BURNS' MUSEUM, AYRSHIRE - 21st January, 2011.

On Friday, January 21st the National Trust for Scotland opened the magnificent new, official Robert Burns Museum.  There was a party to celebrate, to which I feel very privileged to have been invited, especially since I am not a Scot, I just live here.

The museum itself is a brand new, very expensive and a very innovative building with many 'green' features, light, heating and the most spectacular to me, several sweeping, slightly upturned roofs, all coated with sedum.  When it is in bloom it will be marvellous!  Inside there are various kinds of Burns memorabilia, and of course a shop to sell books, mugs, T-shirts etc.

But the thing that took my attention, then drew me back again and again, and finally absorbed my thoughts and emotions and created a turmoil of ideas and desire to create, was an exhibition of paintings by an Ayrshire artist named Peter Howson.

There was a whole room given to the paintings, all of which were large, some at least life size.  The lighting was extremely clever and it felt also temperature controlled.

At first I found the paintings overwhelming, almost ugly in their rawness.  Nothing was 'pretty'.  They were all portraits of Burns himself in powerful, almost crude-seeming lines and dark colours.  The bonny-looking young man you see in most pictures of him was nowhere at all.  This was a man of passion and nightmare, a man who drank too much, was haunted by demons, who dared alone to climb the heights and plumb the darkest places of the soul.  This was a man who might be terrified, but was never a coward.  His eyes may well have seen hell but had not looked away, had seen destruction, but with pity never disgust, who had not flinched from life nor ever stuck to the safe paths.

Is genius always lonely?  Perhaps it is.  If you walk a known path you may be clever, have honed your craft, but you will not be great because you go only where people have already marked the way for you.  Genius lights a new way, therefore there must be risks, there will be mistakes, pain, and unquestioningly there will be loneliness.

What a gift I have been given in seeing these paintings!  It will enrich me for as long as I allow it to.  They are a gateway to new paths, new insight, new adventures of the mind and the spirit, a chance to learn and to create from a particular darkness where I would not have gone before.

I would love to see what this same artist would make of other turbulent geniuses such as Beethoven, Van Gogh, Isaac Newton, one could think of scores.

He makes me want to paint in words more powerful than I have before, to have the courage to dare to follow wherever my dreams would take me and achieve something new.

Thank you to the world of creators, preservers, those who dare and those who cherish and those who light a path for others to explore.

How blessed we are to live in ages after so many others have bequeathed us their souls in great work, whatever its form.

http://www.burnsmuseum.org.uk/

Anne