A memorable stint, a few years syne, as Historic Environment Scotland’s first artist in residence in Stirling Castle changed my life. I found a painting language to bring the past to the present through my art and it was marvellous. My studio was vast and encircled by the Castle walls. I was in deep, feeling and experiencing the lives lived many hundreds of years ago.
Then I moved studio to an alms house built in 1637 for a lucky few ‘decayed brethren’ of the parish and I joined the decayed spirits to conjure up the Battles of Flodden and Bannockburn and paid tribute to ‘the best queen Scotland never had’ Marie de Guise, mother of Mary, Queen of Scots.
And here I am, painting once again in the Church of the Holy Rude, the only other, still functioning church in the British Isles beside Westminster Abbey which has witnessed a coronation.
And who was that? Why, James VI of Scotland and 1st of England, Mary Stewart’s son.