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here comes the sun

Posted jane -->on 13th Jan 2022

it’s just started coming up over the hill a tiny bit earlier every morning, though there are more mornings than not where you can’t see it at all. this morning was a good one, the bright gold shimmer behind Owlet wood.

this is a photo taken near Lauder in the Scottish Borders where we went to meet some old friends on new Year’s Day. it’s about one and half hours from here.

we drove over the new Queensferry Crossing, which I think is very beautiful.

it was lovely to walk amongst these big hills – they have a wilder feeling than my new home country, which has rich soils and is quite intensively cultivated. shaggy grass, sheep and big plantations, upland and open.

it wasn’t a huge walk as we’d met up with a family. we had a picnic at the top in the shelter of a wall and a clump of trees.

plenty of sheep

and conversations.

I have walked in Kemback woods and Blebo Craigs a few times in the last couple of weeks, finding new paths

new ways of getting lost

there is a patchwork of old plantation blocks, crowded and dark

you are never quite sure if the path you have found will continue

or lead you over the edge of a cliff. I think this pool, high up amongst quarry workings, may be the source of a high waterfall.

pillows of moss

greening the glades

and smothering old spoil heaps

walls in damp places here in Fife are often covered in moss

mossy greens turning up in the paintings too

this is a stage, the painting started out in September with golden yellows and some dark reds  at the bottom, then it became something to  do with Scotstarvit tower, then it sat about for ages. the week before I painted a nude figure on it. but that wasn’t what I wanted, and the squeegee came out.

 

I wrote into the paint, and there were bits I really liked

but the next day it was looking too dark

it’s become this, with the many layers perceptible under the paint, and more text scratched into it.

I love this big area of pink

I pray you for days back
and your green man sent for
the crescent moon landed
cut off at the neck
just below the hair

I seem to have a pink series going on. my daughter made me this scarf, the pink a reflection of what’s going on in the work. punk pink, shocking pink, not little girl’s pink.

I have paintings without it though

the blues of those shadowy pine plantations

and the whoosh of waterfalls

at Kemback after heavy rain.

another painting; here

the paint is squeegeed thickly and written into. a pair in waiting to see if they are ready or not.

 

 

 

the darkest month

Posted jane -->on 29th Dec 2021

going back to front, yesterday I managed to undo all those bags of topsoil, and the new prairie bed looks like this –

visions of tall asters, echinaceas and coneflowers of all sorts in the late summer, and perhaps I can get some grasses established too. we need that vision at this darkest time of year, when it’s cold and (currently) very wet, and even the seedlings indoors are dying through lack of light and my lack of experience – either I have under-watered them, or more likely over-watered them, and in the bay window it’s cooler than the rest of the house unless there’s sunshine. I have 4 echinaceas left of fifteen, very frustrating when the whole packet germinated, and one coneflower out of half the packet – the other ones I tried did not germinate and have been in and out of the fridge twice now. I must put the rest of the packet in the fridge before trying again in March.

the weather has mostly been dreich (pronounced dreek) – an Old Scottish word derived from Middle English and Old Norse – meaning drear. so a glimpse of sun as in this photo, taken at the top of the Hill of Tarvit (or Wemyss Hill, as the summit is apparently called), was quite special.

it’s a steep climb to the top, five hundred feet from the car park, I thought I was fitter, but had to stop for a breather halfway up.

a hill I can easily walk to from home.

grazed by cattle or sheep at times. there are snowdrops beginning to show in the edge of the woods below, belonging to the mansion house.

 

 

when the dreich is mist and you can see blue sky above, it is much more enjoyable. this is the little stone-built humpbacked bridge over the Eden I use to access the river path.

the sun coming through, and the river quite low again.

more reworking has been going on in the studio, this small painting needed more warmth …

the more layers the better, I think –

this was a start from scratch, a cradled ply panel (I bought ten of them) thirty by thirty inches

with collage of paint and pencil on paper ripped up and stuck on over the first layer of red oxide paint, on an overgrown path was my thought, I’d been listening to the Janaček

plenty of paths in my head

but the next day it became this

I had the radio on, Radio Three’s afternoon concert –

they were playing Pelleas und Melisande, a symphonic poem by Arnold Schoenberg

of course Melisande is a water creature who takes on human form – and this has a lily pond look to it –

so her name is scratched through the paint, and the title is something like Melisande’s over grown path …

tackling it with the new squeegee, and then the spray bottle.

in between, walks at Kemback, avoiding the fallen trees

and the old quarry cliffs

and caves

two sorts of lichen on this fallen branch, maybe more

patterns we respond to

maybe the pattern of our world, down to our DNA

and here’s me, trying to make my own patterns. so the yellow lid has gone – it wasn’t very firmly fixed –

 

more yellow

and more pink …

then one that surprised me into stopping after a couple of layers about two months ago –

attacking with the squeegee and the spray bottle, after strategically placing paint ..

it might be finished now

painted to the sound of Sir Simon Rattle/Berliner Philharmoniker playing l’Oiseau-Lyre et la Ville-Fiancée from Messiaen’s Eclairs sur l’au-delà, one of my favourite pieces of music – all the shimmering textures and bird sounds.

I also finished two little ones – 20 x 20 cm

on ply boards – no titles yet

well, and then we had Christmas (this is my son in law, Scott Donaldson, with a board full of little pasta shapes he’s just made, on Christmas Eve.)

one of my Christmas presents was an apple pencil, to use on my ipad. I have been frustrated for some time with sketching and painting apps, because painting with my finger just doesn’t feel right, it’s clumsy on that size screen. this is painted with an app called Art Set, which provides lovely thick paint mark-making with a palette knife, as above.

this is drawn with Procreate, fine for drawing, but the painting side of it very disappointing, thin and wishywashy. even this 6b pencil tool is frustrating as it stops making a mark after a couple of ziggzaggy loops, and you have to take it off the screen and start again.

a feeling for grasses – these in Cairngreen Wood

marrams

on the beach at Tentsmuir

I have started playing with the Hipstamatic camera app again

I love these gritty textures

I just put it on shuffle, as I have too many effects now to discover what they will do on a certain day

this was on 27th December. a strange misty day with a silvery light, and the inspiration for the ipad painting above the pencilled one.

the pools and burn are high with water after all the wet.

on Boxing day it was wet all day everywhere except for this hill above Perth

we didn’t even meet much mud, as so many of the paths are well-maintained cinder tracks

spectacular views of the Tay

ruins, cliffs,

plunging slopes

trees that had to be captured

that are totem poles

or turning into monsters that creep across boggy pastures

giant sequoia

towering in the arboretum by the car park

and I think this is Noble Fir, Abies procera, of the pine family, with a smooth trunk and no branches until very high up.

 

the colours of winter

Posted jane -->on 14th Dec 2021

it’s surprising how much colour there is left in the landscape. it’s early winter of course, so the bracken and the beech leaves and the larch needles are still bright rust colours.

they stray into some of my paintings, in layers of veiling colour and translucent run of watered-down paint.

beech leaves like these will hang onto trees, and hedges, for months, but they will lose that bright orange tone.

skies may be grey, but winter wheat and autumn-sown barley will continue to grow in mild weather, bringing a thick thatch of green to fields.

oranges and pinks at dawn and dusk.

as dawn is now something like 8:30 am here in Fife one sees it more than in the summer.

the colours of winter skies are grey, pink and yellow, the land green, burnt sienna and grey here in Fife where we have stone walls.

the second storm of December, Barra (named after a  Northern Irish TV weather man) was short and sharp over here on the Eastern side of Scotland. I was painting in my studio in the afternoon, and the wind made vacuuming noises in the gaps between the new wooden wall of my studio where we replaced the garage up-and-over door. I have taken to using a squeegee for the layers of paint – it brings up the textures underneath and produces a semi-transparent veil of colour. it dis-allows for detail and fussiness too.

I don’t always use it, this one was finished with an even thinner layer brushed on of a turquoise-green, allowed to run with water added from my spray bottle

and some brighter green painted on with a small brush at the end of a cane.

the day after Barra I was most upset to find this precious jewel of a bird, a male bullfinch, lying dead in the drive – I had been so happy to see him in the gardens at the back of my house for the few days before. so he is commemorated in the painting above, Barra bullfinch. I buried him in the roots of the dark pink rose I was planting at the time, Mme Isaac Periere.

Barra came in at a completely different angle from Arwen, from the South-East, and ripped the dunes apart on Tentsmuir beach.

I found this sea-mouse, about eight inches long, washed up. it’s a kind of marine worm. Its body is covered in bristles – giving it a furry appearance. At the fringes are beautiful iridescent bristles which shimmer blue, green and gold. the sea mouse is an active predator, hunting small crabs and other worms on the seabed, but out of its element like this it is not beautiful at all.

it was a grey morning, the sun trying to come through, with silvery reflections on water and wet sand.

this is a neglected garden on my route to the river Eden here in Cupar. I love it – great for wildlife!

the river is wearing its winter face, its water is thick and fast and would drown you if you got into it. it has otters and big brown trout, kingfishers, herons and dippers.

we had a few very frosty days last week; then the colours are pastel versions of themselves, filtered through the frost crystals.

another painting got taken much further last week

after walking around the Foodie hills and watching these RAF Typhoons come flying out of Leuchars one had to end up on the painting

typhoon for low-flying combat aircraft, and typhoon for storm. someone said that this is a turbulent painting. “Where are you now, Rumgally” (scratched into the paint), the fighter jet and all these winter yellows. or something like.

working on it with very little intentionality. but in my hand is a tube of green paint, and it’s tube to canvas with no intermediary.

I have been around that walk again since then, on a pure sunlit morning, frost and ice underfoot

after rain early in the night the sky cleared. black ice everywhere. I did skate a little on some roads.

puddles broken by tyres

a good morning for drawing

once I had warmed up with the long-drawn-out hills and the sun on my back

Pitcullo farm buildings with their neo-gothic crowsteps and their stone and mortar warmed by late morning sun. here the road was particularly treacherous for a walker.

on Sunday we had a bit of an expedition to Dunkeld. it’s only forty miles from here, easy for the electric car, although the winter cold has reduced its range by a third.

everything there is on a much bigger scale – the hills, the trees ….

even the moss seems brighter and taller

it was quite hard work, not only did we climb up about 150 metres on the Pass of the Caves, it was slippery and narrow.

but very pretty in its wild way with the little burn tumbling down and all the moss and trees and boulders

views of the valley full of mist with the warmer air after  snow and ice

which was still around higher up

an overgrown path and the red larch needles on the ground

back to the studio, so many echoes of these colours.

the third paint-over, swishing pale greens around with a few globs of cerulean, orangey coral and yellow ochre while listening to the Beatles album, let it be ….

and scratching text from a poem into it. then an acid yellow appeared from some colours mixed in the stay-wet tray

balanced with a bit of pink, and here it is – Three Wishes(Hidden), 70 x 80 x 4 cm.

winter gardening has been happening – I am making a new flower bed

sheet mulching for prairie flowers – I have the seeds for them. and a Spartan apple tree went in today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Storm Arwen

Posted jane -->on 1st Dec 2021

of course she is the main player this last week. we were lucky in Cupar, a few trees down, but no power cuts. the lights flickered a lot on Friday, but I was terribly relieved when I switched on the light on Saturday morning and found we were still connected.

also I have just (at last) got the little greenhouse up, having found an odd job man, and as I had gone down the cheaper road of ordering horticultural glass, I was very worried that it wouldn’t survive the 70 mph gusts we were forecast.

on Saturday morning it seemed that a few things had tumbled about, but the greenhouse was intact.

I don’t have any shelves yet, I wonder when they will arrive. I ordered this in the spring. so some tender things have gone in there; there won’t be any protection against frost but perhaps not having cold winds blasting them will help. if there are intense frosts I’ll get out the woolly liners I used last year to protect all the baby prairie plants.

the studio is pretty cold, one day this week it was only 1C (I have a reflective halogen heater so spending 10p on electricity, as my new smart meter tells me, gets me to 11 or 12C which is bearable). the next day things had warmed up outside and everything inside had condensation on it. this painting is going to take a long time to dry enough for me to do the next stage – I used a slow-drying medium. reminding self not to use it in the winter any more.

I brought this plastic pot with four pink pelargoniums in it indoors and installed them on a metal tray table in the bay window. I love them! they are giving me far more pleasure than they did outside.

before the storm I decided to have another go at Ariadne’s bed in the wood, turned it on its side and drew a reclining nude partly from sketchbook, partly memory and imagination, with a small brush on a long stick. all those colours coming through the drawing made me hesitate about going any further, but I girded my loins –

I’m so glad I did. there’s a lot left of the original layers but I think they talk to the new paint. I am very happy with this and have brought her indoors out of the cold studio

and put her above my bed

so I can listen to her and the wood at night

as for the real wood

this one big larch had gone over just before the entrance to Owlet wood

and there were one or two small dead silver birches blown over, and some branches off,

but on the whole surprisingly little damage.

on Sunday morning there was a small amount of snow. the blackbirds busy taking the last of the rowan berries and digging about in my pine-bark-mulched flower beds, chucking bits of bark everywhere. I’m very pleased to see coal tits along with the blue and great tits, pecking at the sunflower heads. my garden begins to be a wildlife refuge. there was even a male bullfinch yesterday. the cotoneasters have lots of berries which attracts thrushes as well as pigeons and blackbirds.

 

walking down along the river there were more trees damaged

two small alders across the path had to be ducked under and further along a beech had lost its top two thirds.

on the whole there’s not anything like the damage we saw in 1987 in the hurricane that hit the South of England, except today I was told that three hundred acres of pine plantation has been flattened in the northern part of Tentsmuir Forest. I remember seeing a plantation gone like that in 1987 in Suffolk. once one goes they all go.

at Kemback there was quite a bit of debris – twigs and branches cleared on the road verges –

the good sound mature trees seem to have stood up to the storm pretty well

a large limb had ripped off this one

some young highland cows had escaped their rather small field, trampling the electric fencing and were sampling the woodrush in this patch of birch

and the sudden rise in temperature (this was on Tuesday, air temperatures went from from freezing to 10C during the day) gave rise to mists blowing across the hills

on the northern side of the wood the path was blocked by several fallen trees

though there were a lot more lying beside it

mature Douglas fir on the edge of the wood

and to get past this oak we had to scramble and duck through the branches and then under the main trunk

possibly a bit dangerous in retrospect

this beech tree must have been diseased I think

though it stands out on the edge, perhaps more exposed

we had to make a steep detour to get around it. what a rending splitting and cracking that must have been.

big beech trees are awesome, great demigods of the woods

a small oak gone here

it will make a different opportunity for life than the one it has been.

and a truly ripped and rended Douglas, almost folded by its own weight.

I wrote “Arwen” on the side of this small painting in charcoal

there is something of the woods in this one. both are additional layers, have been work in progress paintings waiting to be right and done.

today we went to Tentsmuir; it has been closed with many fallen trees in the rides and paths, but luckily today they had opened the car park

the sea was quite wild and the incoming tide was creaming up the beach

penning us in against the dunes

not many people there

something large and white on the horizon, maybe a ship?

so great for Bims to run without the need for a muzzle – with only mad packs of the professional dog-walkers about I took it off, it didn’t seem fair.

at last a resolution on this one. After Kimura, green and yellow fields with thorn hedge. 44 x 60 cm.

and a middle layer which brought lots of ideas for colour combinations

I watched a programme about Bridget Riley, one of the great innovative artists of the twentieth century, now in her nineties and still painting, still pushing herself.

as with the impressionists and post impressionists, she uses the juxtaposition of colours to produce the impression of other colours.

also I  was very interested in how influenced by the landscape she is – the shapes and movement in it.

it made me think I should work harder on my colours.

 

four reservoirs

Posted jane -->on 16th Nov 2021

on Sunday my daughter and I tried a new walk from the Fife Walking website. last winter when we couldn’t leave Fife because of the Covid restrictions it was a useful resource and we found plenty of interesting walking options close to home.

this one is close to Glenrothes, around four small reservoirs supplying drinking water to the area.

I have only seen the huge dams in the Peak District before, especially the one that drowned Hope village, where my mother’s school was evacuated from Sheffield during WW2. these are much less of an interruption of the landscape, mown grassy berms covering the dam walls, and paved channels where the burns over-spill through sluices and continue down the valley to the river Leven and the Firth of Forth.

quite bleakly upland sheep grazing and sitka plantation, mostly harvested, with the pale grey tree rubble lying on gentle slopes we crossed in the first half-mile or so. and off in the distance West Lomond,

lurking under its wreath of low cloud

and East Lomond in the other direction. they are stumps of Carboniferous era volcanoes, and the upland they thrust out of is composed of metamorphosed hard sedimentary rock infested by sills and dykes of magma.

these very bold sheep and one goat belonged to an isolated house, they obviously expected treats and Bims was quite overawed by them.

it is sheep that keep these quite low hills as almost featureless grass. we climbed a long hill next to a hedge of blackthorn

past sycamore and beech, the broken-down stone walls attesting the bones of the land.

after a short sharp climb the walk is quite level, and you can see the flattened hills around East Lomond and imagine the old ice sheets snubbing up to and over these resistant rocks, smoothing them down but leaving them standing. you have to think of the Greenland ice sheet to imagine it.

down a little to a gate and a small road, and that takes you round the biggest reservoir, Ballo, to  a track leading to the ruined Ballo castle, which in truth is very small and not very obvious.

and on to the dam of the next reservoir, Harperleas

the water levels are quite low

although we have had some heavy rain, it’s been mostly dry and mild.

these semi-industrial structures fascinated me

they seemed more like the foundations of a strange architecture from a different civilisation, ancient and hidden.

an interesting walk rather than a beautiful one. a solitary fisherman had two rods out over the dam wall of this last, smallest reservoir, Drumain, and we walked down past the weirs and filter beds to the car park at the top of Holl reservoir.

some drawing happened

it’s handy to have someone else to hold Bims.

I have to be quick or I will get left behind

Bims was very clever at negotiating some stiles we had to climb over at this point. standing on a narrow tread she stepped one leg at a time over the wire. I was most impressed. from her old agility training?

back home and yesterday morning there was exciting news – this painting (seen in the last post) has been ‘pre-selected’ for Visual Arts Scotland’s annual exhibition in the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. they say they try not to de-select after you have delivered but there is a possibility your work will not be hung/displayed/installed. so it’s not a done deal. the exhibition is in january and february. but these things are quite hard to get into and are open to international submission as well as members of VAS. it gives me a bit of positive direction to work on. text paintings! strong colours! palimpsests! veils of paint! (this pair of canvases were rejected from another open submission this summer, with a rather different painting,

under this – but all these layers contribute ….

and here is another that has not yet resolved, I prefer this stage to the previous one

here, which just looks to me as if it, and I, have no idea what is going on! the more I fiddled with it the worse it got. so no more fiddling, instead a big brush and a gallon of dirty white made a bit translucent with medium … which has made it dry very slowly, giving me time to think about it.

meanwhile I re-stretched this canvas from ’96 and hung it in the living room. it has landscape qualities which are quite autumnal – the silk fabric pattern is a Chinese landscape of pine trees – as well as being part of a continuum of paintings about being a female painter who paints the female body, usually her own, to avoid any exploitative aspects of this oh so traditional painterly trope.

and to get back to the landscape – almost in the centre of this photo is a red dot, the waterproof rug of a horse on top of the hill.

Kinshaldy beach – the light gets more and more slanted on these November mornings

although last week the light was so clear and the sky so blue

periwinkle shells on the mouth of the eden estuary. because the oceans are already quite acidified by the extra carbon we have been pumping into the atmosphere, shellfish like these cannot produce thick enough shells to protect themselves from crabs. (if they smell a crab in the water they normally thicken up their shells)

one of the treats of going to walk at Tentsmuir at this time of year is the beech trees that line parts of the road through the forest.

at first glance this looks like the same photo, but in fact it is a view down the 220 steps at Kemback, which is also a treat to visit just now.

we went on a morning that threatened rain

wellied up

as it is a muddy walk anyway in the winter

but we were lucky

and even though parts are looking quite wintery now (I love this licheny squiggle of grey trunks, all these lines)

the colours are so much to do with the light shining through leaves

again, you can’t beat a beech tree for sheer huge exuberance

some more drawing

lying about

and meditating on how to combine the old with the new

the best bit of this new painting … but it needs more and so I will have to do what we call in poetry killing off your baby, the bit that needs editing because it’s holding you back.

the last of the wild cherry (gean) leaves in the view from my house. now I will be waiting until April for the blossom.

meanwhile there is a terrible stink from the field behind, where they harvested the broccoli and then dumped it in rotting heaps. Oh COP26, oh COP-out. stinks from all directions.

and talking of green things, I am very slowly getting my greenhouse built, yesterday I rather inexpertly concreted in the corners of the base

the frame is in 4 sections indoors, waiting for a propitious day to bolt it together and attach it to the base.

the rudbekias make lovely cut flowers, now I don’t expect them to last very much longer outside – we have not had a real frost yet – but I presume, like dahlias, the flowers will not survive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and November is here

Posted jane -->on 2nd Nov 2021

I’m just looking at my prairie flowers which are still blooming away, wondering when the first frost will wither them.

or if it will. I have bags of bark to mulch them with but I don’t see how to do that at the moment.

that orange colour seems to have transferred itself to my palette. well, I did buy a tube of cadmium orange paint.

but then more layers, so the orange is just vibrating quietly in the background

maybe something to do with brass instruments

it popped up in other places too – this is a small board. with small I can be terribly simple, but it’s much harder on a bigger painting.

I have a lot of little postcard size paintings mounted on card, which I did for Open Studios.

North Fife Open Studios was held just for one weekend in October. it was really a bit cold and damp for having doors open and people coming and going. I had fourteen visitors in all. I think with being a new artist to the area, and people not really fully into going out and about because of the pandemic, I was lucky to have that many.

not quite so small but feeling the effects of working on a lot of small things at the same time. I’m still quite pleased with this one a couple of weeks later.

and here is one that a couple of posts ago was a rich yellow with strong blue corners …two or three more layers and changes of mind

and some text

rearranging sunlight. it’s quite cheerful and cheeky.

beach walking continues

it’s very soothing

there’s always something to be awed by

mesmerised by

inspired by.

autumn proceeds

the woods are full of treasures

I did a bit of leaf printing

I draw almost every day

so many things make me want to draw

the landscape changes all the time, with new growth

decay

the light is different

so many forms and colours

every wood is a joy, and a sadness of transience at the moment

there are lots of woods in this part of Fife, Kemback, Cairngreen, Owlet .. not to mention Lumbo and Spinkie dens and Lade Braes in St Andrews.

Kemback is particularly gorgeous

the waterfalls on its steep slopes were very active after the heavy rain this weekend

I was drawing in the rain under a dripping tree on Blebo Craig, above Kemback.

a watery postcard

walking around Craiglug yesterday

I did quite a few drawings

and back in the studio

some chemistry with new woody crayons, pastel and some paint on paper

over this big panel

and here we are. painting on panel is quite different to canvas, it’s much more like working on paper.

I think paying attention

being attentive

allows things to go on in the brain. there are no shortcuts though. today in the studio was mess-making. ultimately it contributes, if you eventually get there, but meanwhile it’s pretty frustrating.

sometimes sewing is more comforting.

 

 

 

 

bigger hills

Posted jane -->on 17th Oct 2021

last Sunday we took the electric car to Glen Tilt, a round trip of 120 miles with hills and dual carriageway – I did not drive faster than 60 mph, but the hills on the way seemed to be sucking up a lot of juice. however on the trip as a whole, the battery performed well and we only used 120 miles on the battery readout, so very satisfactory.

this is the annual sloe-picking walk, with snacky picnic and beautiful scenery. last year there was a killer hill, but this time the shooting range being open we had to walk along the river and avoided it.

walking up from Blair Atholl the river Tilt has an impressive rocky bed, and the beech trees – so many in Scotland – are lovely. although there were leaves on the ground of many colours there were very few trees that had changed to autumn golds

a small stand of birches on the hill like soft flames

a few speckles of gold here and there

not so many conifers

we crossed the river

some change to a more yellowy tint. last year we were a couple of weeks later and the beeches had definitely got their autumn glory together.

beech seems very successful in this climate

Kemback, Lumbo Den … they all have majestic graceful beech trees.

here their trunks are splotched with green and white algae

a lot of this version of the path didn’t have views of the hills

until further along, a little higher up

the heather and bracken make interesting colour combinations of browns and ochres

looming hills made to look smaller by the phone camera

on the way back we were a little higher, above this croft with its four barking dogs in kennels, and idyllic stone wall enclosed fields

and this dear little bothy on the edge, by a tumbling burn (something growing out of its chimney, so it looked disused). the sitka spruce plantation is a bit of a sad blot on the Glen.

but I was happy to see several big glossy healthy ash trees here. perhaps the Glen shelters them from wind-blown spores of the ash die-back fungus.

lots of rough pasture

another splendid isolated ash, and a rather less croft-like house (not in the photo) with its horses

and back through open woods

grassy glades of birch and oak, perhaps what would grow here naturally, but more spruce and larch plantation hanging down to the river.

nearing our hedgerow destination. the birds have not taken the rowan berries yet.

some of the blackthorn has turned quite special pale orange and amber. but not many sloes, the same as last year. but the year before there were masses.

pretty silver birches with catkins already

and silvery lichen thick on the hedge trees.

I did manage some drawing

not as much as Glen Feshie, it was cold, and there was the odd spot of rain. we walked eight miles altogether. there is a longer walk, further up the Glen, of twelve miles, it would be fun to do that one day, with more in the way of a lunch.

 

 

 

 

 

autumn’s bright face

Posted jane -->on 4th Oct 2021

after a weekend of summer temperatures we have really entered the new season, cold clear nights are here and there are stars to look at when I supervise B’s night outings in the garden. she says there are rats and cats – something gave her a big surprise around the bins last night, while I was gazing at Cassiopeia.

our beach walks have slipped to a little later, and there is no chance of meeting the nudist who seems to want to shock us women dog walkers at Kinshaldy beach, it’s too cold for his preferred outfit of boots, cap and rucksack. I got an article published in the local newspaper, the Courier, about him; after the terrible fate of Sarah Everard, we can’t just make a joke of creepy men who think a woman’s discomfiture is an aim to be wished for.

last week at 9.30 am, the perfect sky, the perfect sand and ripple marks

it was deserted until about an hour later

then I went to the Tatha Gallery for their current show of Wilhemina Barns-Graham

screen prints

I think the exhibition had an effect on that afternoon’s painting

I am making postcard size paintings

for an open submission online exhibition run by Highgate Art. you send 20 images, and if you are lucky enough that they select any, they go up for sale on their website anonymously. a way for lesser known artists to be seen.

this bigger piece on a full sheet of Khadi handmade paper, strong enough for multi-layers and quite a bit of water and wet paint applied.

the garden gets better and better, just hoping there are no frosts until the echinaceas and rudbeckias and other prairie plants have finished flowering. the greenhouse arrives tomorrow, but it’s a kit, so goodness knows when we’ll get it up. first there needs to be a level floor for the base.

I had a lovely walk along the Firth of Tay just over a week ago

I had to go to Wormit to collect leaflets and signpost for Open Studios, which happens in just under 3 weeks. there is a car park there just along from the Tay rail bridge (in the photo) and you can walk along the Fife Coastal path to Balmerino.

we met this lovely friendly young pig (B was not impressed), passed a sign for coffees and ice cream just off the path which another time might be useful.

some houses right on the path have their own boat slipway into the estuary. the path is quite up and down, on one case with steps, as a few little burns cut down the steep slope to the Tay through woods.

B has got to know about kissing gates, but each new one is a challenge.

At Balmerino you can follow a path inland through meadow and woods, past horses (as in the scribble above) along a road and then back down to Wormit with more views of the Tay and the bridge. a five and a half mile leg-stretcher, on a beautiful Sunday morning.

at Kemback on a rainy morning the leaves showed signs of autumn – this cherry will soon be blazing

and the black poplars

a rather different colour. colourful leaves have fallen in the wood and decorate the paths, but the trees still look green with that radiant light pouring through the beech trees on the lower slopes.

the horses at Blebo Craig, above the wood, are a rewarding draw

and Bims as always

even some agricultural machinery caught my eye,

but I have been looking back through old catalogues of my very different paintings in the 90’s, and then looking at Tracey Emin’s paintings alongside those of Munch in her recent exhibition at the RA, and thinking of those, I did a few self-life-drawings in the mirror and found that drawing horses and cows has sharpened up my skills, and I am interested in how that works with the paintings.

a small one. I am prepared to be much more minimal with this kind of drawing/painting

and use memory and the impression of how it feels to be in my flesh and bones as a seventy-one year-old woman, as much as how it looks.

painting like this has influenced my attitude to drawing for sure

then for October I am following a daily prompt by Angela Carr, for poems on the theme of Samhain, after a two month lazy layover of not writing a thing. I think it’s done me good as I am feeling fresh and enthusiastic, and the words are popping out onto the paintings again, no doubt influenced by Tracey too.

under your open arms

our unending confessions

nothing but our pulse

and the vibrating yellow layer over swirling greens

whereas this blue and gold knocks back a whole lot of detail and “stuff” on another diptych, and I’ve scratched through the paint with the point of a palette knife

harder to see in the photos

your anthill eyes
filigree and irreversible

the poem is addressed to Hecate as an earth goddess, thinking of our walk at Glen Feshie, but also thinking of self as embodying the triple goddess.

today was a ramble along the river eden

still low in her bed

under these hills that I never get tired of

and all the autumn berries

red ones

and pink ones on the golf course

leaves with their stems already snagged by earthworms, standing up in the grass

and these hills as ever

postcarding it

into my practise

with towers

and stubble fields

 

 

 

 

towering

Posted jane -->on 7th Sep 2021

the end of August doesn’t include a bank holiday in Scotland, as the schools have been back for a couple of weeks. there’s no official end of summer feeling, though we had some chilly nights and I started to obsess about frosts and plants.

I have finally removed the protective fence around the bigger new bed, and mulched it with some lawn cuttings. the only prairie plants that are flowering freely are the little cone flowers

the bigger ones seem quite stuck, some with buds that aren’t opening, or in the case of the rudbeckias, unable to open fully.

happily, the love in the mists are doing well.

I have one rudbeckia flower fully out ….

along the river the himalayan balsam is flowering in its punk pink, freckled and in all shades from pale to fucshia.

it sparked a few days of working over a big mainly blue and peach canvas I decided needed more doing to it.

I did this to it on my ipad. looking at it again I like the mark-making –

better than what I actually did, above. a painter I like on instagram, Karl Bielik, summed up his work in one sentence as “I make visceral loose process driven oil paintings full of doubt and chance.” I guess that’s what I try to do, in acrylic, and the doubt always gets me. not loose enough, Jane!

experimenting with impasto and gel

this was under some of that jabby pink …maybe I shouldn’t have covered it up.

river bank drawing on the spot …

a resolution for more pink and drippy stuff … the blue section caught the drips from another painting, the last of the three Glen Feshies, and the right hand was the spare bit.

I had to wait for another roll of canvas to arrive, then these cut out and painted,

I zig-zag stitched them together with my old semi-industrial Bernina,

since I  was sewing these pink trousers and had the thread in the machine

not entirely satisfactory as the lower piece got stretched a bit. an interesting experiment. putting this arrangement on a stretcher might even it out enough … sometimes I probably overthink my painting processes!

more pink – but turning to white fluff now as the seed pods split open

a grey morning – this summer most mornings have been grey, the low cloud burning off later if we are lucky –

while I was taking this photo I disturbed the resident sea eagle which was perched on one of the posts

I wasn’t quick enough to catch it with the phone camera, but it flew low across the estuary mouth, its huge wingspan and white wedge on the tail making it easy to identify

and landed on one of the banks exposed by the low tide. you can see a dark object there. it was being mobbed by the seagulls which appeared tiny. it had something to eat out there. it might have been feeding from the seal carcass which is slowly rotting into the sand at the top of the beach. another day in conversation on the beach I found that there are two pairs here, one nesting in the forest at the Eden end, the way I walk, and one further up the Tay. introduced, and doing well.

a sure sign of September – a big but lonely clump of sea aster in flower. this is all over the saltmarsh edges at Morston and Cley to Salthouse, but I haven’t seen it here before.

my big news is that I decided I’d had enough of the 2017 Leaf with its very restricted range, and having read that the new Renault Zoe has a better battery range than some bigger cars – 240 miles – I found a forecourt car with 10 miles on the clock for £5000 less than the new price minus the government grant. of course I lost on selling the Nissan, but it’s such a relief to know that I can drive to Glasgow and back, or Edinburgh, or even the Cairngorms. it’s more efficient than the Leaf. I haven’t been very far in it yet, though I have a trip to Glasgow planned in the next couple of weeks to look at an exhibition of wonderfully colourful paintings by Alison McWhirter

meanwhile, this is surely the last stage in this 50 x 50 cm painting’s evolution. braided river/closing over brooding stones. another reference to Glen Feshie.

twittering swallows at Craigsanquhar farm on Saturday’s rather damp drizzly walk from Dairsie. they are getting ready to fly to South Africa.

I made a cake for a walk this weekend, I had planned it during the week, an extension of the Eden river walk, for Lucy and my Sunday walk. Poor Em being too old and wobbly for much of a walk, Scott is sacrificed on the altar of daughterly love, and he’s the one that’s missing out.

so from the house we walked down to the little stone bridge that crosses the river, and followed the meandering Eden as far as you can. before Springfield the way is blocked by a big old stone mill that comes right to the edge, and is owned by a concrete block company. but the road is quiet  and has a decent footpath, as so many places do in Fife

we passed a flower selling stall from a grower in the field, and made a note.

if we had been able to approach via the river bank there would have been a photo of this beautiful high-arched stone bridge, but as it was, here one is looking down from it.

then on and across the A91, but the road I had chosen is not quiet at all, and narrow, so we went into the stubble fields and up through a wood, almost blocked with bracken, then along the side of the hill in more stubble

with great views

through to Scotstarvit, passing by the farm yard, as the track that’s marked on the OS map is now blocked with trees and scrub, to the tower house

you can just see this from the other side of the river

built in the 15thC and modified early in the 17th

a good place to sit below and have coffee and plum cake

then back through the Hill of Tarvit estate, up to Whitehill, over Ceres Moor and back to my front door. 8.3 miles altogether with some steep uphill in that wood, and the most beautiful late summer day, quite warm. I wouldn’t want to do that every weekend, but now and again … our next expedition may be Norman Law, shorter but much steeper. it’s the most easterly of the Ochills and more or less north of Cupar, with wonderful views, so we want a clear, fresh day.

and the last painting of this post, possibly (that doubt again) resolved yesterday with thoughts of the golden stubbles and the tower, but it started in my usual way with some fluid lines and a bit of colour, then it became a pour painting

on Saturday i did some pretty intense scrawly stuff on it

but by Monday was doubting that, and it did seem very dark, so I got out all my yellows and golds and a bit of white and lots of impasto gel, and covered a lot of this up.

with more of this

and worked back through it with the palette knife point.

it may be finished,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

late August – wet grass

Posted jane -->on 24th Aug 2021

two new walks for this post – the Saturday before last I walked from St Monan’s to Pittenweem along the coastal path,

and then inland via the Balcaskie estate and Abercrombie.

in fact I’ve done this walk before, in early spring, but the other way round, and then I avoided Pittenweem harbour because my knee didn’t like steep slopes and lots of steps. the knee is so much better now it isn’t a problem, but this way round there’s no steep downhills. the two harbours are still working, used by local fishermen.

between them there’s no beach to speak of, more a rocky foreshore exposing the geology.

out there is a rather pointy large boat. I assumed it was military, but in fact it was a luxury vessel, on which Tom Cruise may, or may not have been, according to local rumour.

inland

more drawing than phone snaps

around Inch farm

the entrance to Balcaskie

which has an ornamental gate and twin doocots (that’s dovecots for sassenachs)

tree avenues

a handsome gothicky house

and park full of trees that just ask to be drawn

then there’s the little disused church with its yews

I’ll be going back with more paper scrap sketchbooks

suddenly saw jaws in the gate latch …

the combines were advancing as the day dried up and the sun was out.

everything looking ready.

I started this one early last week, it’s my last big piece of canvas off the roll, so 180 cm wide and about 170 tall. under that wash of pale pink and green are two or three more layers, but I wanted something much more fluid. Craiglug is the hill with rocky cliffs exposed above Dairsie.

the track below it is lined with wild flowers, and rosebay is big and bold through August, its magenta pink enlivening the soft greens of tall grasses and cut hayfields …

like this painting

another day we walked along the Eden, which is infested with another pink flower, himalayan balsam, impatiens glandulifera, less welcome, being an invasive alien. I picked a big bunch and inserted it in the folds of a huge wool and silk shawl, making a huge bundle, to boil in my neighbour’s eucalyptus gunnii prunings

it left pale green prints, which may not be light fast, deeply 3D impressions, and some vague peach-coloured marks from the flowers. the seed pods explode and shed hundreds of seeds everywhere. it tolerates low light levels and also shades out other vegetation, gradually impoverishing habitats by killing off other plants.

rosebay willow herb is more elegant and fringes the dunes at Tentsmuir, and the stone walls around Cupar with its feathery pink fronds.

once a week we walk at Tentsmuir … it’s always the same but always different. the light last week was silvery

as the sun is lower in the sky now at 8.30 am

grass of parnassus flowering now beside the pools, also known as the ‘bog star’, it isn’t actually a grass at all, belonging to an entirely different botanical class related to the saxifrages. it used to grow in the Norfolk broads, it likes damp places, and why it grows in a couple of places in Cairngreen wood, flowering much earlier, I have no idea.

the sea was so calm and blue and the sun warming, one felt like swimming

but two of these large lion’s mane jellyfish stranded on the beach would not encourage me to get in there. they deliver a very nasty sting with multiple hooks. two dead on the beach surely means a lot more in the water.

back to the studio and I am working on a series of studies about Glen Feshie

heather purples obviously … butterfly oranges

little dark green triangles for the young pines

then a slightly larger collaged (bits of an old map of Norfolk) canvas which started with a green and pink pour

with lots of medium to keep the colours translucent

and then when I painted over it I allowed quite a lot to show through

or scratched back to it

so it glows.

then some text – Glen Feshie, and Sròn na h-Iolaire painted, scratched out partially, written with crayon which scratches through the wet paint ..

 

a loose piece of primed canvas was the drip sheet, and all these lovely marks and runs

are developing into something else, but I want to extend this canvas. I have the sewing machine out, making myself and others pj type trousers, and I’m thinking a zigzag stitch … it’s very Frank Bowling and to be honest I AM very influenced by his work just now. but I’m hoping that will take me somewhere new and interesting.

I’ve always used drips and runs, and stuck things on the canvas (parts of a linen shirt as well as paper)

the studio is feeling quite crowded

the garden actually has some things in flower – red midget, a kind of prairie coneflower.

these are spectacular, not in my garden, but on the second of the two new walks, in Foodieash. We parked on the green and took a path through trees to Cairnie fruit farm

they have a maze, a tea room, endless things for kids to play on, there was a dog show, pick your own strawberries suspended at just the right height to pick, but we were just passing through

to follow a long track, 1.7 miles to Moonzie

the grass was very wet, and then quite tall, so we got wet feet and trouser bottoms. summer walking is worse for my poor boots, it’s like wading through water.

views of all these big rolling hills topped by woods which are so typical of this part of Fife

it was quite a steamy day, sun and cloud and high humidity after rain

crops not dry enough to combine

some already harvested

this ruined tower house was built by the Lindsays in the 1500’s. it had five storeys and was L-shaped. not much of it is left. all the stone edgings of windows and corners have been taken. you can see more about it here 

we walked up the hill to Moonzie Kirk and wondered if we’d be able to see Norman’s Law, an Ochill we’ll like to have a go at just north-ish or north-westish. maybe that bit of brown hill.

so that will be a post for another day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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