William, or Bill, Holmes – otherwise known as Muhammad Ameen – has been in love with rockscapes at least since the start of his eastern journeys in the very early nineteen sixties. He left school early, and therefore the London suburbs. The road provided his further education. He travelled through Kandahar and Sindh, Baluchistan, and the Hindu Kush. He started his career selling simple landscapes and lake scenes to the tourists in houseboats on Kashmir’s Dal Lake.
Later, in a prison in Kuwait, he sold portraits in return for food and cigarettes. He said the shahada in Mauritania. Slipped into a trance at a Sufi sama in Urfa. His best-remembered journeys were with the Bedouin, mainly in Syria. Sometimes he crossed borders with them, not needing a checkpoint. He moved through a world which in many respects no longer exists.
For half a century since, he has settled in a part of Scotland whose bare brown hills and wildernesses remind him of the Syrian badia. He has painted in the Galloway uplands again and again, wrestling brevity as the light shifts and the colours change. He has painted faces in rock-faces – these have been his obsessive theme. He seeks to represent or at least to commemorate the art made by nature and time, by the wind and the wheeling sun.
