'Scuse me while I paint the sky': The musical collaboration inspired by Victoria Crowe's cloud art
Having painted the Pentlands and Venice, Victoria Crowe was surprised when she was drawn to clouds. Now her paintings have inspired a music and film collaboration, writes Susan Mansfield
When leading Scottish artist Victoria Crowe was offered the chance to go and paint on Orkney in 2022, she hadn’t given much thought to skies. “I always thought of the sky as a background to landscape,” she says. “I thought, ‘What am I doing here? I can’t paint clouds!’”
But the big skies of the Northern Isles beckoned her into a new challenge as a painter. The result was an extraordinary body of work quite unlike her much-loved paintings of the Pentland Hills, of snow fields, firey light on winter trees or cityscapes of Venice, where she kept a studio for two decades. Here was land, sea and sky, especially sky. The word she comes back to is “elemental”, the title she gave to the exhibition staged at the RSA on her return.
Crowe continued to explore material from Orkney over the next two years. She painted, worked with Dovecot Studios to turn a series of small night sky paintings into 6’x8’ tufted rugs, and created stone lithographs at Edinburgh Printmakers. And a chance meeting with Orkney-based composer Gemma McGregor in 2024 was the beginning of an innovative music and film collaboration.
The live premiere of Orkney Sequence, composed by McGregor and performed by Hebrides Ensemble, alongside a film of Crowe’s painting by Kenneth Gray, will take place at Dalkeith Palace on 20 September. The collaboration promises to draw the audience into a sustained engagement both with the music and the paintings.
Crowe says: “When people look at paintings, each work gets about 35 seconds – if that! Orkney was such a profound experience beyond a simple snapshot of place, I wanted to extend the painted work into something that expanded time. Gemma has written the most fabulous piece of music. When I first heard the recording by Hebrides Ensemble along with the film, I was blown away, it was everything I hoped it would be.”
Crowe’s paintings have been shown with music previously, but this is the first time she has worked collaboratively, step by step, with a composer. In 2017, tenor Matthew Rose performed Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise against a film of elements drawn from her winter paintings at Snape Maltings and later Wigmore Hall. “It took me, as a painter, into a different space, seeing the work at scale. It was a fabulous experience,” she says.
Then, in 2019, Scottish composer Thea Musgrave wrote a Trumpet Concerto inspired by Crowe’s work after visiting an exhibition at the Scottish Gallery, which was performed by trumpeter Alison Balsom at the Hollywood Bowl in 2021 with projections of the paintings as a backdrop.
McGregor has written opera, choral and chamber music and created a wide range of interdisciplinary work, collaborating with sculptors, writers, dancers and filmmakers. Her opera, The Story of Magnus Erlendsson, premiered at the St Magnus Festival in 2017. She received mentoring from Peter Maxwell Davies when she was an undergraduate composition student in Aberdeen. His music and his descriptions of his home in Orkney fascinated her and influenced her to move to the islands where she has now lived for 27 years.
Crowe says she had heard and enjoyed McGregor’s music before their chance meeting and they hit it off right away. “I had become fascinated by Orkney skies, and the first time we met, Gemma said to me, ‘I recognise those skies, they were the skies under which St Magnus went to school’ so straight away I knew we were on the same page.”
McGregor adds: “The place where Vicky had her residency, at Birsay, has been a special place for me. I’ve written so much about St Magnus, and from there you can see the Brough of Birsay, the island where he went to school. It’s a place very much rooted in my work.”
The collaboration began with open conversation and continued as McGregor and Crowe exchanged recordings of musical motifs and excerpts of film. Crowe says: “We didn’t want to complete the film first and have the music illustrate the paintings, but also didn’t want the paintings to illustrate the music. We talked a lot about the feeling of the piece.”
McGregor says: “Some of my music is brooding, but it has a sense of lift when material transforms into brighter chords and registers expand. My sound world seemed a natural fit for these images of sky and sea, thresholds of light and darkness.”
As each talks about their work, there is overlap in the way they describe their practices, talking about layers, tones, textures and colour. McGregor says: “Music is quite hard to describe so colour is really useful. I use the names of colours to describe emotions. I write them on the score – ‘prussian blue’, ‘golden’, ‘shimmer’. It helps me to get into the emotion I’m trying to portray.”
Crowe says. “Music can capture an atmosphere in a different way to painting. I feel Orkney Sequence brings out those experiences I had in Orkney. The paintings are consolidations of lots of ideas, but this is much more fluid so you can really look at the layers that make up the paintings.”
Crowe’s time on Orkney was funded by the RSA’s Residencies for Scotland programme, in partnership with the Pier Arts Centre. She spent seven weeks on the islands, which she chose to split between the summer and winter solstices. “I had read about the white nights of the northern summer and really wanted to experience that because, in the twilight, landscape is in a liminal state, it’s incredibly powerful.”
The qualities of liminality were everything she hoped for. “One of the interesting things about Orkney is that you can get lost there. You have no reference points. It felt very much like that with some of those skies. It’s like a threshold. I loved that aspect of it. During the summer solstice, in the light of the midnight dawn, it’s not a real landscape in many ways, it’s a mystical thing. You are observing time passing, which has long been a theme in my work.”
For a second exhibition, Touching the Surface, at the Pier Arts Centre in 2024, she reflected further on her Orkney experiences, alongside the poetry of George Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir, both of whom were deeply rooted in the landscapes of Orkney. This connection to poetry helped her move the paintings away from depictions of sea and sky into a more liminal space of imagination and memory.
And her tendency to ignore clouds blossomed into a deep fascination. Jeff Clark, who runs a weather station at Rackwick on Hoy, introduced her to the work of the Cloud Appreciation Society, whose worldwide membership share pictures and descriptions of clouds online.
“The descriptions of the clouds are like concrete poetry, I got ridiculously hung up on that! Some clouds are brighter at midnight, some are 50 miles high, some are only five. Some rush, some move slowly. There are lenticular clouds, crepuscular rays. It was a whole new experience, another dimension.”
She smiles. “Sometimes I feel I have to apologise for all the clouds!”
Orkney Sequence will be performed by Hebrides Ensemble on 20 September at Dalkeith Palace, 4:30pm, the event includes a conversation between Victoria Crowe and Gemma McGregor and a glass of bubbly. Tickets £15 from www.dalkeithcountrypark.co.uk/event/orkney-sequence The work will be presented with recorded music and an illustrated talk at Cowdray Hall, Aberdeen, on 23 October as part of the Sound Festival. https://sound-scotland.co.uk/. The book Victoria Crowe: The Orkney Works is available from the RSA on the Mound, Edinburgh.
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