Dr. Donnie Ross has been an active member of Aberdeen Artists Society for 40 years, serving as President in 1990-92 and 2021-23. He was a founder-member of Grampian Hospitals Arts Trust, which he chaired for 10 years. He has been a flamenco guitarist (El Escocés) in a South London Chinese Restaurant and in a Stockholm nightclub, a medical officer at Brand’s Hatch Racetrack, a co-pilot in the Isle of Man air-race, a hospital consultant for 35 years, a medical director for 8 years and an Aberdeenshire crofter / tree planter for 40 years, now mixing Scottish native species with Sequoia and other giant redwoods.
In general, science and medicine abhor ambiguity, but art and creativity revel in generating alternative interpretations, constantly raising expectations only to subvert them. The twist in the tale or in the tune; the double take of visual phenomena, the pattern-matching hardwired into our every sensory modality, all of which by their very nature are vulnerable to playful subversion. So I believe if it ain’t subversive, it probably isn’t art!
A constant preoccupation for me has been how can we in our current era relate authentically to nature, to integrate our milieu intérieur with the external world. And maybe the crux of the problem lies in our emotional and neurophysiological evolution in mesolithic times, which could account for the dysphoria, the restless sense of unease that often afflicts us in cities, where we may feel shrunk, peripheralised and negated by the endless stony vistas, the crowd of unfriendly strangers, the haughty imposing buildings, and by all the desolate manmade spaces created in this appalling anthropocene age both in peacetime and war. Becoming aware of our essentially mesolithic nature, can we perhaps more specifically address our central need for meaningful environments which support rather than erode our sense of wellbeing? Is this what art might be about?
One can learn quite a lot in a lifetime of eighty years of constant observation of the world, self and others, and through the unceasing acquisition of skills; but at every turn the frontiers of one’s ignorance are starkly evident in every direction
Ach weel… For further information please see my experimental e-novel !Leonardo Mind for Modern Times, available as a free download from Apple Books:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/!leonardo-mind-for-modern/id541725141?mt=11
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/the-scottish-shed/id707709467?mt=11
