A piece written by George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) in 1988 - for the ten year anniversay of the opening of the Pier Arts Centre. (First published in The Pier Gallery: The First Ten Years)

That Orkney is a unique matrix for artistic achievement is being increasingly commented on in the cities of the South.

Why Orkney produces so many artists, writers, and musicians may have a complex of reasons. I will offer one of many: a unique mingling and concord of the elements. Earth and sea have given Orcadians their livelihood for five thousand years or so. The fish and the cornstalk are perennial emblems. Orcadians, coming home after an absence in the cities, are immediately aware of the great sweep of sky overhead. There, winter and summer, is played out the great drama of light and darkness. (I'm writing this 3 weeks after the winter solstice: already, perceptibly, the afternoons are growing longer. It is difficult to explain to city dwellers how eagerly the mind and the imagination respond to this turning of the tide.)

The hills are stored with peat, the shores are strewn with wrack. It is as if what Bernard Shaw called "the Life-force" had endowed Orkney with all the essentials for life. Fires turned continuously on the same hearth-stone for centuries.

I am sure that good art springs from such a fruitful contact with the elements.

The art I am mostly concerned with is literature. An Orkney writer has an immense quarry to work from: not only that magnificent anthology of stories The Orkneyinga Saga from our medieval past, but the 18th and 19th century legends of witches, smugglers, lairds, ministers, merchants and skippers, and the folk-lore whose roots reach deeper than history.

There has always been music, much of it lost. What we would give to know the airs and dances of Yule and the midsummer hill fires! In the past three decades or so there has been a marvellous renaissance of music in the islands. The Folk Festival in May and the St Magnus Festival in June draw music lovers from all over the world.

The visual arts, too, in this twentieth century have shown remarkable achievements in many different genres. Before Stanley Cursiter, there were few names: Strange the 18th century engraver and Charles Smith of Tormiston, who was painter to the Great Mogul in the 18th century.

In those times, an artist had to be in close touch with dealers, studios, exhibition rooms. He had to exist in or near a city. For an island artist - there must have been many who had the gift - his art must have been a lonely delight.

But that the islanders possessed an innate artistry is shown by the houses they built and inhabited: the long low croft houses that fit so beautifully into the landscape that they seem to be a part of it - the fishing boats -the long winding surging Stromness street that seems to have been a swift careless improvisation, but I can't help thinking that some aesthetic impulse, however obscure, oversaw this complex of piers and closes and gardens.

I don't doubt, either, that the magnificent shape of St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall entered into the minds and imaginations of Orcadians in the course of eight and a half centuries. It will surely continue to be an inspiration to future generations of artists.

The Pier Arts Centre in Stromness has, in the brief decade of its existence, been an "alma mater" for all the arts and artists in Orkney. It has also, of course, kept open house to artists and their work from every country and continent. May it still be there, in its lovely setting, and flourishing mightily, after ten decades have come and gone.

George Mackay Brown
Stromness
11 January 1988