Moray Firth 1905

Editor: So, this is David Young Cameron’s "Moray Firth," an etching from 1905. I'm really drawn to how quiet and still it feels, like a moment suspended in time. It’s beautiful but muted and almost melancholic. What strikes you most about it? Curator: That stillness you describe, that’s precisely what grabs me too. It's more than just a landscape, isn’t it? It feels almost like a memory fading at the edges. Look at how Cameron uses line – so economical, yet so suggestive. Do you feel the vastness of the sky pressing down, mirroring the sea? It’s a clever mirroring, visually balancing the earthly and ethereal. The figures feel insignificant, doesn’t it? And the sea is, to me, a threshold to an in-between, somewhere. How might we enter this work? Editor: Absolutely. The figures are tiny against the water and sky. And I hadn't thought of it as a threshold, but I totally see that now! With that thin band of the land meeting the shore. Do you think that choice emphasizes humanity's relationship to nature or perhaps isolation within it? Curator: That's the delicious ambiguity of it all! It's there if we chose. Perhaps he’s playing with the idea of the sublime, that feeling of awe and terror in the face of nature's immensity. You see this vast space and realize our own limits. It’s an ode to what it feels to look, listen and stay quite still in vast landscapes. Do you ever look in landscape painting, like one would music? Editor: I do now! Thanks. I think I'll carry that way of looking with me, really listen to a piece like this. So cool. Curator: Brilliant. Each encounter refines our ear and expands the dialogue; it always goes both ways, no?