Above: Moonlight Iona Beach

Another new artist I came across at the Francis Kyle gallery on my way to Postcard Teas late last week.

Ramsay Gibb (and the gallery site) has a couple of dozen oil on board paintings of some wild North Easterly landscapes called "The Pilgrim Coast". Wild, isolated and lonely, both mountains and beaches. Atmospheric landscapes that evoke the spiritual, as they have for centuries.

Gibb says at the Kyle Gallery page :

'I was struck by the impressions left on the wet sand by the feet of pilgrims following the staves marking the path out to the island. These prints were continually washed by the tide and obliterated, then re-established by the feet of new pilgrims. This cycle has repeated countless times for hundreds of years. I witnessed the traces of an act that could be dated to the arrival of St. Aidan in 635, the coming of Christianity to the Angles of Northumbria, the beginning of Northumbria’s golden age. These prints in the tidal mud connected me directly to the first footfall of the Christian mission to Lindisfarne. Whereas the last paintings explored the wider context of Pilgrimage, this collection returns to the origins of my inspiration, to the stories of one of the richest flowerings of early spirituality in these islands: the blossoming of Christianity that took place in the kingdom of Northumbria.'

A short film about his work.

This is the landscape of Lindisfarne, of St Cuthbert and Aidan, the Apostle of Northumbria.