I rendezvous with Becs Boyd on a hillside where, when called on, she spends all day counting species to measure the richness of its ecosystem and sometimes its fragility. She also studied History and Russian, with a thesis on Jacobeans in eighteenth century Moscow. But I am here for her paintings and to take a portrait of her outside. Like the world around us, her work is rich in texture, colour and whispers an unspoken language. They too are ecosystems - a small square panel where oil and element evolve to find balance.
Boyd is reluctant to give much away about the dreamy symbolism of each painting. Perhaps that is because, like in many of the best works, the distance of time is needed to reveal the specificities of why it was made. Making a painting is often a leap of faith. In ‘70°N, Gouvasshas (The Dancers)’ totemic figures drift upwards where they orbit a celestial night. Below is a white object that nurses a white pebble. A small blue green sphere nestles at the bottom of the painting. In ‘Things Entirely Unseen,’ there is an eye taken from a Russian icon and the suggestion of trees which divide the painting into rooms of colour. Again, there is a white egg and beyond this the glimpse of a two-legged creature. Boyd’s gift in these works is to turn a rich symbolism that in words sounds contrived, into paintings that read like a natural scene discovered on one of her long hill-womps. They are glimpses real worlds but unseen worlds.
Studying painting came relatively late to Becs Boyd, leaving Moray School of Art in 2020. Since then, Boyd has found a way to use the rules of composition to bring together seen things, thoughts and the philosophy of living lightly, into works which suggest a narrative. There is something of the symbolic landscapes of Paul Nash about her work – and the freedom and modernism of the St Ives school. An ongoing interest with Boyd is the north, especially the Sami people she has visited for the last three summers, and she will head to Norway again this summer. ‘They live there in the north, often unseen, hoping to be left alone so they can continue their lives,’ she tells me. I take my photograph and we walk back to the car. I think about the horrible things that industry has done to nature, not just the windfarms and oil pipelines that threaten Sami lands, but the forces at play here in Scotland too. ‘Some think they are in a layer above the ecosystem,’ she tells me, ‘but they very wrong.’
