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Color, Landscape, and Art in Scotland
Pure Colors
Born in Glasgow, Lynne Ramsay trained as a painter and photographer at Napier College in Edinburgh. As her films demonstrate and as she explained in our interview, she has a pronounced interest in "pure colors."
Her cinematic universe reflects the influences of both the international modernist and modern British styles of painting that she encountered. With their distinct art nouveau lines, elegant verticals, and integration of traditional craft elements into an orchestrated aesthetic design, the works of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (above) are the quintessential manifestations of the Glasgow Style. Ramsay was equally influenced by the shifting colors of Paul Klee and Howard Hodgkin (below). Like painters such as Arthur Melville (below), her movement towards abstraction is almost always grounded in quotidian detail.
The clip from Morvern Callar (2002), below, is emblematic in the transition from naturalistic spaces to bursts of strong color, geometric abstraction, and the haunting lines of lead actress Samantha Morton's face and eyes.
Religious Visions
In her youth, Ramsay went to see the above painting by Spanish painter Salvador Dalí at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum every day. She was particularly impressed by the mysterious shifts in scale, which is reinforced at the Kelvingrove by dramatic lighting and the painting's placement in a separate room to the side of the main passageways.
At the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, she would inevitably have encountered two visionary works made at almost precisely the same moment - Paul Gauguin's Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) (1888) and Vincent Van Gogh's Olive Trees (1889). Van Gogh, who originally planned to be a missionary, surely intended these gnarled, wind-whipped trees to evoke the ones in Gethsemane.
Ramsay's use of color and natural elements in films like Morvern Callar (2002) and You Were Never Really Here (2017) demonstrates a similarly rich attentiveness to visual textures and sacred metaphor.
Scottish Art and Terence Davies
Liverpudlian director Terence Davies spent a decade preparing his 2015 film adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's novel Sunset Song (1932). In our portrait film, he explains that the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi was an ideal reference point for his treatment of Northern light, objects, and domestic spaces.
He was equally passionate about the work of Scottish painter, stained glass artist, designer, and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. To find the right way of depicting the unique color of the Scottish landscape and of orchestrating his subtly transformative camera movements, he traveled to the major Scottish galleries as well as The Hill House (above) to see Mackintosh's work in situ.
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Terence Davies
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Darius Khondji
