Page 57 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: At the Foot o’ Yon Excellin’ Brae

Standard Habbie Standard Habbie, Christ’s Kirk, The Cherrie and the Slae
pencil on paper, 2008, 42 x 59.4cm and Montgomerie’s Stanza are strung together to present
a compressed idea of an indigenous standard. They are
four compositional structures which Burns, amongst others,
traced through the poetic line in Scotland and therewith
took joint ownership of. Thereby locating his work, whatever
the subject, to a particular culture: articulate devices.
Supplant words with native metrics in ‘the words were
centres round which to gather his wandering wits’. 1
The drawing of them ascribes voice to these
influential component parts and imagines the visual transfer
ie, drawing or painting in ‘standard habbie’ for example.
There is foundation: ‘Language is the express
image and picture of human thoughts; and from the picture
we may draw some certain conclusions concerning the
original. We find in all languages the same parts of speech;
we find nouns, substantive and adjective; verbs, active
and passive, in their various tenses, numbers, and moods.
Some rules of syntax are the same in all languages.
Now what is common in the structure of
language, indicates a uniformity of opinion in those things
upon which that structure is grounded. The distinction
between substances, and the qualities belonging to them,
between thought, and the being that thinks, between
thought and the objects of thought, is to be found in the
structure of all languages. And therefore, systems of
philosophy, which abolish those distinctions, wage war with
the common sense of mankind.’ 2

1 A Lost Lady of Old Years - John Buchan, p122
2 Scottish Philosophy - The Principles of Reason, Thomas Reid;
edited by Gordon Graham, p146

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