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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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

O Caledonia, stern and wild

Posted jane -->on 14th Aug 2021

as Walter Scott put it. I was privileged to get to some of it yesterday – my daughter took me to Glen Feshie, near Aviemore, where there has been a project in place for 20 years to enlarge the relict Caledonian forest there, by private landowners who are rewilding a shooting estate, bringing back the natural habitat by excluding sheep and restricting the numbers of red deer.

the ancient Caledonian forest consisted of quite open woodland, of native trees, principally Scots pine, plus rowan, birch, aspen and juniper, which formed the westernmost outpost of the boreal forest in Europe. It is estimated to have once covered 1.5 million hectares as a vast primeval wilderness. millennia of deforestation by humans has reduced it to a few spots in the highlands, overgrazing by sheep and red deer has prevented regrowth, and the remaining pine trees, (often four hundred years old and more, called granny pines) have been marooned amongst heather and grass. Luckily this habitat can spring back to life on its own, given the right conditions.

We drove from Fife up the A9, diverted into Dunkeld for a swift bakery raid, and parked as far up Glen Feshie as you can get, Auchlean car park, at the top of this excerpt from the OS explorer map.

Feshie is wide and open, flat bottomed with paths that wind along through heather, probably bog, we saw some cotton grass patches –

with this lovely pool next to the path

three kinds of heather, blaeberry,

the sharp red crowberry, or as it is in Ikea, lingon berry, mosses, and iconic wildflowers

like this devil’s bit scabious, noticeably smaller and a darker purple/blue than field scabious.

as soon as you go through the gate that keeps the neighbour’s sheep out, there is a ford to cross. just deep enough to wet barefoot walking shoes if you missed a stone.

it was about midday so we retired to this larch grove, out of the quite strong wind, to eat the wonderful baked goods from Dunkeld, and wash them down with coffee. there was a spooky hooting sound you could persuade yourself was some sort of owlish bird, but I think it must have been tree rubbing against tree in the wind.

here is one of them, a danish pastry (but so crisp!) with gooseberries, almonds, and elderflower syrup. eaten while sitting on a tuffet of rather damp moss.

the next adventure was a hair-raising part where the old path had been swept away at least four years ago

and the new path wanders right to the edge of this unsupported cliff of loose stone and earth

having scrambled down that, there is another ford to cross, a bit more daunting than the first, over or through, the Allt Garbhalach. (in the Guardian Country Diary for 28th of July this year there is a description of following this stream up to a hidden high valley, Coire Garbhalach)

we managed the balancing act, me with much waving of arms, and Bims just splashed through, wetting Lucy’s barefoot shoes quite well. then a high bank to scramble up on the other side, and finding a way to traverse another section of missing path.

after that the path took us through Coile an Torr, (forest on a hill) a smallish pinewood, probably a plantation as the trees are all the same age,

full of these elegant feather-like ferns, which are hard fern, and quite common in the west of England as well as here, but I had never seen them before.

on the other side of this wood which is quite steep in places, there are older Scots pine, “granny pines”

you can see they have grown up in an open landscape by their spreading shapes

the path leads us out into open valley bottom or river floodplain again

there are many recognisable grassland flowers, like this bedstraw, clumps of harebell

I had to look this little white petalled flower up – it is sneezewort, Achillea ptarmica, related to yarrow.

the river Feshie meanders across its winter courses, but it’s not a true slow meander in the wandering sense.

you’d think you could walk across all those pale grey stones (schists, or metamorphosed limestones, mudstones and sandstones) but it’s a highly active gravel river bed and the braided channels are turbulent with strong currents.

the results of past storms and winter spates are there to see.

the path takes us into a savannah like open woodland, with huge old pine trees standing amongst their seedlings.

this is real Caledonian forest

with huge wood ant nests

and junipers in between the pines. we were sad not to spot any red squirrels, or pine martens, (less likely) or capercaille (highly unlikely). I did think we might have seen an eagle or heard ravens, but there was not even a buzzard about.

there are grassy meadows full of dark brown ringlet butterflies, and wonderfully we did see a pearl-bordered fritillary, a speciality of this kind of habitat in Scotland.

it is another fritillary, like the silver-washed that you now see in Norfolk, that needs violets for its caterpillar food. Much darker and a bit smaller than the silver-washed. it’s very skittish and we couldn’t get near enough to it for long enough to photograph it, this is stolen off the internet.

I have been drawing in a small readymade notebook all the way, mountain shapes and tree shapes …

very quickly, so as not to get left behind

the triangles are a great simplification of young pine trees

drew in the car on the way there too –

I now have an ambition to find somewhere to stay close to or in the Glen, to paint outdoors there for a few days.

Idris Murphy should go there to paint! there are some extraordinary trees

their bark is deeply sculptural – a habitat in itself.

we passed the Ruigh Aiteachain bothy (that might mean next to fast running water and abounding in sloes) where you can stay for free if there’s room, but need to bring everything except a tent – bed, and food – the four miles from the car park. so I don’t think that’s an option for me with painting gear to carry as well. it’s very nice, recently done up with a kitchen, wood burner, and 2 rooms to sleep in upstairs. the ablutions are outdoors and probably don’t include running water – well, I imagine compost loos would be better for the environment; there are two stone built cubicles away from the bothy itself.

we find a fallen tree to sit on for our picnic

it is silvery with age and has a flora  and no doubt fauna all of its own.

B jumps up to be up high where she can see what’s coming and going. it’s drier than the moss tuffet, surrounded by soft puffy hummocks of grass with ringlets flitting.

there are three hills and the glen turns to the left,

but four and a half miles is far enough for us – another half a mile past the bothy

we come to the edge of the Feshie’s gravel bed and look across.

the OS map has these two hills where they slope down into the glen as Sròn na h-Iolaire and Sròn Díreachain – Sròn being a nose. Glen Feshie continues to narrow up to the left, and the gap we can see from here are two tributaries, Allt Lorgaihd, and Fionntag Burn.

so here we turn round and walk back to the car park, repeating our scramblings and splashings in reverse. enjoying all the views from a different angle. I run out of sketch book pages.

key species – red squirrels, pine martins, rare sawflies, ospreys, wood ants and black grouse. European beaver, wild boar, lynx, moose, brown bear and wolf would once have been here, and there is discussion ongoing about reintroducing lynx. beaver have already been reintroduced to the trossachs and have spread to much of the south – will they come up into the Cairngorms too? as well as several notable species of birds – the capercaillie, crested tit and the endemic Scottish crossbill. I imagine we probably heard crested tit subsong without realising it, birds being generally pretty quiet in August.

 

 

 

 

the autumnal feel of August

Posted jane -->on 9th Aug 2021

if I may quote a good friend – with early darkness, the evening chill and the morning freshness of a September camping morning, when it all dries up by lunchtime.

we go all too quickly from this golden field

to this brown one, as the autumn barley is gathered in and the stubble is turned over by the cultivator.

and the rowans always seem too early with their red berries.

and as I remember how last year in Norfolk the first week in August was a blazing heatwave, we went swimming at Gunhill dunes at 8.00 am and poor Bims got heat stroke walking back to the car even at 9 in the morning. We are both grateful for cooler temperatures here in Scotland, making post-breakfast walks possible.

although here in East Fife we have not had the monsoons that have afflicted Angus and more westerly parts of the Central Belt, this morning it has been tipping down since daylight and I have to be strategic about picking a place to walk that will not result in this –

after plunging through this

beautiful as it was, now the Ceres Moor path has been mown I can do a local walk with dry legs and more or less dry boots.

Bims snatches sunbathing moments on grass that is too battered to call it a lawn, and anyway I do no-mow May, June and July!

as a dark cloud threatens rain. the sunflowers need it. I have set up an irrigation system for my new flowerbeds but one in the shade – too shady? – doesn’t seem to need it at all now there has been some rain –

the first one I made has full sun and gets dry very quickly. the rain we have had brought things on by leaps and bounds, but these prairie flowers are very slow to fulfil the seed packet promise. I now have yellow petals on three of these coneflowers, and one has started to open the pollen and nectar producing florets on the cone.

I hope to see rudbeckia flowers out soon

and love in the mist. meanwhile the runners are covered in red flowers and have a few inch-long beans – and I propagated them indoors! I suppose one blames the cold May and June we had.

I have been catching up on the house. I had two of these glass panelled wood doors hung instead of the solid doors, to allow light through from living room and kitchen into the hallway, and had not got around to painting them to match. also the skirtings got very knocked about when the joiner had to take them off to fit the laminate flooring. the colour is Little Greene Paint’s Rubine Ash, and I’m using their water-based primer/undercoat. it’s great as it doesn’t drip at all and covers really well. the only question is what is the easiest way to remove the plastic film that protects the glass when I’ve finished. the hall is looking very smart now all the scrapes, and Bimba’s claw scratches on the front door, are covered over. obviously I will have to continue touching that front door up though.

I have still managed to paint in the studio, finding up small surfaces to work on, some older and some just bits of cardboard from Jackson’s Art materials packing

I’ve been using some of these line drawings made on walks to inspire more linear elements in the paintings recently

as well as the spatula for broad mark-making

and here

this is on a block of tropical hardwood I’ve had knocking around for twenty years. some effects are easier on a panel rather than canvas.

the barley fields and some gold paint have inspired a stream of little paintings

this on a canvas covered board

on ply board

layering gold, colour, and gold again

and messily, on the slightly ridged surface of the cardboard box I cut up and gessoed. all fun and nice little paintings. I’m thinking forward to Open Studios. we are doing one weekend only, in October.

I’m seeing some field edges that I assume haven’t been sprayed – this a rape crop –

it reminds me of this section of a painting

and is probably a may-weed

and a wheat field with such poor growth on the edge that I walked through its gaps instead of the long grass and thistles of the path, full of these flowers on the corner where it meets the road.

the walk from Dairsie around Craiglug to Craigsanquhar and Pittormie continues to inspire me. the combination of the crags and high hill shapes with the dotted trees and gorse battlements, and the lines of field boundaries

plus the little distanced livestock figures

and the great hedgerows along the edges of tracks

this small painting (40 x 40 cm) has the feel of all that, for sure.

just to be inconsistent, this pair making a diptych, are less tied to a particular place, but more to writing I’ve been doing about the area, and there is text half hidden

crow steps – they are the mock-gothic stone steps on so many farmhouse gables around here.

Constant Billy – the name of a traditional Morris dance tune. dance has been a bit of a theme in some of the poems, and Crow Steps refers to that as well as the architectural detail, and simply the number of crows here – well they are corbies of course, figures of doom, following battles and shepherds. Bims regards them as an excuse to leap about and bark.

this Phacelia Tanacetifolia with its interplanting of red clover as a cover crop, or a nectar crop, along the edges of the barley next to Ceres Moor path still has much of summer about it.

I keep at it with these small boards – 15 x 20 cm or thereabouts, and some smaller

and the pocket sketchbooks

I am trying to document them

and have written  about the first one in a page on my website, but to do all of them is a huge undertaking.

currently in the studio. no idea where this is going. it’s the last big piece I have from the roll of canvas.

 

 

 

 

high summer

Posted jane -->on 25th Jul 2021

while the rest of the UK has been sweltering we have had cool grey mornings, sometimes with a haar looming by dusk. walking Bims has not been a matter of falling out of bed into my boots just after dawn to get a cool walk, as it was last year.

some of our beach walks have been quite misty and grey,

but this week – a little earlier than my usual time –

at Tentsmuir it was all silvery glitter.

the Kinshaldy pools are beginning to dry up

but the dunes are still flowery

 

and the rosebay in full blast of purple.

ribbed sand

striped blues

and a bit of drawing

always inspiring.

inland there’s plenty too.

barley ripening, and swooping swallows

blocks of dark trees

I love using the random appearances of pattern in these hand-sewn books.

and to quickly draw B over these pattern hounds

meadow sweet every where

good for alcholic drinks, and a glorious yellow-gold dye colour

in Owlet wood we pass a place of desecration, broken glass everywhere, cans, plastic bottles … a teenage camp in the wood, the broken bottles and cans etc matching the farmer’s deposits of fencewire and possible fly-tippings or farmer of other crap, pheasant pens trampled and tripping one up, rusty barbed wire laced between trees, and theres a broken sofa. goodness knows what goes on on it, but I imagine Ariadne, just a teen herself, going all the way with Bacchus/Dionysus, she can’t resist him, hormones blazing ….

and there’s my painting resolved –

Ariadne’s Bed in the Wood

all these reds

with some sparkly mica

and a crown. A. has become a bit of a theme recently.

then early last week we went on the walk around Craiglug again. It was partly cloudy

and once we got around the western side of the hill there was a fresh breeze.

near Fingask’s beautiful beef shorthorn strawberry roans there were annoying flies though.

scabious in the hedge

and then more resolution for this diptych from the sketchbook

Craigsanquhar farm

the first marks were blues and runny

fluidity

and text – up there a reference to that dominating hill with its crags

a painting showing its Chuta Kimura and Idris Murphy influences.

cool morning walks in Cairngreen and Kemback woods

the garden – the roses turned out to be strongly scented –

the prairie flowers are starting to show some buds. I have put a micro irrigation system in for them, things are so dry.

this white clematis is in the shade most of the day. it seems quite happy.

today I made a stack of thick paper rectangles from some smooth (hot press) heavy watercolour paper to paint on.

summery colours

juicy fruits

and another of those crowns.

 

july flowerings

Posted jane -->on 12th Jul 2021

even the beach is flowering this month, with sea rocket coming up in the sand

on the dunes there is an almost machair type of flowering grassland

northern marsh orchids are fading a bit now

this amazingly bright pink little flower is common centaury. its yellow petal tube extends beyond the pink sepals.

common spotted orchids are out too.

this looks like some kind of pea, I would love to say the rather rare sea pea, as that does grow on this coast, but I think it’s more likely common restharrow, as its leaves (or leaf-like stipules) seem to be sticky-hairy and toothed.

Ariadne has a new shelter, made with various washed up items

the old one collapsed

and she has lost her string

so many wanderings under these clouds

the wave rivulets and impressions

reflections

pools and then we found a lochan yesterday, inland

in Perthshire, near Blairgowrie

its yellow waterlilies just coming into flower.

we walked at Drimmie Wood

in towering plantations of larch, sitka spruce, and douglas

found a tiny brown toadlet hopping on the path

the bark of douglas fir catching my eye

in this glade there were more flowers, ragged robin

more than I’d ever seen before

and forests of neon green moss alongside the path

and bell heather coming into flower.

we passed through deciduous plantings and pasture – sadly these ash trees are losing the battle with die back. I wonder if they are some of the imports that brought it here.

rowans covered in thick lichen growth

grey willows and goat willows

northern marsh orchids here too

stitchworts

fox and cubs in the lane

many of the tracks are old drove roads, where cattle rustling was rife

small hamlets and farmsteads dotted around

Fergus is a Pictish placename, as is Angus. we were only just into Perthshire, having driven through Coupar Angus.

this old grey willow

how would Chuta Kimura paint this place?

I made a good start last week

but wavered

and the colours were too bright

the struggle was painful

it got worse, colours that were like scraping your nails down a blackboard. But as David Bowie said, “If you feel safe in the area you are working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

Mostly I feel out of my depth at some point when painting, some paintings more than others. after two unhappy days I got a grip on myself. I got it down from the wall, leant it against the drawing chest in my studio and wrote on it with wet paint and made that run with a spritz from my sprayer. then I got my water-soluble graphite stick out and drew on it. then I went indoors and had several cups of tea to let things dry.

back out there again and opened a tub of Golden acrylic, pale flesh coloured and used a biggish brush on the acid green, blue and yellow, but that was still streaky, so I used the kitchen spatula – it worked really well, lovely soft marks that pulled up some of the graphite, and skated over the bright colours.

used some dark brown and some rusty gingery translucent red oxide

a softer yellow … and now I am happy with it.

it wouldn’t work in the same way if it didn’t have all the other colours lurking underneath.

my own July flower – Bestow/becoming. 120 x 100 x 4 cm.

 

 

 

summer’s been and gone

Posted jane -->on 27th Jun 2021

but no doubt it will warm up again. the rain has been a huge help to all my seedlings. watering them is not the same. they don’t mind cool June temperatures it seems. I don’t either, it’s much better for my long walks.

our weekly beach walks at Tentsmuir are still an inspiration

the alder pools are full of birds, and the marsh orchids in bloom. this painting on paper Kinshaldy Alder Pools/Willow Warbler.

the tide always seems to be out.

somebody, person or persons unknown, keeps making these ephemeral sculptures with the trees and branches that get washed up.

they make me think of refugees landing on beaches, drowning on beaches. this painting on paper, Ariadne’s Beach Shelter, is one of a series of Ariadne paintings, ongoing, sparked by the idea.

the drama of this beach makes any object into a sculpture.

a face loomed up in another small painting on paper

 

Ariadne in the Wood

some of the fields have wildflower edges. others have been sprayed, I can’t see what good it does.

around this small quarry up on Garlie Bank a forest of foxgloves.

highblown summer

along Ceres Moor path

the recently cut grass fields – for silage – are such a pale green.

the barley is beginning to turn almost the same colour. another farm, the one on the edge of Cairngreen Wood, is growing proper hayfields, softly pink with grass in flower.

from Cairngreen looking North. when there’s snow on them you can see the Cairngorms, but they blend into the distance in the summer.

the daily scribble in my hand-made pocket sketch books keeps me fluent

I finished this diptych at last. It received a runny libation of greens to begin with and then I could get no further, but last week took myself in hand with the greens … Ariadne’s Naxos/Cairngreen Wood.

a fan of ferns and the dog’s head

the foxgloves are wonderful. I will sneak some seed later in the year.

I put a finishing touch to this one, top right hand corner

now it is rolled up with the other big unstretched paintings; I bought some plastic pipe to roll them around, which keeps them safe and uncrumpled.

then there are some small paintings turning up in wardrobes and other storage spaces which need finishing. this was just two shades of grey before – Paths in the Wood/Hold the Thread – a reference to Ariadne –

suddenly they can be resolved. the painting on paper on the floor activity is a tremendous help – as with the small gouaches I did in St Andrews when I had no studio, things happen spontaneously and I’ve become more confident. This one is High Tide/Morston Salt Marsh/Reflections. all these paintings can be seen in much more detail on my website

after all the rain, the preferred walks were in the woods where there’s not so much dangling vegetation to soak one’s legs and boots – in fact I’m back in my “barefoot” trainers having developed a painful blister – this is a marvellous old field maple

in the field next to the lower entry into Kemback wood. it must be ancient, I have never seen one as big as this.

elder flowers, beautifully scented

and wild raspberries, the flowers attended by buff-tailed bumblebees

by this deer fence kissing gate. Cairngreen has six of them, only one is not redundant, as the deer fences are no longer necessary to protect the trees.

in the wood the mosses are still brilliant emerald

so another beginning, on the floor with the elongated brush, a box canvas, 120 x 100 cm.

a drawing ripped up

and collaged onto the now splendidly dribbled initial marks

I tackled it with the aim of covering all the white. here I’m using a kitchen tool, one of those big plastic scrapers for dough. quick and quite a different sort of mark.

and fingers

some finger, some small brush for this spatter of marks

and words, from a poem I’ve just written for an ethnopoetics workshop with David Caddy of Tears in the Fence. his workshops are fantastically fruitful and informative. so Rumgally (the name of an old house/castle just below Cairngreen) gallowglass, a type of mercenary warrior from the Western Isles, hand in hand from the witches in Macbeth

as you can tell, quite a Scottish poem. the words in the painting are obscured, as usual.

and then suddenly I feel if I do any more I will lose it. so that’s it. kind of sad as I was expecting a few days of working on it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

working on paper again

Posted jane -->on 15th Jun 2021

after making three large paintings in a row I started a new one

but then began a week of caution, working small on paper instead of tackling the canvas.

I produced several paintings of A2 size on 220 gsm paper, a reasonable quality cartridge, bigger than my series made during the winter.

working on the floor with my long handled brush

thinking about shapes on Kinshaldy beach

and generally letting paint flow a bit

also I worked over an old less successful painting. this can often be quite releasing

and after walking in Cairngreen, those four larch trees …

all the ferns are unrolled now

buckler fern in the wood

and the much more upright male fern

this seems to be the scaly male fern, it’s quite shaggy

this speedwell seems to like the low light of the beech woods

and I found this, which turns out to be grass of parnassus, around a sycamore tree in Cairngreen, and also where the wild garlic grows in profusion in Tarvit gardens next to the ice house.

the deciduous parts of Cairngreen have wonderful fern groves

walking up and down the paths there feels a bit like playing snakes and ladders

you are never sure where you are going to pop out, onto a ride, or a deer fence. the mountain bikers build jumps on the steepest trails; coming up them, climbing over all the tree roots is like scaling a ladder.

tree roots or the drifted trees on Kinshaldy beach? I bought some new paints, two greys, several yellows, and this iron oxide red in vast quantities. and pthalo blue, which I always found too strong before.

this has the kissing gates, the ferns, the douglas firs and all that ….

getting looser

meanwhile some of this paint was landing on the big canvas, also I stuck on some tissue paper, pink and gold …

and I was thinking of the shimmering glittery wet sand

and wide pools of shallow water at low tide

so the next move was some of the words from my notebook written on the beach

shilly-shallying in the shallows

shimmer

and kinshaldy and glitter and glimmer

and some pieces from a copy of the Guardian (2012)

Lytton Strachey and Virginia for the glitter

Taliban so it’s not quite so shallow

ditto

but here’s the swinging bit .. and reflecting my career in fashion. just a little bit of autobiography …

and then all this blue, and grey, and white

some details

this very strong blue is pthalo blue. CuPc (copper phthalocyanine) was first prepared in 1927 by the reaction of copper(I) cyanide and o-dibromobenzene, which mainly produces colorless phthalonitrile as well as an intensely blue by product. it certainly is intense, but also quite translucent, so all the underpainting shows through. if I mix it with zinc white the resulting paler blue is also translucent. with graphite grey it’s not too opaque either.

I did this one while trying out the blues and greys, 30 x 30 cm, a much painted over linen canvas with great texture.

gradually doing the shimmer …

and then the deep blues

arriving at this yesterday. it will have to be stretched by a framer and then the cream edges will all be folded back and it will look like this

last night I watched a film about Jean-Michel Basquiat and thought right, it’s finished then. love that man’s paintings.

and also I think I should make much more of my writing and use the words in my paintings.

however I must go back to smaller canvases!

 

 

 

blue painting and bluebells

Posted jane -->on 6th Jun 2021

the end of May turned out wet and chilly, and spring flowers have been very drawn out. on Monday (31st May) I went to Kemback wood, which was a treat, the bluebells still out.

as they were on the Balcarres estate on the Saturday

both these places have a lot of white in the mix too.

with the rain the Balcarres old sawmill waterwheel chute was at full charge

I was very happy to find marsh marigolds in a tiny burn alongside a stone wall above Colinsburgh, part of the folly foray five mile walk.

this fairytale neogothic gatehouse looking even more romantic with the clematis

I am hoping this chunky pergola (douglas fir from the sawmill at Newburgh) will soon be draped with white flowers too.

I’ve planted this clematis which has big white flowers, and a white montana, and I have a star jasmine on order, which is evergreen, except it will be ever bronze in the winter, and should cover the woodwork eventually. plus behind that bit of fence is a winter flowering jasmine … so I have put the tit box up in the top of the pergola, hoping to encourage lots of denizens and make my garden a bit more of a jungle.

the prairie seedlings are all doing well, everything is now potted on

but the older ones are rooting through the bottoms of the pots so I need to get a move on and prepare some ground. the intention is to sheet mulch part of the back lawn with cardboard, topsoil and farmyard manure, and to fence it off from my enthusiastic hole digging dog. it looks like we are in for a dryish week or two and I am already spot watering the front lawn where I’ve planted cowslip and harebell plugs, and having to water the old flowerbed in front of the house where I’ve sown seeds for oxeye daisy, field scabious and wild carrot.

I’m continuing to draw out in the field, not so much for information, but for the feel of it

it loosens things up

here’s another big painting, the blue on it a bit of a surprise. on the lines, it was a blue I had mixed up a week or so before, and it needed using up – I was amazed it was still viable – and after that it took over.

still quite translucent, and some of it with a lustre

plus some pink got going

an echo of these rather beautiful exotics at Balcarres

pink balancing act

so it ended up with more blue and more bright light green, and the peachy orange …. and it was Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday, because of which I’d bought his most recent album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, so this is called To Give Myself to You/ Blue/ Green/ Pink/ Orange Spring, and it’s 160 x 176 cm.

more pink

and that pale yellowy green – a different kind of fern. I am looking at my grasses, sedges and ferns reference book, but it’s very hard to tell. this could be an ostrich fern, of the hard fern family, not native but it says cultivated and sometimes naturalised – which would fit this artificial habitat, along with the rhododendrons and azaleas. next time I am at Balcarres I’ll have to look for some other clues, for the two kinds of fronds, and the erect rootstocks.

all the woods here are full of ferns, rather than the bramble and other impenetrable scramblers and nettles I am used to in Norfolk. as the woods here are generally on high rocky ground, rather than the swampy places they generally occupy in Norfolk, I suppose it could be to do with soil and drainage. they are a beautiful sight, especially when just uncurling.

scaly male fern is generally cited as present in woods here, I think along with male fern. I need to look more carefully to see if there are buckler, lady fern or any others. adders tongue is present in Tentsmuir forest, but I haven’t noticed it anywhere else. many of the male or scaly male ferns have huge stumps and must be very old.

back in the studio a somewhat ferny painting, a diptych consisting of two birch ply panels set on deep frames so there is a nice three-dimensional element to them.

I put it up on the painting wall, attached a brush to a cane with some tape, and painted it very much from a distance with loops and splats of this soft green.

some marks were added with aquarelle crayon

“Outset/ferns/gravity”, acrylic and collage, 41 x 82 cm.

drawing in the wood

Posted jane -->on 7th May 2021

now the wood is coming to life I am discovering plants that are new to me. this delicate white flower with clover-like leaves is wood sorrel.

I’m finding violets in lots of places too … the edge of lawns and in the woods

I’ve been spending a lot of time in there drawing, and I hope to keep going back to that. it’s a tremendously varied place, much of it still mysterious dark conifer plantation

opened up by frequent mossy rides and owned by the deer – this roebuck seemed as though he would stand there looking at me and the dog for ever as long as we didn’t move – and by the mountain bikers. I hardly ever meet any but there are steep trails I scramble up and down.

other parts of the wood are new growth birch or sycamore, their trunks encased in moss like furry green socks, the ground pocked with rocks and fern humps

the larches are vivid green with their new needles, from a distance the wood can be seen to be peppered with them

there is deer fencing which is breached in many places, but also allows egress through these tall kissing gates.

they are quite a feature

I have to work out how they can come into the paintings

as the wood is pretty much left to itself there are fallen trees lying amongst the rest, and like this one, they are often still alive, sending up new trunks, or just converting branches into uprights.

now it’s spring the wood is full of birdsong. willow warblers station themselves singing that marvellous sweet dribble of notes everywhere, they have the wood drawn up into territories.

another part of the wood has these magnificent great douglas firs, their soft needled branches draping the air like dark witch hair, so many Rapunzels.

then we get to the end of a finger of the wood reaching over to Dura Den and emerge to this view, away to Balmullo and huge Tentsmuir forest, sit on a wood planked hunt jump over the ditch and hedge to contemplate and see what I have drawn.

B does not like sitting still for long

my little four winds pocket book also has its uses

back in the studio there’s a big canvas started, tacked to the wall. the biggest I have painted for a couple of years. having the wall, and a roll of canvas allows this freedom, but it has its own complications and restraints. I have chosen more of a letterbox format than I am used to.

it progresses, in between walks and more drawing

I resist the first pretty stages and keep going

there is a blue reminiscent of B’s satin brocade collar and the sky in that view from the hunt seat

a lime green

varied and encouraging some subtlety

some of the big bold lines disappear

reds come and go – this is venetian red, an earth colour which is quite opaque until one brushes water and medium into it –

eventually I have this – and take it off the wall and roll it up, possibly to get it stretched professionally when the time comes. rolls are easier to store, I can keep them in the roof here.

there are so many more inspirations in my head – a deerstalker’s tower in Kilconquhar which triggered something like this –

watchtower in the wood

these nets of air
stirred by your migratory flitting
your routes flown
flanking my listening post
hedging high rafters
unpinned braids coloured ribbons undone
untwist the curling strands outside
resist the trap, pitch into this draughty
circle, blow, cry high
scrape noon’s height, ease
low, splay wings in bursts
confessed, I’m unwound
the rain hurls itself
unbound.

something to do with Rapunzel and the yet to arrive swifts. there was a swallow two weeks ago at our hunt seat. but one swallow does not a summer make, as we all know, and I am still protecting my seedlings from frost at night.

there are still cherry trees in flower all around, these tall natives seen from my window, gean here in Scotland – Prunus avium – and the various Japanese hybrids suburban and urban – very uplifting when spring is so slow and we have cold days and nights, with midsummer only six weeks off.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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