Winter Solstice: Stac An Armin Painting

This painting attempts to depict the drama of a winter solstice at the islands of the St Kilda archipelago, fifty miles west of the Scottish Outer Hebrides. As the remotest set of isles in Europe and in seas at this time of year which are generally mountainous, the painting is in essence a fiction. To photograph this viewer position and point of time being practically impossible. The principle subject of the painting is Stac An Armin, the tallest sea stac in the British Isles and it throws a deep shadow which alludes to its symbolic character as a kind of gnomen of the Atlantic. To achieve this conceit I used reference material combined with open source software courtesy of NASA to calculate the probable position of the sun at the winter solstice in relation to Boreray. Exhibited at Corke Gallery. This original artwork was used for the jacket design of my second collection of poems 'Come, Thule' published by The Artel Press in 2015.