FOR many people the farthest tip of Scotland is somewhere to be ticked off on a list and never revisited.
There’s precious little to recommend about John O’Groat’s, that shabby collection of buildings whose main claim to fame is that it is as far as you can get from the opposite corner of Britain at Land’s End, equally shabby.
But for Wirral artist Steve des Landes, Scotland’s far north east in Caithness is God’s playground. Windswept it may be, but beautiful too and an inspiration behind many of the 23 paintings on display at the View Two gallery in Mathew Street in Liverpool, his first exhibition for more than 10 years.
At one level the show marks his return to painting after a decade or so concentrating on sculpture and public art, but it is also a tribute to a close friend, Howard Smith, who set up his home in the hamlet of Harpsdale.
Howard was a Liverpool man who had made his home in the remote countryside of Caithness in the mid-1990s.
“For the last 14 years I’d been going up to see him every year,” Steve recalls.
“Howard had 16 goats, and he had been looking for a cheap piece of land where he could rear them. He wasn’t interested in milk, he wasn’t interested in making cheese, or breeding them, he just kept them for the love of them.”
It was while staying at Harpsdale that Steve had gradually started painting again.
After graduating from the then Preston Polytechnic in the 1980s, he had been a regular exhibitor across the north west and in London.
But after a one-man show at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool in 1997 he drifted away from the gallery scene, and this year’s exhibition at View Two is his first since then.
“I had started getting a lot of public commissions, doing a lot of community-based projects and moving into sculpture,” he explains.
But by 2006 he was back into painting. A commission for a large-scale mural had required nearly nine weeks of full-time painting, and gradually he realised that this was the direction in which he wanted to move again.
“I thought right, this is it, I really must get back into painting.”
The series of paintings on show in Mathew Street stem from a summer spent in Harpsdale last year, exploring both the sweeping landscape and Howard Smith and his goats.
“There’s something about Howard and his goats in the field that I absolutely loved, and I wanted to try and recreate that atmosphere, and Howard’s love for those goats.”
Howard died in January this year, aged 64, and the exhibition has been dedicated to his memory.
It won’t be the end of the affair with Caithness, though. “I’ll still go up there every year,” says Steve.
“It’s a magical place.”
The exhibition had been due to close at the end of this week, but the feedback from visitors has been strong, a number of paintings have been sold and gallery owner Ken Martin has now extended the show until March 6.
