Poetry and pictures become a stream of ideas and inspiration

Alexander Moffat’s painting Poets’ Pub, completed in 1980 and now in the National Galleries of Scotland collection, is a work of its time. It depicts an imaginary gathering of the poets Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown, Robert Garioch, Sorley MacLean, Edwin Morgan and Alan Bold and the art critic John Tonge, set in a hotch-potch of the writers’ favourite Edinburgh “howffs”.

Almost two generations later, it appears anachronistic. The women are on the periphery, sexualised and anonymous, although they are known to the artist. To be fair, the painting is a reflection of an earlier era, in the Sixties, when women did not go to pubs and most prominent poets were men. How times have changed. The painter Ruth Nicol is younger, contemporary, passionate about politics and culture, and how these may serve to better the nation. In a relatively short time she has changed her career in finance to become one of the country’s better known artists.

Nicol’s landscapes are juxtaposed with Moffat’s portraiture, punctuated by Alan Riach’s poems. Together they become a conversation, a stream of ideas, imagery, inspiration and energy. Nicol depicts the landscapes associated with the poets, so there are panoramas of Raasay, Orkney, Edinburgh, Assynt and the Borders.

One of Moffat’s paintings, Scotland’s Voices, is more recent. At its centre is the poet Hamish Henderson surrounded by characters such as the fiddler Aly Bain and the actor Dolina MacLennan. Riach, a professor of Scottish literature, is a specialist in the Scottish literary revival spearheaded by MacDiarmid in the 1920s but is a talented poet in his own right. A series of prose-poems and verse pay tribute to each of the poets. Riach’s poem Deirdre’s Farewell is a tribute to Iain Crichton Smith, who was born in Lewis. It might well stand as a eulogy to both the land and to the creative spirits it continues to nurture.

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