Norma Morgan with one of her paintings

When I was a girl growing up in Arisaig, a friend of my mothers came to stay. Norma Morgan was an artist from NYC who was on a sabbatical to the UK as she was fascinated by moors and mountains and wanted to spend time painting in the Highlands. As you can imagine, she was an exotic visitor and caused quite a stir in our wee Highland village!

She stayed for about a year and our spare room was turned into her studio – she was one of those people who, on reflection, influence a child’s life and I remember being amazed that a women could live independently by painting and go off and have adventures!

Over the ensuing years she has always kept in contact with my mother and Norma’s Christmas card and letter filled with news about another life in New York is always exciting to receive.

Yesterday I was so delighted to spend time with her again – the first time since I was a 10 year old! We sat in her communal garden under the magnolia tree thousands of miles from the Highlands and reminsced about her year with my family.

She is elderly now but still filled with enthusiasm for life and goes off camping in the mountains (using the same tent she had when she stayed with us!), plays music, paints and exhibits. She has a studio three hours away in Woodstock and visits when she can but has her 98 year old mother to care for so that is not so easy now. In her apartment were many of the paintings and etchings that she created in the Highlands – her work is either in oils and very large or small scale etchings. She does not like to sell her big work but has many pieces in collections all over the world including the V&A and Glasgow Museum.

Norma and her mother live a very simple life and I found the contrast between their apartment filled with paintings in progress and everyday life so different from the apartment that we went to for the reception on Thursday night!

Ethel her mother, is now in wheelchair and nearly blind but had an amazing life as a couturier, milliner and latterly as a writer and singer. Both women seem so happy and content with their lot in life and echoed the words of the Japanese jeweller, Reiko Ishiyama whose studio we visited the previous evening – to be an woman and artist in NYC is great as you can be who you want to here and nobody judges you. Ethel’s parting words to me were to live as long as I could because life is so wonderful!

The visit was such a good way to complete my trip here and perhaps is an example of how international exchanges can have such long lasting benefits and can affect the lives of people in so many ways.

It was lovely for both Norma and myself to see how her decision to come to the Highlands all those years ago had brought me back to see her and how my life had been influenced by seeing how she lived hers and how her life was changed by her time with us. She said she thinks of Arisaig every day of her life.

Pamela
19 April 2009