing treescape", Mr Westacott’s work will come under the spotlight of a new exhibition at The Stables in Cromarty starting next Friday.
A succession of Cromarty’s eighteenth-century lairds spent fortunes remodelling the estate with ambitious plantings.
A planting list of 1756 prepared by John Urquhart of Cromarty’s surveyor and gardener, James May, lists 136,363 trees. His plan of 1753 shows the Gallow’s Hill above the castle with a spiral ride to the top with twelve radiating avenues offering views of the surrounding county towns and mansions in Moray, Nairn and Easter Ross.
At the end of the century the 1794 Statistical Account of Scotland describes how his successor George Ross, who had replaced the castle with a classical mansion, expended considerable sums on "beautifying and enlarging the pleasure-grounds around the house and hill of Cromarty.
The latter is covered with firs and forest trees of all kinds, and beautifully interspersed with delightful walks; the grandeur of the prospect from many parts of this hill or south Sutor, is beyond description and constitutes, upon the whole, the most beautiful variety of land and water that is to be met with in Britain."
The last vestiges of these plantings still survive in the form of majestic elms and gnarled chestnut trees. But after a forty year delay, Dutch elm disease, which romped across southern England in the 1970s has found its way across the Cairngorms and is now wreaking havoc across one of the last redoubts of elms in mainland Britain.
Ian Westacott is fascinated by the twisted, gnarled and misshapen forms of ancient elms and sweet chestnuts. His large etchings capture the majestic character of individual specimen trees of the Cromarty Estate, where he has been working over the last two years. Elms and sweet chestnuts are particular features of the woodlands there.
Sitting outside, come wind or rain, he uses careful observation and meticulous craftsmanship, drawing direct onto large copper plates, to create the initial images. Back in his studio, near Dornoch, he works further, refining and adding to the images and choosing papers and inks to produce a limited edition of original prints.
The exhibition at the Stables in Cromarty will display the images close to where the trees are growing. Alongside the exhibition, the Cromarty Arts Trust is publishing a guide so that visitors or local residents can explore the woods around Cromarty and seek out the trees that Westacott has chosen to portray.
John Nightingale, the current laird of Cromarty, who commissioned Ian to undertake this project, said: "At times, it has felt as though Ian was working in a race against time. The elms are dying from Dutch elm disease, and with trees that are hundreds of years old, gales are a regular threat.
Ian is a master of the art of etching in the tradition of Rembrandt and Turner and his work provides an extraordinary evocation of a vanishing treescape."
The exhibition will run at the Stables, Cromarty from July 27 to August 5, from 10am to 5pm daily and 10am to noon on Sunday, August 5.
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Entry is free.
Some of the prints will subsequently be on show at Brown’s Gallery in Tain.
