Marble Quarry - Iona

Original acrylic on canvas by David Page. 

This painting is one of David's new 2026 collection, Grit and Grace: Iona. 

Each painting in The Last Munro exhibition is accompanied by a limited edition, large-format book, featuring the full collection and David's insightful personal notes.

ARTISTS DESCRIPTION:

Like the north shore, artists have long been drawn to the “marble quarry” and its steep gully descending to the sea. The rock faces, sliced, levered, and split, now edge a piled-high graveyard of broken stones and the metal remnants of its extraction and processing.

Both S. J. Peploe and Cadell painted the site in situ - a challenging journey that required reaching the gully, setting up, and working on location. Here, it was human effort, not natural forces that shaped this fragment of the landscape, just as it did the abbey precincts, settlements, and tilled land.

This painting captures the excavated rock slot, the leftover stone detritus, and the rusting frames once used to lift stone - a meditation on past human labour and the painter’s attempt to record it.

Want to learn more about the collection? Read David's full artist statement here.