Beschreibung
380 x 565mm (image 279 x 407mm). Edition limited to 40, numbered and signed by the artist, and dated 2002. One of a series of seven prints commissioned from Scottish printmakers by the Cromarty Arts Trust, in co-operation with art.tm in Inverness (formerly the Highland Printmakers' Workshop, now the Highland Print Studio), to celebrate the bicentenary of Hugh Miller (1802-1856), the Cromarty stonemason who became one of the great writers of the Scottish nineteenth century. A fisherman clings to the edge of his boat in a high sea; two black birds hover overhead, two empty bottles loll in the wash. Miller tells the story of Stine Bheag in Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland (1835). Tarbat Ness is a peninsula at the mouth of the Dornoch Firth. There lived "an elderly woman, still known to tradition as Stine Bheag o' Tarbat, [and] famous at this time as one in league with Satan, and much consulted by seafaring men when windbound in any of the neighbouring ports. And her history, as related by her neighbours, formed, like the histories of all the other witches of Scotland, a strange medley of the very terrible and the very ludicrous . . .[Once,] a small sloop had been weather-bound for a few days in a neighbouring port; and the master applied to Stine for a wind. Part of his cargo consisted of foreign spirits; and on taking leave of the witch he brought with him two empty bottles, which he promised to fill, and send to her by the ship-boy. It was evening, however, before he reached the vessel; the boy would not venture on carrying the bottles by night to the witch's cottage; and on the following morning they were forgotten in the hurry of sailing. The wind blew directly off the land . . . it freshened as the land receded . . . until as the evening was darkening it had increased into a hurricane. The master stood by the helm, and in casting an anxious glance at the binnacle, to ascertain his course, his eye caught the two bottles of Stine Bheag. 'Ah, witch!' he muttered, 'I must get rid of thee;' and taking up one of the bottles he raised his arm to throw it over the side, when he was interrupted by a hoarse croaking above-head, and on looking up saw two ravens hovering round the vane. The bottle was replaced. An immense wave came rolling behind in the wake of the vessel; it neared; it struck the stern, and, rushing over the deck, washed everything before it, spars, coops, cordage; but only the bottles were carried overboard. In the moment they rose to the surface the ravens darted upon them like seagulls on a shoal of coal-fish; and the master, as the vessel swept along, could see them bearing the bottles away . . ." Judith MacLachlan (1940-) lives in Waternish on Skye, where she moved in the 1960s and ran Three Camuslusta, a gallery only approachable from the beach. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 1eB10021f
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