Luke McTaggart

Light Takes The Tree

“Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?”

Theodore Roethke, excerpt from ‘The Waking’, 1953

Morwick has given me a sense of place, perhaps knowing that neolithic man inhabited this
corner of the world informs my sense that it has it’s own life, a past. Some paintings here
depict other places, Warkworth dunes, a housing estate, other edge lands, but the work is
ultimately most informed by insights that come from time spent at Morwick.

These paintings were all completed in my studio, working from a mix of drawings,
photographs and memory. I don’t work on paintings consistently, but instead in bursts and
pauses. Inspiration only matters at the outset, it is a fleeting feeling that is quickly
exhausted in the early stages of the painting. I sustain myself between these bursts and
pauses by returning back to the landscape and walking there.

If I have tried to do anything in this exhibition, it has been to produce a group of paintings
that hold feeling. If my work is ‘about’ anything, it is this. An effort to recapture fleeting
moments from the landscape and hold them in time. The complexities and possibilities of
the painting process combined with this simple intent give rise to the work you see on the
walls.