A large sycamore tree stands directly within the sight lines of the dining room windows of Colstoun House, the 900-year-old pink hued mansion house on the outskirts of Haddington in East Lothian, fifteen miles from Edinburgh. As a focal point of the immediate landscape surrounding the oldest family home in Scotland and still the domain of the Broun clan, the tree has proved an inspiration for the artists who have passed through the residency programme started up in 2022 by Colstoun Arts. This is the initiative set up by Mackie Sinclair-Parry, the former business strategy consultant and art collector nephew of the current laird.
“They all paint that tree,” Sinclair-Parry says, pointing through the window following a tour of Colstoun’s art collection. “It doesn't matter who it is. That's the starting point. I might as well dig that tree up and take it to London. It's funny how we’ve got hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of trees in Colstoun, but they all pick that one.”
The tree’s presence speaks too of the residency scheme’s focus on landscape-based art in its broadest sense, which has been embraced by the first eight artists to have passed through it in a variety of forms. After a decade of collecting work by the YBA generation of one time enfant terribles, with Gavin Turk a particular favourite, Sinclair-Parry’s drive to reinvigorate landscape based art has seen him come home to roost and get back to his roots.
“When I started collecting, I didn't really know what I wanted or what I was doing,” he says. “As a result, I just collected names. The one that I've really resonated is Gavin Turk, because he's almost an art teacher. He extracts a single point from a well-known artist and then turns that into a conversation in itself. Someone said about his art that he makes art after art, and that kind of formed the basis of what I wanted to do. I wanted to know what came next.
“I got to a point where I was like, well, this is wonderful having these sculptures and paintings that I do have, but now I want to know what happens next. And I kind of wanted to start informing what happened in my area that I love, which is landscape. But I didn't really know that I loved landscape when I was younger. I studied history of art at school, and that meant looking at Caravaggio and some modern art, like Cezanne and Picasso, but nothing really contemporary.”
Having grown up around a collection that includes works dating back several centuries, this goes some way to explaining Sinclair-Parry’s attraction to Turk and co. With the residencies he is aiming to provide something that is more holistic than simply being about purely financial transactions.
“I want to have a personal connection with my art,” he says. “That's probably another reason why the residency is so important, because these people become part of our life. I mean, there's this kind of cruel irony about the residency setup in that the artists come and live with us for four to eight weeks, and it takes me about three weeks to understand them and their practice on a deep level. Worst-case scenario, I get a week to provide some real, tangible feedback for them. Best-case scenario, I get five weeks, and then I get this terrible sense of loss because they're gone.But then there's this beautiful connection when they come back.”
To this end, since beginning the residency series in 2022 with London based painter Joe Grieve, Colstoun Arts has hosted an array of international artists. These include German artist Raffael Bader, Bloomberg New Contemporaries selected James Dearlove, and figurative painter and member of the landscape based collective The Arborealists, Lara Cobden. Other resident artists at Colstoun are dreamscape painter Suhaylah Hamid, Glasgow based artist Marina Renee Cemmick, Canadian/American painter AngéliqueNagovskaya and American artist Jen Hitchings. With such an array of disparate talents in the house at different times, each artist took a radically different approach to landscape painting.
Following a tellingly titled inaugural exhibition by Grieve called The Other Side, Sinclair-Parry began working with gallerist Jack Trodd of London’s BWG Gallery, and who now co-directs the Colstoun Arts programme.
Summer 2024 saw Colstoun Arts’ first group show, Resident 1, which provided a showcase for all eight former residents in what is planned to be a rolling programme of exhibitions. Sinclair-Parry also has plans to invite more high profile artists into the fold to work on passion projects, as well as making short films of the artists that will create a living archive of Colstoun Arts’ activities.
While the residencies are the heart of Colstoun Arts, they are also the means to a much bigger end. This will not only put Colstoun House on the artistic map, but as the collection of new works grows, may well end up creating a brand new institution.
“The long term goal is to build this landscape collection to the point where we can create a museum,” Sinclair-Parry says. “That's really what I want to do. I'm not precious or particular about the museum being here in the house, but I want to be able to have a substantial enough collection of landscape paintings of a high enough qualityto form the basis of a museum collection that is dedicated to landscape and nature.
“It's going to be a hard drive from us to continually increase the quality of work that's coming from the output of the artists that are experiencing Colstoun, to the point where we're bursting with high quality landscape paintings, and we can just go into the world and give something back.
“I've been fortunate to see some absolutely outrageous collections of art around the world featuring really talented artists, but which are private, and it's kind of sad. With Colstoun, I want to be able to present the world with pieces of art that have been created here, and engage people with that.”
Like the sycamore tree facing it, the artistic activity initiated at Colstoun House looks set to grow and change with every season.
Scottish Art News, January 2025
ends
Comments