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| Richard Demarco, Artist and Citizen of Europe |
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A statement from Dr Donald Smith, Director of The Scottish Storytelling Centre, in Edinburgh’s
Netherbow Friday 23rd August
2013
Dear Richard,
It was a great pleasure to speak with you this
morning, and to hear about your forthcoming European award as ‘Citizen of the
Year’ in Europe as well as your address in Dundee to printmakers from around
the world. I am delighted that you are happy to be featured in my forthcoming
book about Scotland- ‘Freedom and Faith’, but even gladder that you would be
willing to see an exhibition of your ‘Meikle Seggie’ drawings and hopefully a
reprint of your book next year, perhaps connected with our European
collaboration ‘Seeing Stories’ (which links landscape narrative in northern
Germany, Tuscany, the Lisbon region and southern Scotland). But really as part
of a wider European moment for Scotland- if not a Scottish moment for Europe in
2014! It was in this context that I raised Meikle Seggie with Stefania del
Bravo at the Italian Cultural Institute.
While I have just as it were ‘rediscovered’ your own
‘Road to Meikle Seggie’ you have continued to travel on it, and as is sometimes
the way with longer journeys, the true significance is only coming to light.
That sense of an underlying cultural ground, expressed in our environment and
how humans have related to them over thousands of years, is now acknowledged as
vital to our creative future, if not our survival. On ‘The Road’ you expressed
verbally and visually the way artists can be inspired and inspire through such
grounding, and the way in which modern divisions between sacred and secular,
art and craft, artist and people, are overcome by such connection and
catholicity- wholeness. It is a gratuitous bonus for me, as someone whose
artistic work has always been grounded in Edinburgh’s Old Town, that the Road
begins here while leading to everywhere! The Road also snakes through all our
cultural legacies- Roman, Celtic, Medieval, Enlightenment, Victorian and
Modern- showing how they cumulatively nourish an outward looking Europe in the contemporary globalising
situation.
I look forward to a wider conversation on these
things, but in the meantime here are my thoughts on the Scottish significance
of The Road, for present and future, as represented at the culmination of my
new book (out in October) ‘Freedom and Faith’:
Richard Demarco has been a transformational thinker
and doer in Scottish culture for over fifty years. He was instrumental in
connecting Scotland with a burgeoning international arts scene in the nineteen
sixties, but in the seventies his innovative impetus took a fresh more
reflective turn. He embarked on a series of journeys which were undertaken with
groups of artists and activists, and were in themselves a form of creative happenings
or explorations. ‘The Road to Meikle Seggie’ began in Edinburgh’s Old Town,
moving into its rural environs, into a wider Scotland, and then ranging across
Europe. Meikle Seggie was a remote farm steading on the western flank of the
Ochil Hills, which was almost impossible to find and easily missed when one
arrived. It was in a sense nowhere and everywhere.
Travelling ‘The Road to Meikle Seggie’ was about
reconnecting the contemporary arts with the environment and with the culture
layered through it which was already the product of generations of human life.
But Richard Demarco was also seeking to reshape ‘the arts’ in a wider
non-metropolitan crucible. ‘My instinct tells me to make drawings and paintings
of the Road to Meikle Seggie,’ he writes, and the drawings made on these
journeys are a remarkable legacy in their own right. But walking, seeing and
drawing also inspired a significant commentary, as Demarco came to feel that
these often ancient routes were simultaneously mythic and ordinary.
I can draw or paint the tangible and observable markers,
tracks and trails they leave behind them when they travel in harmony with
nature, so my drawings are about what I see in the real world all around me.
They are about the magic in all things we recognise as normal. They are not
about the paranormal. They are about ordinary roads, and the ordinary things we
see on roads- stone walls, farm gates,
hedges, telegraph poles, signposts, wayside shrines, trees, grasses, plants, flowers
and weeds and how the road moves forward incorporating all of these ‘normal’
things together with the ‘normal’ movements of animals and birds, and the wind
and the weather they encounter and the movements of clouds and rain storms and
shafts of sunlight. They are about ordinary houses and farm buildings, and in
the villages and towns they are about paving stones and street corners,
drainpipes, gutters, chimney pots, windows, doors, washing hanging out to dry,
balconies and all forms of useful street furniture. The road does not concentrate
on castles, palaces and cathedrals, or grand and historic buildings. It is
governed more by small apparently insignificant details and hidden forces, by
underground ‘blind’ springs and the ever-changing movements of shorelines,
rivers, and of moonrises and sunsets.
For Richard Demarco the great truth of the myths is
that what is exotic and far distant comes to be recognised as what is near at
hand, close to home. The marvellous is also the immediate. ‘We have failed to
learn the truth,’ he comments, ‘in all the fairy tales we learned on our
mother’s laps, that no fairy tale object or event is more exotic or more
improbable than the stuff and substance of our everyday lives.’
‘The Road to Meikle Seggie’ reopens our eyes to the
enchantment of the world and to ‘the mystery infused in all things’. The Road
is Scottish and universal but passionately grounded in love of the particular.
Here Demarco articulates a rooted creative response to the growing
environmental crisis, which led to his notable partnership with the German
artist, Joseph Beuys. A culture disconnected from the sources of life can only
be deathly. That insight for Demarco was social and psychological as much as
environmental. During this same period he was working inside The Special Unit
at Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow with long term inmates. This brought the art
educator’s vision into direct contact with the urban poverty of industrialised
Scotland, and some of its bleakest human outcomes. A prisoner’s perspective on
that creative partnership is set out in Jimmy Boyle’s ‘A Sense of Freedom’.
Richard Demarco set out an agenda in the seventies for
Scottish culture which is visionary and down to earth. He is also pointing to
the remaking of religion as the spiritual dynamic of culture. Together they
animate a sense of life in all its dimensions that can be creative, connected
and sustainable. The artist in every person is a daily expression of the
divine. But that artist is also the teacher, the labourer, the child at play,
the traveller, the technologist, the philosopher, and the gardener.
The road leads to a space which reassures the human spirit of
its spiritual destiny. It is the space I would like to offer anyone who valued
or sought freedom. It is the space I should like to give all those who live and
work in prisons where physical journeys are unthinkable.
