Back of Beyond is a collection of paintings garnered from various locations in the last year. One reason for the title is it refers to somewhere yet nowhere. It has the same ambiguity as ‘in the middle of nowhere’. It’s impossible to be in the middle of somewhere that doesn’t exist yet we have an instant resonance with the phrase. These are paintings done with a dual intent: painted at a specific time and a specific place but specifically timeless and universal. The gravestone and it’s shadow; the tree and the wind that bends it.

So they are paintings about the Beyond and the back of it. The Beyond bit included silhouetted churches cresting the low slung hills of Lewis: the distilled silence of the Eastfjords in the North of Iceland: Advent celebrated at the cemetery of Hrisey: the extremities of Mangersta and Cul Mhor: the old graveyard with sun licked trees and crumbling headstones near Kilmorack.

At the back of all these locations lies the interesting bit. I like travelling through cities on a train, you often get to see the dishevelled back of properties rather than the well maintained front. Backstage is where the real show takes place. This applies to us too. We are all probably more honest within the walls of our own home than when we present to the world at large.

At the cemetery near Kilmorack, one headstone recorded the deaths of five children from one family. ‘Asleep in Jesus’ the distraught parents had engraved at the base. On a flawless Spring day in 2025 the sense of death as a long sleep lingered in the air. As daffodil trumpets caught the sun, I had a conviction that a cemetery was a waiting place, not a terminal.

On Hrisey, near midnight, a luminous green hovered in the sky, full of promise. The silence was broken by the strains of Silent night: it was Advent, and the island folk sung carols in defiance of the dark vastness above them.

Carloway church on the island of Lewis stood haloed on the horizon, straddling the line between a blazing gold sundown and dark tangible earth. For some reason the words ‘Choose life’ came to mind: the film Trainspotting used the phrase as a mantra but it was Moses who came up with it first.

In 1968, the astronaut William Anders took an iconic photo of the earth, one which altered not just the way we see the planet but also the way we see ourselves. It was a new view of the earth, as though someone had wandered round the back of our world and revealed a hidden truth, a vision I echoed in ‘the painting ‘Earthrise, Eyjafjordur’.

The author George Macdonald, a pioneering figure in modern fantasy literature, wrote a book called ‘At the back of the North wind’, a story that flits between two worlds. Back of Beyond draws from the same well, though in a less specific manner. The paintings merge sensory perception with the imperceptible: they are hints of a hinterland, postscripts from the back of the backwoods, out-takes from the outback.

Allan MacDonald