Join us for a wide-ranging discussion about art, process and imagination with two of our best-selling Edinburgh based artists, Louis McNally and Arran Ross.
Summary
The second part of this artist talk at Graystone Gallery shifts focus to Louis McNally, whose distinctive paintings feature fine detailing, haunting qualities, and long low horizons. Louis discusses his cityscape work, particularly a painting of Edinburgh's Cowgate that began as a sketch during jury service. He explains how he was drawn to the Gothic quality of the area and the contrasts within the city—where ancient buildings stand alongside modern structures, and where spaces of wealth and power exist directly above areas of poverty and desolation.
Louis reveals his artistic process, noting that while he uses photography and sketches, he avoids becoming a "slave" to realism. He explains that sometimes details must be removed rather than added to achieve the desired atmospheric quality. When discussing his bird paintings, Louis describes trying to "design the wind" rather than just expressing it, aiming to create a sense of vulnerability against the elements—a metaphor for human experience. His Highland and island paintings feature isolated tree groupings that remind him of family units surviving in harsh environments.
Throughout the conversation, Louis reflects on his relationship with realism, preferring to occupy a space between strict realism and impressionism. He notes that overly realistic paintings tell viewers everything at once, whereas his approach leaves room for viewers to discover new elements over time. The discussion highlights commonalities between Louis and Arran's work—particularly themes of isolation, the influence of music, and a sense of timelessness in their art. Both artists create work that invites viewers to form their own interpretations without imposing specific meanings, allowing the visual language to speak for itself without excessive explanation.
Transcript
Rob Briggs: All those cuss words that I was hearing during the break, please keep them to yourselves and we can have a more pleasant conversation later. But thank you all for hanging around and for coming to the second part of our session tonight. We have with us as well the wonderful Louis McNally. Louis, thank you for joining us.
Louis McNally: Thanks for inviting me.
Rob: Half past seven that won't do Louis any justice so I hope you can bear with me a little bit longer today so we can give Louis a fair chance. I'm sure that you've all got some wonderful questions for him as well. So just by way of introduction, inspired by the 1980s, Louis's distinctive paintings—and as some of you have noticed, we've moved a little bit to the left so we get a little bit more of Louis's work behind us here.
His distinctive paintings feature fine detailing and observation coupled with unique haunting qualities. Maybe that's something that we'll pick up in conjunction between the two of you later on. He also has a very distinctive and recognizable style of oil painting which has been painstakingly developed over years—many and many weeks indeed when he works on these particular images using drawings, photography and his own memory. And the results I'm sure you'll agree is often emotive and atmospheric landscapes and cityscapes with long low horizons. So Louis, thank you and welcome. Perhaps you could give us a little bit more of an overview based on that.
Louis: Yeah, I mean everything that we said is true. The city ones and the sort of landscape countryside ones they come from different angles. The city ones are all within the city. For a while you get used to it, it's a haunting place. This one here of the Cowgate which started off as this one here.
So it started off as that which was doing jury service one morning.
Rob: Just that. So we can say the people at home watching if you can see that as well.
Louis: Early in the morning got to jury service and it just caught my eye. And I've known this building for a while. Used to have a studio in the Cowgate before it was burnt down. And so I knew that area quite well. Anyway I kept seeing it and there was something haunting about it. Edinburgh like Leith has got old and new sort of put together. And I do like the gothic quality that it has.
There is—you see it maybe a couple of times, you take pictures, you maybe do some drawings, scale them up. And then you try and put all that together when it comes to actually doing the piece. So I mean photography can sometimes be a slave, you know, you can end up putting everything in. And I think that is something that you sort of learn and it's something maybe I was guilty of.
You could put loads of detail in things, loads of detail and the hope that this thing's going to work because you've put a lot of detail into it. But in the end to get it to work you find out you're actually painting out the detail, you know, because you want it more general as about, you know, being too specific.
And so these came about with that. The other one, the city one which was a place which is a view from the top of the Ocean Terminal. And when we—many years ago when we took driving license, I was taking driving license we used to sit up there and the driving instructor would have his piece and so we would look out there and I thought that was a—I'd never seen that view and it got me interested in painters.
I think the city art center had done a show maybe twenty years ago where it was a collaboration of views of Edinburgh and it did make me interested in finding the idea of how certain places have changed. And so I think some of them—some of the views if you go across to Fife and you look across and you see the shore like that hasn't really changed, you know, it's basically the same. But if you come into town some of the old like down Broughton Street and you see a painting 1700s, and sort of now they've got a some of the buildings originally there but now they've built an office or something there. So you just get this huge sort of blank space office building and you can't actually see any of the rest of it but you could maybe see a wee top of something like that. And so that gives you ideas for compositions and it is—I do like the idea that views change over time. And some of these offices get knocked down and something else will go in and and the view changes again. And so it's always moving.
And like I say Edinburgh like Leith is a place where you've got really old buildings next to really modern buildings. And things like the tenements they're just—you go thinking although it's one big block that there's so many flats in there with so many different people living in these places. And I think that atmosphere—trying to try and get all that together it does take a lot of work and it does take a lot of detail. But like I said in the end you're trying to create some sort of mood just—some sort of—it's not just a gothic mood it's a representation that somebody will remember, it'll stick in your head.
And so I still paint various aspects and I still sometimes—you'll go especially with the developments going, you used to be able to see a gable end and then now when you walk by that gable end's gone because there's a building there and it was like that was such a beautiful gable end, nobody's going to see that now. And vice versa you walk and a building's been knocked down and you think oh that's a new angle. So it's always changing and there's always new views of Edinburgh.
Try to think anything else that could be important but the Edinburgh ones—influences you had mentioned Hopper that was mentioned. I do like Hopper but he's never been a—I never think of him when I'm painting it it could be it's sunk in so deep that I don't know. But I mean I do like Hopper but I do like more of the sort of iconoclasm although Hopper's got that as well but I suppose maybe maybe more gothic I think maybe that's what I'm going for.
Rob: Yeah. See in the Cowgate because you can walk along the Cowgate and all of a sudden you can see forever.
Louis: Yeah. And the same in that one it's kind of there but it's kind of out of focus. I like the foregrounds but I really like the way they go.
Rob: I think I think that's got something to do with contrast as well just in the sense that one place is vast, you know, and another place is so crowded and I maybe it's the use to trying to take your eye into the painting as well that you sort of—you just see just in Wallford and always when you're sort of in town it's quite funny looking back to where you've come through, you know, and there are because there's a couple of really good views—I think I've maybe done one painting where you see sort of the old—is it the academy that we're going to use at some point. And then you've got Edinburgh disgrace and then you look right out and you see the Bass Rock, you know, and then you see a way down there and you think jeez there's all that connection and all that life.
Rob: I love that that Edinburgh that you can just keep walking. Suddenly it explodes into—
Louis: Yeah. I was telling Robert earlier was I'd shown this in a gallery and I knew that the bottom where the light comes in that was a hostel for homeless people and I liked the idea—I think I'd been a couple of times and I like the idea the second time I'd been there was a tenant's van, you know, it must it was either making a delivery or whatever but you know it was pulling out in the hostel and then somebody had seen that in another gallery and had mentioned—it was a judge and he says oh that's where we have our quarters. So you had the office above where all this law and stuff was going on and then down below you had this poverty and desolation and I did like the idea—that's why the bigger painting came about. I did like that contrast to that just the men's experience, life experience between nothing and a lot.
And so that really gave me the idea to do the bigger one. And I think that's the other thing is that if you visit friends in town, it's another thing you know you look out their window and you go oh that's a cracking view. I've never seen that view before, you know what I mean? And sometimes ideas come like that. But sometimes ideas come—I've walked along the same bit so many times but it's just the way the light hits it and you think oh jeez I've never seen the light like that before, and you get a wee sort of moment and you think—and maybe that's the thing you're trying to convey as well, you're trying to feel a sort of feeling.
So the city ones are sort of like that—the countryside ones, the bird ones are sort of similar to that as well. You're trying to convey—I think I'm trying to convey some sort of human experience with these ones and especially this one the idea was that there were trying to come together in a sort of stillness but the elements were blown them about. And normally I think in some of the skies that I do they're quite expressionist sky whereas that one I tried to—I was trying to express the wind but I was trying to design the wind if that makes sense to you.
I was trying to sort of design it in a way that it wasn't just expressive it was sort of—it sort of had a completeness to it. I think that's what I was trying to do. And somebody had mentioned before that especially some of these ones that they almost look like musical notes. And I thought that would be great if you actually could put them in a quotation like some sort of bird song. So you were not only were you looking at the nature because it is a sort of celebration of nature but not only were you looking at it but you were looking at a tune as well and I loved that idea, I like the idea that even if you didn't know about it you're still looking at it.
Rob: It looks like they know there's a storm coming in both of them. Like they know something we don't.
Louis: I think again with the birds it is like trying to express how sometimes in life it feels as well to be so vulnerable against the elements. It might not be the elements you're vulnerable to it might be something else you're vulnerable to but you do feel vulnerable and it's trying to suggest that. And again living down these coasts you get huge skies, and it's great and Scotland has got just amazing skies. Even in the city it's got some cracking skies. And so you're trying the idea that we're all sort of living in nature and we're all trying to survive. Some of us are trying to get together and talk and communicate, some others are just trying to have a rest, but the life just keeps bashing at your door. And I think that was all that and is trying to be representational of wild life I suppose.
Yeah. It's true. The other ones which were these type of things which was the more Highland and Island type things was basically based on taking the kids when there weren't many years ago taking them—went to Fort William and then we got the train up to Mallaig. And as you went through there was all these wee islands and and they reminded me of wee villages and people and I suppose the trees become people, they're like—they have the figures in it. And so they're isolated in their own—there's maybe three or four of them and in the one lake or loch and I liked the idea that they were just isolated on their own with their own wee group and there's this landscape that's out there that is rough and a difficult place to live in and yet they survive. And I think some of the landscapes now they I invent them, they're not actually places anymore, they're just an invention of the islands. It's a hill with rocks on it and eventually when you do so many of them you begin to go all right I know that's going to curve there and that's going to round there. And so that's how they came about.
Rob: Thank you. So for anybody who doesn't know the Fort William Mallaig train it's the Harry Potter one. I recently took it. So when I saw that I think I've seen it and when you said exactly where, I know exactly which you're talking about.
Louis: Yeah. I mean there's it's not just there as well. I mean you get them in Loch Lomond and you get them in various places and they just seem to grow and you get different types of trees as well with paints. But I do like that long—gives you a chance to sort of almost centralize your idea by using these long sort of and putting them right in the middle of the composition.
Rob: And there's there's a couple of things that I'd like to pick up on with you. I think I'll start with realism. Now there's a theory in aesthetics that says you can't paint every single blade of grass. So when you're looking at particularly your landscape paintings and to an extent your cityscapes as well, how do you determine just how much level of detail you feel you want to get into?
Louis: Well I mean if you know jury's tough, and he did paint every blade of grass. And I think there's—and I mean Martin Tosh Patrick is another one.
Rob: Yeah.
Louis: And Andrew Wyeth who's another one who are realists but they've got a quirkiness about them, they're not just realists and I mean I do like realist art but I don't want to be a realist. I think there's a place between real and say the impressionist thing, there's a place in between there and I want to suggest a sort of realism and I like the idea that a viewer is drawn in by realism but that's not what the picture's about. It's not about especially the birds—if you—I think the middle one there is fabrics.
Rob: Yeah, you know, he painted the fence.
Louis: So you can get a sort of realist or classical painting of a bird. I don't want that. I don't want it that you can count every hair on it because that detracts from—a bit like why you asked me earlier about why you don't have people in the landscape in the cityscape it's because it detracts from what you're trying to do. And if you have something too realist you end up just focusing on that and it doesn't give you a whole picture and to be fair some for me some realist pictures that are like photographs I look at them once and I don't need to look at them again. I've seen they've told me everything that I want. And so that's it. Whereas there's another element where it be paint, a tone feeling, whatever it is if there's something else in it then it just keeps you—and especially if you're living with these things, if you're living somebody buys your picture and it's up on their wall and they see it every morning.
Some people can live with realist painting, they'd look at it but I like the idea that somebody will come in and go I never noticed that before, that's or that wee quirkiness but oh there's something—I like the idea that it sort of changes—just like it changed for me when I was painting it. That fresh look at it. But the idea is that realism didn't allow you sometimes to be emotional, and you want to be but I want to be a particular emotion that I want to try to express and so realism sometimes cuts that out so there comes a point where you stop being like every blade of grass.
Rob: I was about that. This one I was just explaining about—
Louis: Yeah. I'm just explaining about taking the train from Oban to Mallaig and as you go through all these wee lochs—but not just there even in Loch Lomond and stuff like that you get these wee islands with trees on them and they just reminded me of wee family units on their own and just with their own wee things and ecosystem almost—their own—and against this landscape that can be quite harsh.
Rob: Right the way they see two trilogies against the harsh landscape it's like almost evokes the father son and holy ghost kind of—
Louis: Right yeah yeah. I mean I would—I have—I remember doing a portrait of my wife and my first son when they were born and it was just as the bairn was born and somebody says oh that's very Catholic and I thought yeah that's not bad—I quite like that there's sort of an acknowledgement that there's something else out there.
Rob: Yeah there's kind of this stuff for blood—
Louis: Yeah yeah. I like the idea that somebody else can see something and see that there's—what is this—how did this come about—whether you believe in God or not it's neither here nor there but the idea that there is something greater than these things that are in front of us and it represents that mythology whether you believe it or not it is a mythology.
Rob: Yeah yeah that's in some ways that's oh it's a mythology and differently you get different ones take—if it's true what they say they're all in the same path—they're just different paths.
Rob: And it's almost like the trees are casting the light rather than the sun casting the light.
Louis: It's coming from inside as opposed to—yeah I mean I do get mixed up with that sometimes. You're painting away and you've got a light source and you think you need to remember that light source because it hits that but then it looks better if the light's coming from the other side and the tree and it obviously doesn't make sense but it doesn't matter very really.
Rob: Yeah uh poetic little bit because—
Rob: I'd just like to pick up on I think some common themes between the the two of you one of them being isolation now we spoke on a little bit earlier about the lack of figures in your paintings particularly in the cityscapes although we may have a little bit of competition later—see if you can find two figures spot the figures in the Calgate—
Audience Member: To me that's what's striking—it's this no people.
Louis: Yeah it was it was funny I mean I've never really put figures in at all but it was—and I should have done but anyway it's quite difficult to paint a cityscape when there's all parked cars everywhere so you're trying to paint it without the parked cars. So you're just getting rid of them and it was funny seeing images during lockdown when nobody was on the street and I thought my paintings have come true—it's a prophecy it's coming true. And I did actually—I've I could have brought the roads out and taken some pictures and some people did and and when I looked at them I thought oh yeah I can see—and they do—I just felt they detracted from the actual architecture and the power and the space as well but sometimes it is good to put a wee figure in to show you how big something is because it gives you something to scale it against.
Rob: I think you do that with doors and—
Louis: Yeah yeah windows—
Rob: Yeah windows and doors yeah. Like if you shoot on the hills like that it's too harsh for sheep.
Louis: But I mean another thing that we were talking you're talking about things in common and you're talking about music and I remember—I mean I don't know if they're influences but I certainly liked them with the Barbizon school which were just pretty sort of impressionist—went to Fontainebleau and painted there and it was all these dark sort of things—and somebody asked you your influences—the other thing was like as really difficult—you mentioned Mr Ben and stuff like that which is and I remember Mr Ben as well and other thing was like album covers. It's like you don't know but you'd pick up an album cover that's cracking—I mean even some Pink Floyd albums that there's a real images and you think what is going on there it's just so intriguing—sort of their album covers and stuff like that you think that—I would say yeah as a piece of art and that's cracking. And so it's really difficult to to find a thing that really did affect you.
Music and speaking about music and when I was at college somebody gave me a violin and I mean I don't play music—but as an adult I went up to I think it was an adult learning center up in Gorieway and learned tried to learn the violin just before the kids were born and I do I did like the idea that when a bit like color and painting when two notes go together they really create a beauty but and if you're off it really creates a jar. And you can but you in painting you can work that to your advantage—if you can make it jarring or you can make something just mellow and you it's like certain painters—I was trying to think is it Morandi who done the vases and stuff like that—they're just all these simple tones with just a slight difference in each one and it just it's just like a beautiful piece of music. It's just there's something beautiful that's just all set together right nothing sticks out nothing—and so I do think I like that idea about music and I think music in that way sort of influences you a wee bit as well.
Rob: Yeah and I just add to that that when a painting is complete like when a piece of music is complete like when a piece of writing is complete or at least the artist is ready to part with it—let's say it then no longer belongs to the artist, no longer belongs to the creator—it's the relationship between the person who's viewing that piece of art what they read into it and the stories that that they can tell or that they can relate to.
Louis: Yeah I think maybe titles is quite handy for that as well because I quite like quirky titles as well I like titles that maybe give it another—it makes somebody look at something slightly different with the titles but I think it is up to the viewer sometimes to find their own way into the painting and and you can't dictate it and maybe that's one of the things back to the realism again is is realism can tend to focus the viewer in a mindset whereas if it's not a realist painting people can see ten people can see ten different things in it as opposed to if it's too realist ten people see the same thing in it and I sort of quite like that.
I think it's also quite nice that in this gallery you don't have that little artist country—
Rob: Yeah tries to turn the look to them—
Louis: Just of the title here. There's that—on that subject there's a—I got interesting getting somebody else to that takes you to see something new that you wouldn't have done and a friend of mine who's an English guy who lives in Holland and he says we're going to this museum that's you like it—you really like it—it's in a country area in Dusseldorf—all right so we went to this place and it was wasn't an idyllic park or anything like that but it was it was an old nuclear sort of war type set of buildings for a missile system there were brick buildings and really unusual shape in this sort of country park and in all the rooms they had this really airy feel to them but they had no labels about the stuff very little information at all and they had all these objects that have been kind of created there's not many in the room but it could have been a—it could have been something maybe Chinese from whatever dynasty probably and it was a big ceramic piece and then there'd be something like a tangly connected structure and you think well but you couldn't explain why that went together but it did go together and then you just you were just enjoying all the objects for them being there and you just been there—what you thought of them and that's one of my favorite museums because you automatically want to read that.
I mean I think the other thing we labels is it's a different type of art—I mean I like the craft of painting and I do like that and when you look at it you do hopefully you don't need a label. It's not the same as like looking at a maybe a Tracy Emin where you'd maybe need—but I always thought that goes on to it it's like art philosophy it's more it's more about the intellect it's more about it it's talking about something else—and it's not what I would call painting—it's not painting as such—it's just more about the art the philosophy of art or the art of philosophy—and sometimes you see a huge book on this piece and you think—if I can art for me is something visual I want to get it when I look at it I don't want to have to look through and get the meaning of it—so again that's a different thing but I do like the idea that when you see it even if you don't get it all you get a—that's you I like the artist name the picture's name what media is that done in.
Audience Member: Because you may not have painted the father son and holy ghost—
Louis: That's yeah—
Audience Member: And I wouldn't disagree with you that but I didn't deliberately go to paint that but like I say but when the viewer views it they're seeing their end thing—
Audience Member: You don't need you to tell me it's something different if I wanted that painting—
Louis: Yeah yeah. I think the other thing is as well it is difficult to express explain a visual language in words and somebody else said it and it was a quote I think that I remembered that Franz Kafka said about "try to understand architecture through words is like try to understand music through dance"—it's until you've—I can tell you what it's like I can thing but until you see it you're not going to get it.
Audience Member: That's where I imagine he grew up—
Louis: Yeah very similar very similar landscape—
Audience Member: Was my dad was a landscape painter I sort of remember pointing out anyway that a lot of these natural rhythms would inform a lot of the mood like art or architecture or maybe like an idea like the holistically or whatever it is so the idea is got kind of rhythm which is similar to the visual thing or similar like you're saying to the way that these plants would behave just simply structure themselves in that space—
Louis: Yeah yeah it's like if you do into like yellow creeks doing the road and you see some of the trees that they're actually grown at the angle of the you know the wind I actually thought it was the wind but somebody told me it's the salt spray on the back that affects their growth so that side is slower growing that side goes faster so the sort of grown angle and it is they they adopted their environment.
Rob: So ladies and gentlemen that is us coming up to time almost—
Audience Member: All right yeah.
Rob: I just like you to if you have any further questions for Aaron and for Louis please now use your your chance otherwise in a few minutes time we'll take a further break for you to either mosey on home if you wish to do so or hang around and chat with these two fine gentlemen as well.
Audience Member: I just like to say I like the way you put together two completely different styles that work really well with each other—
Rob: That's the gallery owner, they take care—
Audience Member: I was intrigued by that one the first time I looked in here—
Audience Member: That's the other one I come to for. Talked a lot about music and you get the influence of it and then somebody once said the bulbs looked a bit like music.
Louis: All I can think of is the first five bulbs there basically play close together.
Audience Member: It's a kind of there is a kind of isolation about these it's quite it's a bit ghostly actually as well I think of course isolation—
Louis: Yeah it's not a contentment I wouldn't say happiness because happiness is one of these transient things—it's neither here nor there you know because you—
Audience Member: It's a Dutch thing about isn't it definitely—
Louis: I do like the Dutch I like the Dutch Realists—I think the frames they sort of relate to that as well they're sort of Dutch frames as well.
Audience Member: That's it—very self aware as well like that contentment is like being present there like you can't escape the moment any—like that moment there observing what's in front of you—
Louis: I mean it's good to hear folk talking about them because it does—
Rob: I think observation though, it has to be some sort of loneliness and observation because you can't observe in a group. You can only observe and if you've ever tried to figure out what observing is—a really difficult thing to what is it who is observing. I'm looking through a pair of eyes that I was born with but who is doing the observing and I think it is very insular and I think as you say isolated in that as well and I it's like part of the course.
Audience Member: I think what ties you both together is kind of the timelessness—that time that could be taken at any time at all that's been 19th 18th 20th 21st century and that one even more and and the nature one—and the same with with the ones with this strange wee man that's just timeless the past future—
Louis: I like that idea I like that idea I like that in the painting I like timelessness.
Audience Member: You don't get many lemon trees during the Calgate really do you—
Rob: Change. There you go. It's funny we're talking about earlier on that like chance and that you talked about for British and—
Arran Ross: Obviously he came to a sudden end with and how that was just a brief, short careers and suddenly—there's a way a lot of art that's presented by these a lot of these big financial guys is that somehow these this person was destined to do this and that's—it's not like that life's not like that—you could you could get trouble with artists who die young because you—
Louis: You just don't know. No. But that's the interesting that's the interesting thing as well, isn't it?
Arran: have a studio and extra dynamite. But having said that, you see that image, the bullfinch is really popular.
Audience Member: Would have here been that I think it was a popular in—
Arran: Brand. Goldfinch. That's a finch, isn't it?
Louis: Yeah, that they're finches but they're not all—I mean I do. They're not real finches, they're just finchy finches. I'm not sure what you mean. There's if they're real they're—
Audience Member: They have specific finches. They look like goldfinch.
Louis: Ah yeah, yeah, I would say they were goldfinches, right? They I think they were blue tits and the other ones were magpies. I quite like magpies. Magpies are good because—
Arran: I'm good with I wonder why your your colour scheme so that it's going to look pretty dramatic.
Louis: Well magpies—the other thing I liked about magpies was the whole superstition thing. You're talking about kids programs and I always remember magpie and the song that went with—and that was only because they copied Blue Peter. That's why they called it magpie because they'd ripped some details off.
But I do maybe it's the Catholic upbringing, but you get the—you do become superstitious and obviously not to the point where it's OCD—but you see a magpie and you think oh there's another one. Oh that's sorry then. But hopefully you don't let it get to you that if you only see one you go oh no, that's my day ruined. But so I do like them and as you see they're visually quite striking. Also that the finch—yeah, it's obviously got connotations as well.
Arran: That one of the theories with Colin Bailey, who was a professor and a really good speaker on the Dutch Masters. And they had this show up there with the Vermeer, and I went round with it and was interested in what he said, and what he said about it was different to the label, and we talked about the labels. And he said, well, he read it, and I said, well, what do you think of that? And he went, right, I'll tell you what I think. So he says that he thought that that was a secret icon, because Vermeer was married. Well, for Vermeer, like it was for a Catholic client, probably, who would have kept that as a secret altarpiece. And that's what he thought, and I thought that is what it's from, you just feel that's what it's about. But as he said, a lot of all of these facts, he says, I analyze paintings obviously. And you know, he's really fluent. He says, you know, one thing that never you can't explain beyond a certain point. He says the big great paintings, and they just they get to a point where it's very abstract. So you can't.
Louis: I mean, I know the symbolism, well I don't know all the symbols, but I know the Victorians used a lot of symbolism in their flowers and stuff like that. And I've seen they would put certain flowers that meant certain things. And I sort of like that idea, but obviously you're not aware of a lot, there's a lot of things that I do that I'm not aware of. Or just I don't know about them. And like you say, something else comes along and says, do you know what that means? But then you go, oh right, okay. That changes it for me as well. It means the next painting will I'll have that in my mindset, obviously, but you know.
Rob: I think that's a good spot to leave it at least for this for formal conversation. Thank you.
