At the end of almost a decade of work devoted to exploring Dualities, Bill returned to the landscape reference in a long series of paintings, pastels and studies called "The Scottish Stone Series", based on his travels in Europe and the British Isles. He considered these paintings essentially reactions to and responses from visiting close to a hundred pre-historic stone sites: cairns, brocks, rings, mounds and standing sentinels.
"The "S" Series (perhaps signifying: September, Stones, Scotland?) paintings of late 1985 - some 26 in all - were inspired by an autumnal visit to Scotland and Wales. The focus of this trip was the pursuit of pre-historic monuments there, circles of stones, cairns, brochs, sometimes single sentinels set in the landscape of outer islands.
In some paintings such as "Stennes", "Pentre Ifan", "Callanish", "Maeshowe" and "Brodgar" there exists a reference to site specific recollections of experiences in the Outer Hebrides, Orkney and of the Welsh Mountains. Others, such as the Cairn paintings and "Sentinel", "Abergwaun", "Quest", "Uncertainty", and "Capstone" grew out of a syntheses of the whole experience, which involved nearly 4000 kilometers of travel in the U.K. and visits to more than 60 sites.
Dealing with juxtapositions of energy and substance, gesture and concrete construction, these paintings - while definitely more pictorial than preceeding ones - continue the subject matter of the more abstract Dualities series begun in the late 1970's"
William Morehouse 1985
Bill was energized by this body of work and consequently this body of his stone paintings and pastels is huge. I will continue to add more and more images in the future.
Meanwhile the images on this page are my selection. Michele Morehouse 2008
