Marion Boddy-Evans is a contemporary landscape painter on the Isle of Skye. She moved to Skye in 2008, thriving on the tranquility amidst visual drama.

Marion’s latest body of work is focused on the mountains and seacliffs of Skye, building on her previous work whilst simultaneously heading in a striking new direction. It considers the essential timelessness of the island whilst still capturing the fleeting atmospheric nature of an island.
The paintings are developed from on-location observations, drawings and sketches, and memory, with repeat visits to a spot to explore it in different seasons and light. The aim is not to copy nature but to explore the intensity of a location, to convey a sense of its essence, power, and age.

The paintings on canvas pull strongly from the traditions of watercolour by retaining white and using transparent colour, with distinctive use of negative space and texture enhancing sense of the transitory nature of the environment. The viewer is left to intuit some of the painting, making it unique to their eyes.

Using acrylic inks adds a strong element of serendipity to the creation, it works or it doesn’t, no easy second chances, which is again more akin to watercolour than acrylic painting. Having to keep moving forward before the ink dries, without losing the white of the canvas, adds an urgency and energy to the paintings. And, unless it’s absolutely flat, the ink continues to move until it’s dry.

This new body of work is a striking contrast to Marion’s many-layered paintings where the entire canvas is built up with small bits of colour that meld together in the viewer’s eye to create the subject, sense of location. Yet it contains many echoes, in the sense of movement, the different rewards of close-up and distant viewing. The mountains of Skye are a constant backdrop to everyday life, and echo the mountainous valley Marion spent so much of childhood in, complete with rocky streams, clear mountain pools and waterfalls.