Keith Salmon

Landscape as Painting and Sound

Keith Salmon is an artist who is passionate about painting and about the Scottish landscape. After studying Fine Art in the 1980s he later moved to Ayrshire from Wales and set up his studio on Irvine’s beautiful harbourside in 2003. Since then, he has established himself as a full-time professional artist and his semi-abstract landscape paintings have been exhibited widely throughout Scotland and the UK.

His work won the prestigious Jolomo Award for Scottish Landscape Painting in 2009 and has since taken him to Germany, Brazil and the USA.

Over the last 25 years Keith has also exhibited his work much closer to home, with work included in shows at the Harbour Arts Centre in Irvine, the Barony Centre in West Kilbride and the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock, as well as in a number of Ayrshire’s fine commercial galleries.

Keith’s studio is part of the Workshop and Studio Provision Scotland (WASPS) Courtyard Artists’ Studios, a small community of 17 artists and makers located on Harbour Street in Irvine. Here, you will find a wide range of quality arts being produced including paintings, drawings, prints, jewellery, ceramics, music and photography, as well as pieces made in leather and felt. There is something to interest most people and although these are working studios, visitors are always welcome.

WASPS is an organisation that was set up over 40 years ago to provide affordable workshop and studio space for professional artists and makers in Scotland. They now have over 800 studios situated in buildings across the country and the Courtyard has been running since 1994.

A keen outdoor enthusiast all his life, Keith’s work is now based almost entirely on the walks he does in the Scottish landscape. His paintings, done in either traditional oil colour on canvas, or in a mixture of acrylic paint and pastel on board, try to convey something of what it is like to be out in these wild and sometimes remote places. He and his wife, Nita, are experienced walkers and go out regularly in most conditions and at all times of the year. They often spend hours just wandering through the landscape, stopping regularly to allow Keith to do quick scribbled sketches, take photos or make sound recordings… or to simply just sit and look. At the end of the day, he returns to the studio and uses everything he has collected to help him create his finished works.

Keith is particularly interested in the hills and mountains and many of his works explore viewpoints that are well away from the roads and often high up on ridges and summits. He uses a fairly limited palette and mixes the paint to create pictures that try to recall the natural brightness of the highland landscape, without being garish in any way. The paint is put down using a wide variety of brushes, but these generally err towards the larger sizes. Indeed, one of his favourites and most used brushes is a very old 15cm-wide horsehair house painting brush owned by his late father that dates back to the mid-1960s. The traditional horsehair is very coarse compared with modern nylon brushes and it creates fabulous textural marks in the thick oil and acrylic paint. His finished paintings range in size and there is something to fit most houses and situations.

Keith, who is visually impaired, has spent many years adapting how he works resulting in the very distinctive and recognisable style of his paintings. In 2014, he also started exploring the idea of using sound to help him create and exhibit his landscapes. Together with professional Ayrshire sound engineers, Graham Byron and Drew Kirkland, he explored different ways of using and presenting sound as part of his two-dimensional work. In 2016 they spent almost a year collaborating on an audio-visual arts project with a Microsoft research team in Seattle. This culminated in a large artwork called ‘The Oregon Project’ and the finished piece was exhibited in Seattle as part of the 9e2 Art, Science & Technology Exhibition and then shown again in a slightly different configuration the following year at the Tent Gallery in Edinburgh.

Since then, Keith, Graham and Drew have been developing a less technology-based approach to the work and in the autumn of 2023 they held a large exhibition at the Scottish Maritime Museum in Irvine called, ‘Painting with Sound – Short Walks Along the West Coast of Scotland’. The exhibition included 17 large paintings that all had accompanying video soundscapes accessible via QR codes. These can now all be seen and heard on Keith’s website, along with many more of his paintings and drawings.
www.keithsalmon.org

Please scan the QR code below
to view the painting opposite
(High Tide. A Dreich December Afternoon Near Campbeltown)
with accompanying sound.