This painting began with meeting a fiddler from the Shetland Islands of Scotland when she was teaching a workshop in Maryland. Only seventeen years old, she was already an expert fiddler because children of the Shetland Islands are usually taught how to play at a very young age.
Music, being a common language among different cultures, became an early and obvious theme in the development of this series of painting about the connections between the Scottish and Appalachian cultures, especially because the music of Ireland and Scotland took new root in the soil of our southern mountains when the immigrants came over. So I focused on the fiddle, still so important today to Scottish, Irish, and Appalachian musicians, and on the link between Highland dancing and mountain-style clogging.
Although these two styles of dancing have many similarities, there are distinct differences as well. Because Mary, Queen of Scots, spent much of her childhood in France, she brought the influence of the ballet dance style of the French court back to Scotland. Highland dancing gradually evolved into a graceful style that is primarily upward and aspiring, with arms raised and toes pointed in a ballet fashion. Clogging, on the other hand, is downward and earthbound, using very little arm action and very intricate footwork. So even though our clogging style of dance was influenced by the Scottish-Irish dancing, we made our own form of it, attaching to it our own perspective and expression, much of it also influenced by African dance styles of people enslaved in the United States.
And then I went a little deeper, comparing the harmonies of ritual in both cultures. While in Scotland, I recognized on many occasions, the sound of the bagpipes "wailing", often a plaintive undercurrent of the piper's melody, as the wailing voices of an Appalachian Fundamentalist family saying good-by to a loved one at the gravesite, or the ecstacy expressed in a traditional baptism in the mountains.
In preparing for this painting by making many sketches of the fiddle, I discovered that the fiddlehead itself has a spiral shape that can be seen also in the same proportion in the middle of a sunflower or at the tip of a conch shell. It's something that can be found in nature repeated over and over again. So there's a certain harmoniousness that exists in nature that we have applied to man-made objects, or sounds, or movements, because it is pleasing and beautiful. That's what this painting is all about. This painting is owned by Southwest Virginia Community College.
Ellen Elmes
PO Box SVCC
Richlands, VA 24641-1101
email: ellen.elmes@sw.edu
phone: 276.964.7205
fax: 276.964.7720