An exhibition at Calgary Arts from 9th to 24th May 2026 exploring Iona, just off the south west tip of Mull.
Iona has a special place in the imagination. This thin sliver of land, urbanised to the east, idealised to the north, raw to the Atlantic west, and hidden wilderness to the south, encapsulates what it means to be an island: sanctuary, inspiration, exposure, and isolation in one.
Its enormous punch, in contrast to its seemingly diminutive size, is mentally discoverable in chunks of visitor time framed by the departure timetable of the CalMac Ferry. Curiously, repeated visits in all weathers jigsaw the fragmentary experiences into an idyllic memory, reinforced rather than diluted by each return… (introductory text continued at end)
Cloak of Many Colours
Acrylic on canvas 1200 x 1200 mm
Our admiration for the raw stone crosses and austere ecclesiastical interiors of Iona is likely a modern perspective. In their own time, these crosses and spaces were probably richly coloured, reflecting the vibrant manuscripts produced by the island’s monastic community—works filled with intricate illumination and decorative brilliance.
In Book III, Chapter 1 of Life of St Columba, Adomnán evokes a powerful sense of the colour that once permeated Iona. He recounts a dream experienced by the mother of Columba before her son’s birth:
An angel of the Lord appeared to St Columba’s mother in a dream one night after his conception but before his birth. He seemed to stand beside her and to give her a robe of marvellous beauty, decorated with what looked like the colours of every flower. After a little time he asked for it back and took it from her hands. Then he raised the robe and spread it out, letting go of it into the empty air… Then the woman saw the robe moving further and further from her as if in flight, growing greater and greater, so that it seemed broader than the plains and greater in measure than the mountains and the forests.
The vision suggests a world of vivid colour and spiritual radiance—an atmosphere that may once have filled the crosses, buildings, and sacred spaces of Iona.
Great House
Acrylic on canvas 1000 x 1000 mm
The architect never entirely leaves this painter. In Book II (45) of Life of St Columba, Adomnán recounts the blessing of favourable winds that enabled the transport of building timber to Iona Abbey. Although the size of the original church on Iona is unknown, the scale of the oak trees floated across the water and guided by groups of curraghs suggests that the building may have been substantial.
Adomnán describes two such journeys. Of the first he writes:
On the first of these, pine trees and oaks had been felled and dragged overland. Some were to be used in the making of a longship, and besides ship’s timbers there were also beams for a great house to be brought here to Iona.
He later records a second occasion.
The second time was several years later. Again, oak trees were being towed by a group of twelve curraghs from the mouth of the River Shiel to be used here in repairs to the monastery.
Across the distance of centuries we can only conjecture, but the scale of these efforts suggests that the early buildings at Iona may have been far larger—and more ambitious—than we often imagine.
Duchess Cross
Acrylic on canvas 1500 x 1500 mm
The Duchess Cross stands to the north of Iona Abbey, overlooking the Sound of Iona and facing the pink-red granite of the Ross of Mull.
In Book I (25) of Life of St Columba, Adomnán recounts an incident from a period when Columba was writing:
One day, shouting was heard from the other side of the Sound of Iona. The saint was sitting in his raised wooden hut and heard this, saying:
The man who is shouting across the Sound is too careless to watch what he is doing. Today he will tip over my little horn and spill the ink.
His servant Diarmait heard him say this and for a while stood by the door waiting for the clumsy guest to arrive so that he could keep him away from the inkhorn. But soon he moved away for some other purpose, and then the troublesome visitor arrived. As he went forward to kiss the saint, he upset the horn with the edge of his garment and spilt the ink.
Like the spilled ink of this story, these paintings allow for the unexpected. The difference is that, here, such accidents are anticipated—and welcomed—as part of the process.
Sand Corridors
Acrylic on canvas 1000 x 1000 mm
The north end of the island is characterised by sharply delineated rock formations that create narrow passages and glimpses down to the sea. Unlike the gullies to the west and south, these corridors are filled with sand, and the ebb and flow of the waves continually reshape the scene.
Writing to S. J. Peploe in July 1932, Cadell observed:
...that sand is now piled quite high up in the ‘corridors’ and the cliffs have in consequence lost their false majesty beloved by the designer of the B. and M. tombstone.
Underneath this layer of painted sand the rocks do descend down into Cadell's lost cliffs.
Made or Found
Acrylic on canvas 1000 x 1000 mm
During a concert, composer and harpist Ailie Robertson described the discovery of a remarkable collection of early nineteenth-century tunes at Torloisk House on Mull. Later I asked how she composes: whether notes are consciously chosen or shaped by such research. Sometimes, she said—but at other times they are simply found, emerging through playing and experiment.
In Iona Portrayed, Cadell is described as wearing “an overall of many colours, dyed by years of wiping his brushes on it.” That layered chaos echoes these works: paint is built up and scraped back, revealing marks that are “deliberately accidental”.
Behind the Veil
Acrylic on canvas: 1000 x 2000 mm Diptych
Sold
Inspired by a letter from Peploe to a friend in November 1923, this painting captures something of the distinctive atmosphere of Iona in all weathers:
We had miserable weather in Iona this year—the worst in living memory—gales and rain the whole time…But that kind of weather suits Iona: the rocks and distant shores seen through falling rain, veil behind veil, take on an elusive quality, and when the light shines through one has visions of rare beauty. I think I prefer it these days to your blue skies and clear distances.
Glacial Times
Acrylic on canvas 1500 x 1500 mm
Embedded in the sands of the northern beaches of the island are pink-shaded rocks amidst the darker outcrops. Argyll Vol. 4 – Iona by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland provides an explanation:
In glacial times ice moved north-westward across Iona, bringing numerous erratic blocks from the Ross of Mull and from further east.
It is amusing to think that, like us, the pink stones of the Ross of Mull are visitors to the island, and indeed contributed to the construction of the island’s ecclesiastical and domestic infrastructure, as the text elaborates:
These surface erratics, and the numerous rounded granite boulders in the glacial sands and gravels, formed an important source of building material in the medieval and modern periods.
This painting seeks to capture how geology and human history have come full circle in this North beach landscape where the rocks are laid out in serried ranks like the monumental commemorative slabs in the Abbey precincts.
Colour Scrapes
Acrylic on canvas 1000 x 1000 mm
For painters such as S. J. Peploe and Cadell, colour seemed to lie close to the surface of Iona itself. Writing in Iona Portrayed, Jessica Christian and Charles Stiller capture Cadell’s response to the island’s palette during the 1920s and 1930s:
Cadell was particularly attracted by the colours of Iona. He quite often interpreted them in daring and very personal combinations of bold and intense lime or mint greens, lemons, oranges, apricots, pinks and purples, which in his hands could express Iona to perfection.
In this and related paintings, colour is first built up in underlying layers. Darker tones are then applied across the surface, before selective scraping reveals the submerged colours beneath—rediscovering the vivid palette that lies hidden below.
Iona Horizon
Acrylic on canvas 1500 x 1500 mm
Sold
Both S. J. Peploe and Cadell were attentive to the distant peak of Ben More. It appeared so often in their work that they could even joke about it. In a letter to Peploe in July 1922, Cadell wrote:
Anything to escape the horrors of Ben More, Loch na Keal and Bourg!
Yet Ben More represented more than just a distant outline. Later in the same letter, Cadell reflects on a personal encounter:
O. told me what an extraordinary man ‘Stewart’ was: that she had offered to sit for her portrait, but that he apparently preferred to wander about the hill at the back of the hotel. She, I suppose, is his Ben More!
For Peploe and Cadell, Ben More hung in the horizon as both a visual motif and a symbol of grandeur - a secular marker of significance. It may have served, in a more personal and poetic way, as a substitute for the spiritual and artistic concerns that earlier visitors to Iona, such as John Duncan and James Paterson, had associated with the island, particularly in their engagement with the Celtic Revival and the Saint Columba origin narrative during the Abbey’s rebuilding.
Distant Tiree
Acrylic on canvas 1000 x 1000 mm
Iona’s notional visitor hub runs north–south along the east coast and east–west in the middle, with all the popular destinations branching off this L-shaped axis. Yet there are places to escape. Adomnán, in Book III (10), alludes to this desire centuries ago:
One day, when St Columba was living on Iona, he set off into the wilder parts of the island to find a place secluded from other people where he could pray alone.
This painting imagines a setting on the west coast, with Tiree in the distance, hinting at the strange attraction and allure of being removed from the ebb and flow of life.
North Beach
Acrylic on canvas 1000 x 2000 mm Diptych
The northern and southern ends of Iona could hardly be more different. The flatter northern end, if the island is imagined as a boat, resembles a foredeck of machair grasses, edged at its prow by a crest of white sand and scattered rocks—some tumbled smooth, others cracked open or slowly worn away by millennia of the sea’s action.
These paintings undergo a comparable process. Their surfaces are ground, rubbed, torn and sanded, echoing the physical forces that shape the shoreline and the long tradition of artists drawn to paint these beaches and the distant outlines on the horizon.
South Shore
Acrylic on canvas 1000 x 2000 mm Diptych
The southern end—the bow of Iona as a metaphorical ship—is a higher, more elevated platform of bogland compared with the northern machair. Approached from the mid-level east–west axis, this upland is intersected and drained by numerous gullies that define the island’s southern “hull.”
Some gullies form narrow slots down to the sea, such as the so-called “marble quarry,” while others open out more widely, like the channels leading to St Columba's Bay site where Columba may have first landed. This diptych of St Columba’s Bay seeks to capture the wetness of the bogland over the undulating, sculpted rock, down to its pebble beach, looking south across the water toward the distant horizon of his “Irish” homeland.
Colours of Every Flower
Acrylic on canvas 2000 x 1000mm Diptych
The west and southern uplands of Iona are lush and wet, their terrain gently kneaded to form a series of sheltered gullies that lead down to the shoreline.
In capturing these soft folds of the land, the painting evokes the image from Life of St Columba in which the mother of Columba is given a robe ‘decorated with what looked like the colours of every flower.’ The work celebrates the vibrant, layered palette suggested by both landscape and legend.
Half and Half
Acrylic on canvas 1000 x 1000 mm
The marble quarry evokes both human craft and natural forces. In this painting, one side is marked by precise, geometric cuts, while the other is shaped by random washes, scrapings, and scratches, all beneath a merging sky and sea. The composition becomes a microcosm of the island itself.
It captures a snapshot of Iona’s enduring power of attraction: the interplay of its uniquely hand-built environment with the rugged, rocky landscape, lightly overlaid with soil and grasses.
Marble Quarry
Acrylic on canvas 1000 x 1000 mm
Like the north shore, artists have long been drawn to the “marble quarry” and its steep gully descending to the sea. The rock faces, sliced, levered, and split, now edge a piled-high graveyard of broken stones and the metal remnants of its extraction and processing.
Both S. J. Peploe and Cadell painted the site in situ - a challenging journey that required reaching the gully, setting up, and working on location. Here, it was human effort, not natural forces that shaped this fragment of the landscape, just as it did the abbey precincts, settlements, and tilled land.
This painting captures the excavated rock slot, the leftover stone detritus, and the rusting frames once used to lift stone - a meditation on past human labour and the painter’s attempt to record it.
Industrial Monument
Acrylic on canvas 1000 x 1000 mm
Argyll Vol. 4: Iona by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland describes in detail the historical importance of what it calls an “Industrial Monument” in the south of the island:
Marble is found in several places on Iona, the most extensive source being located on the SE coast about 350m NE of Rubha na Carraig Géire. Here a vertical band of forsterite tremolite-marble, having an average width of about 7m, extends inland from the foreshore for at least 100m. The stone is white, streaked and mottled with yellowish-green serpentine. The visible remains, situated in a steep-sided gully with the main working-face on the W, evidently date from the most recent period of quarrying activity, early in the present century.
The care lavished on this industrial site in the description matches that given to the ecclesiastical monuments of the island:
They comprise machinery (including a producer-gas engine manufactured by Fielding and Platt, Gloucester, and a cutting-frame by G Anderson, Arbroath), a small rock-cut reservoir, a gunpowder store, and a roughly-built quay which provided the only means of transporting equipment to and marble from the site.
Today, it is another of the island’s isolated escapes, where one can sit in isolation amidst the wasted rocks and rusting archaeology of the excavations. It’s also a prescient link back to the Abbey that ‘the high alter of the medieval abbey-church appears to have been made from this material’.
Radiance
Acrylic on canvas 1200 x 1200 mm
Adomnán's Book III is filled with narratives of how St Columba harnessed the light of ‘Angels’. This concluding painting was inspired by Chapter 3 which captures one particular moment:
...St Columba too entered the Lord's house. With his arrival the whole church was filled with a golden light shining from the heights of heaven. Even in his shut-off side-chapel, where Fergnae tried as best he could to lie concealed, the brilliance of that heavenly light came through the inner door of the chamber, which was not completely closed, and filled the room, causing Fergnae no little sense of fear. In the same way that no one is able to look directly at the sun at midday in summer without being dazzled, so Fergnae could not bear that heavenly brightness, for it was brighter than any light and completely dazzled his sight. Its radiance filled him with fear, so that his strength failed him utterly.
(introductory text continued)…,.,A cursory glance at the island’s history reveals a cycle of flowering and decay, anchored by the Abbey: a hidden ancient history before becoming an island of monks, then obliterated by Norse invaders; followed by a medieval spiritual renaissance again left in ruins; and finally a remarkable reconstruction that brings us up to date. For this artist, anthropological time echoes geological time explored in previous paintings—here, cycles of the warm and cold human hand: building, destroying, building again rather than shaped by the heat of the earth.
On Iona’s ancient rocks, traces of ordinary life persist: working the land, fishing, trading, and looking after increasing visitors—from kings, queens, politicians, writers on retreat, to today’s day-trippers. Among them were artists. In Iona Portrayed by Christian and Stiller[1], over two hundred years of these artists are documented. Iona has always held a strange attraction.
The first artists faithfully recorded what they saw, before two regular summer visitors in the 1920s and ’30s, Francis Cadell and S.J. Peploe, contributed to the modern art world’s way of seeing with a surge of paintings draped in colour and shape. They were not solely documenting; while one can measure the depth of what they observed, they flattened strict perspective. With bold, receding colours, they filled the flat canvas to hint at the view.
The result was that they captured an essence of Iona—an otherworldliness—paralleling the then-recent reconstruction of the Abbey. Both painters and rebuilders seemed to view the modern world through “Iona Eyes,” engaged but detached.
Their correspondence reveals a nuanced relationship with the landscape. Peploe wrote in 1923 of gales and rain, of ‘rocks and distant shores seen through falling rain, veil behind veil,’[2] but preferring this elusive quality to blue skies and clear distances. Cadell had a more optimistic take: ‘warmed by the sun, blown by the wind’.[3]
Both artists were conscious of the distant peak of Ben More on Mull and painted it often. Ben More hung in the horizon, a secular motif and essence of grandeur—a substitute, perhaps, for the interest of earlier contemporaries, John Duncan and James Paterson, in supporting the Celtic Revival linked to Saint Columba and the Abbey’s rebuilding.
John Duncan painted Saint Columba in St Columba Bidding Farewell to the White Horse, based on Adomnán’s account. Duncan’s Columba is holy, sympathetic, and benign, and that image pervades.
So Ben More, like St Columba, looms over Iona, but it is to Adomnán’s remarkable insight that we owe our understanding of the Saint and his era. He painted a colourful picture of the Saint and the island in his book Life of St Columba[4] aside from the books now lost, possibly including the Book of Kells.
In three books—foresight, miracles, and the light of the Saint—the expected narrative of holy actions and reactions is captured. What surprises, however, is a parallel tale of brutal clarity, black-and-white judgement, and the consequences of failing to observe determined adherence to faith.
The Iona of enlightenment, meditation, and sensitivity sits alongside the politics of the early church, punishment, doom-laden prophecy, and a real sense of “no messing.”
Walking the Abbey precincts today, amid tidy ruins framed by well-kept hotels, houses, and shops, it is hard to imagine the terror of Norse invaders, the sacking and destruction of Adomnán’s time. The island then had to contend with the local politics of the Dalriadan Irish and Scots, the neighbouring Picts, and the “Angels,” all while living in constant annual fear of northern visitations.
Scrape the surface of the island and millennia of geological pressure and erosion cycles are revealed; scratch that surface, and centuries of creativity in paint and text weave in and out with periods of destruction and decay.
The exhibition’s title comes from curator Pippa Reade’s observation of an earlier painting of Ben More she called “Grit and Grace”. Pippa neatly summed up the essence of Iona: the grit of painful histories and destructive forces set against the grace of exquisite creativity, draped in colour and light—the art of applied and buried colour brought to the surface in scrapes and scratches.
[1] Jessica Christian & Charles Stiller, Iona Portrayed, The Island through Artists’ Eyes, 1760-1960. The New Iona Press. 2000
[2] Guy Peploe, S.J. Peploe 1871-1935. Mainstream Publishing. 2000.
[3] Alice Strang, F.C.B. Cadell. National Galleries of Scotland. 2017.
[4] Adomnán of Iona, Life of St Columba, translated by Richard Sharpe. Penguin Books. 1995
Thank you to Pippa Reade, Gallery Director at Calgary Gallery, for her unwavering commitment to hosting art that reflects the islands of Mull and Iona. Her perceptive title for the exhibition, Grit & Grace - Iona, neatly captures the idea behind the show. Thanks also to Sarah Butler at the gallery, and to Tom Reade, for arranging the paintings so beautifully.
This project would not have taken flight without the guidance of fellow artist Angus Stewart, who reminded me that Iona - despite the saturation of artists’ views - remained a subject worthy of being tackled again, and of course, for his constant critique.
The depth of artistic involvement was highlighted to me by Professor Sally Foster from Stirling University, whose guidance encouraged anchoring the work in a broader understanding of the history of the Picts, Gaels, and Scots who shaped the island’s context.
That context was further enriched by Professor Johnathan Burnside of Bristol University, whose writing on the religious backdrop of Biblical law in early Anglo-Saxon law-making intersected with the parallel west coast St Columban mission to bring Christian values to the Scots and Picts, as captured by his biographer, Adomnán.
Finally, this work - and indeed this publication - could not have been realised without the constant support and thoughtful challenge of my wife, Jane Burnside. Thank you, pal.
David Page
