This painting looks at the lives of people in a Scottish fishing village, as well as the lives of people back home in a coal mining camp. We traveled, my family and I, to this northeastern village of Crovie, (or, as the residents would say, "Crivie"). In coming to this village, we first rode across large open fields and farmland on a plateau area, and suddenly the road dropped down, and came to the edge of the sea. And right at the edge of the sea were these little houses, clustered together, with clotheslines buoyed up by sheets flapping in the wind. As soon as I saw that I thought, "coal mining camps...Jewell Ridge"...things that I knew from home, where the houses are close together and look very similar to each other. It had obviously been, during the boom time of the herring industry, a close-knit community. So that sparked the idea for this painting, with the fishing village and coal camp spanning the middle of the composition.
The painting is, of course, more broadly about the lives of people who lived and worked in these communities; those by the sea, who daily bore the risks and pleasures of the trade, and those who lived by the resources of the earth and knew the dualities of the underground. In Scotland, many of these little fishing villages were created in the late 1800's and early 1900's during a time referred to today as "the Clearances". This was a time when wealthy land owners raised the rent of their tenants, consequently driving them off the land to the edge of the sea and replacing their rental payments with the more lucrative enterprise of sheep raising. Like coal mining families of the past, the fate of the fishing families was often altered by outside influences, and survival often depended upon the strength of the local community.
Other images in the painting represent further connections between the fishing and mining environment. In the upper right area, the coke ovens, used in southwest Virginia in the steel-making process, send up ribbons of steam that become images of smoke used for the curing of herring. Traditionally, herring would be slit through the middle, hung over wooden poles, and then left to smoke for long periods of time. This painting is owned by Andy Dewar and Aberdeen College.
Ellen Elmes
PO Box SVCC
Richlands, VA 24641-1101
email: ellen.elmes@sw.edu
phone: 276.964.7205
fax: 276.964.7720