IN the centenary year of the first appearance in print of Hugh MacDiarmid, Scotland’s greatest 20th-century poet and political pioneer, Ruth Nicol and Sandy Moffat – two of Scotland’s finest contemporary artists – together with poet and professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University Alan Riach, are celebrating and exploring his work and life with Valda Trevlyn, his wife, in Brownsbank Cottage, Biggar, their home together from 1951 until their deaths in 1978 and 1989, respectively.

The Line Gallery, at 238 High Street, Linlithgow, is showing the exhibition “Landmarks: The Brownsbank Years” until Sunday, August 21, with Moffat, Nicol and Riach appear on Saturday at 2pm to talk about the exhibition and introduce some poems, including MacDiarmid’s only known Linlithgow poem!

Riach introduced one centrepiece of the exhibition, Moffat’s painting “Milne’s Bar”, a couple of weeks ago. Here he talks with Nicol about her landscape paintings – exterior and interior.

Alan Riach: Ruth, your paintings of the landscapes around the cottage where Chris Grieve and Valda lived vividly evoke the hills and forests, roads and horizons in all the seasons of the year, and your “interior landscapes”, depicting the rooms in which Valda and Chris made themselves comfortable, give us a sense of their partnership in domesticity.

The National: Ruth Nicol's Deep Winter at Brownsbank Cottage and Candy Burn FarmRuth Nicol's Deep Winter at Brownsbank Cottage and Candy Burn Farm

The wilderness surrounded them. The farmed fields and cultivated crops marked the turning seasons of the year. Inside the cottage, Chris’s pen and Valda’s temper kept in balance the worlds of public dispute and political confrontation, and a warmth of welcome and conversational continuity across decades. Could you tell us something about how your painting built up from the atmosphere you encountered when you visited the cottage? Were there presences?

Ruth Nicol: Were there presences? That’s a good question. The answer is yes, on several levels there were but not in the way that maybe you would expect. I have visited Brownsbank several times now and each time there have been

shifts and changes in the landscape and the condition of the cottage. The planted forest next to the cottage is a good example but simultaneously it lies next to the old Roman Road which remains as it always has been since Roman times, as if it were a path through time.

But I have only ever been an observer, not a participant in the goings-on at Brownsbank like you or Sandy and the Grieve family. I think not having recollections of Valda and Chris, being that one step removed, allowed me to see the details of their home, and that’s where the living-room landscapes germinated.

I hope that by capturing their individual paraphernalia I have in some way documented a kind of essence of who they were, but I really enjoyed myself and I hope that has come through in the finished work.

Alan: These are brightly colourful paintings and that sense of the sheer joy of living comes through, even in a small domestic interior. I don’t mean Valda and Chris were happy all the time or that there was an idyllic pastoral atmosphere. I remember them enjoying a good argument at times. But yes, that sense of an intense appreciation of things was there all right.

Ruth: Valda’s room is bright, airy, delicate and filled with family portraits, nods to Cornwall. She clearly had an eye for striking colour. Her attempts to bring comfort to the cottage can be seen in every room, from the crochet cushion to the curtains: nothing was wasted, everything was used.

Chris's room was much darker. I suspect his pipe tobacco played a part there. All in all, I got a feeling of being in the dark looking out in Chris’s room and being in the light and looking out on to the dark in Valda’s, I think I should leave it to others to interpret that analysis.

Alan: So you were depicting the rooms from various angles, perspectives, looking out the window, having the door open, so forth, and therefore, from inside, if we look through those windows, or go out that door, we’re into the countryside.

It’s always seemed to me that Brownsbank is surrounded by a benign landscape in some ways. Certainly, the farming family, the Tweedies, who invited them to live there rent-free when they arrived in 1951, were benign in their gift of a cottage at that time. They arrived in a hard winter, snow on the ground, frost on the windowpanes. How do you feel about the landscapes there?

I’ve said this before but it warrants saying again, maybe it’s not so much simply “landscapes” but the idea of “hauntedness”, places and perspectives, the solidity of earth and the sheer scale and space of the sky – the sense of possibility – what’s gone before and what might come after – I can feel that when I’m there, and that comes through in the paintings, I think.

Ruth: Ah now, Alan! Before the countryside and farmland there is Valda’s garden to appreciate, a working garden providing sustenance. Her grandchildren were sometimes told to collect cow pats from the adjacent fields as fertiliser.

That Valda and Chris managed to make a home of Brownsbank is unbelievable in today’s terms. When they arrived, the cottage would have been considered uninhabitable.

We’re right to take time and appreciate the ongoing generosity of the Tweedies and in a very small way I think our exhibition takes that further. As for the place itself, it is many things simultaneously. It’s on the top of a hill, exposed to the elements, but also it’s nestled in a crease of the land, its life is giving but treacherous to access.

It’s surrounded by normal farming land but something about it is simply extraordinary. Brownsbank is important to all of us and needs to be protected, maintained, preserved for future generations. Let’s make sure we do that.

Alan: And it’s not just the sense of a permanent terrain but landscapes changing through time, through the seasons, even from before Roman times, from prehistory, to where we are now …

Ruth: Using the seasons to express the passage of time is nothing new but it is effective and it resonates strongly with me. When I was very young, our family had a holiday cottage in Leadhills, which is close to Biggar. Two rooms, no hot water, heating and a chemical toilet my father had to empty for a family of eight.

Not much of a holiday in today’s terms but we loved it. Winters were brutal and on one occasion we had to return home to Glasgow as we couldn’t get the door open. Seeing how different the roads, traffic signs, lampposts, houses and smells of the village were to that of the city had a lasting impact on my eye for the landscape. Painting Brownsbank Cottage allowed me to revisit all of that and I will always be grateful for such an opportunity.

The Line Gallery, 238 High Street Linlithgow EH49 7ES, Tel: 01506 670268, wwwtheline.co.uk, is open Thursday to Saturday from 10am-5pm and on Sunday from 1pm-4pm

Proceeds from sales of paintings and books at the Line Gallery go to the Brownsbank Trust for the restoration of the cottage. Donations are welcome through the website www.macdiarmidsbrownsbank.org.uk/index.html

TO accompany Ruth Nicol’s landscape paintings, Alan Riach has written these two poems.

The Seasons

Winter

White winter, ice and snow all over

Everything, the road, though, still, to be discerned,

Traced, tracked, leading us out, welcoming

The visitors, air in the throat, in the lungs,

Cold, ragged, emitted in clouds from the singular

Personal breath, the aural world of frost crunch

Grass bent down in white weight, rustling, all things

Hardened and requiring the resistance of the body,

Its warmth, wrapped up in wool, with only the eyes

As sharp as what they see, what must be seen

And so, preserved, protected, or moved into, changed

Forever into something better. All this landscape

Is the winter mind, filled with the strength of the living,

Balanced on movement and residence, in this endless open air.

Spring and summer

Sowing time and farmers’ fields becoming

Seeded, timed in weeks and months, to turn green

Brown, the earth churned over, ploughed for

The harvest to come. And then long summer’s round,

High skies, dwarfing all beneath, balanced by the sheer investment

Such relations make between the human and the flowers and crops,

The trees and bushes, what’s protective, what’s productive,

What renews and what will pass away, as seasons turn.

The rows and rows of cultivation measured and exact,

The panes of glass in wooden frames creating space enclosed

For growing things. The growing mind and thought of what can be

Sheltered in this building, this small building, relational

And made secure, a kind of generosity from owners.

A kind of dedication, of maintenance and sustenance, from occupants.

Autumn

And round it comes, no other way but this,

To mark the circle, but what disturbance

Threatening the cycle of renewal, now

Comes in to make the breakage

Permanent? Who would not mark

The seasons as they help?

Who would not oppose

The villainy of natural destruction?

The images and words attest

The music in the air across

A long time tells us, yes,

There is no other way but just to learn

How to attune not only mind but actions, to

The turning earth, the necessary rigours we are part of.

Brownsbank domesticity

Two rooms: it was a partnership,

sustained by separation

and each the other’s company.

His, the wall above around the fireplace, portraits:

“A growing shrine to my vanity,” he said – but truly?

Did he ever look at them? Loveday, Coia, Kitaj?

The photographs? Or somewhere unacknowledged

was a gratitude for confirmation needed?

That writers need the readers they respect and write for,

Not a sea of critics they despise, nor a mob of ignorance

Made volatile and goaded into practice of reflexive denigration,

By those prevailing attitudes, which cannot comprehend

Whatever they arise from, or that which they seek to convey:

Fashion, commercialism, bestsellers and books of the week.

“The poet a Tarzan among apes, all

Suddenly, murderously, inimical.”

Time slows. Patience is more than required. Wait. And then see.

Pipes on the mantelpiece. A clock. A radio tuned to the news.

His papers, pens, his shelved collection of paperback crime,

The glass-fronted doors of the cabinet, with his own books, safely stored,

A whisky bottle on its top, and, beside his chair,

The stockpiled copies of the Morning Star.

Hers, Cornwall:

D.H. Lawrence, A.L. Rowse, fishing floats and packets,

Jars, of henna, Nescafé,

the TV in the corner by the windowsill

And telephone, brass decorative horse rings, hanging by the wall.

(He would not have any if the image of Churchill was on them.)

It’s like this now. It was like this then, when I was there.

An old man doing such domestic jobs

as washing dishes after every meal,

with firm attention, CMG, his knuckles,

fingers, gently, firmly bent around

the cutlery and crockery in soapy water,

then the drying, putting away,

for use next time,

the conservation of the effort needed.

His face intent, gaze down, giving it attention.

“Not the job accepted by most men

in that day’s patriarchal ethos.”

His shuffling walk, from sitting room

to kitchen and then back, to sit and

then to carefully,

resume the conversation,

whoever the company was.