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snow and painting on the kitchen table

Posted jane -->on 22nd Feb 2021

the weather got  even colder and we had a night of minus sixteen Centigrade which is almost a record. never was I so thankful for an insulated house and a new boiler.

the view from my window is really not bad, and the snow reduces it to black and white –

makes me want to draw it. I like the simple shapes of the buildings too.

then I have started another little book making – folding and stitching – course with India Flint and so something had to be done with this

the cutting up of the image by folding into book pages improves things radically

though strangely the paintings I did after that were not monochrome. I guess I am just a colour addict.

I decided it was the colours under the snow I was after.

or the colours yet to come

Beech wood between conifers/redwings/ holly – there were redwings in the field at Tarvit Farm where there are horses and the old haha barrier into the garden.

the snow took some time to melt, with the very low temperatures and more snow showers

walking felt restricted, up here there were drifts even when the rest of the snow had gone

and in Owlet wood.

I ordered a book of 101 paintings by Henry Ward ( Shed Paintings @henzward ) documenting the 101 paintings made in his shed during the first 6 months of lockdown in 2020. they are all painted with acrylic on paper. this decided me to get my acrylics out and stop being chicken. I have a huge roll of decent but not fancy Fabriano paper, so I took some of that and had a go.

the great thing is that unlike with watercolour and gouache, you can layer and layer and it doesn’t kill it.

and if you don’t like it you can turn it into this

more window gazing

the roof shapes and the tree! so Japanese somehow … this from my kitchen window ..

I was much more pleased with this than with the rather sentimental looking landscape above.

I must go back to these ideas

meanwhile the view from the front is really quite astonishing

Bimba likes it too. and at about this week I advanced the levels of civilisation in the house by connecting up the audio system. I can play records and CDs!

 

 

 

 

January walks in Fife

Posted jane -->on 31st Jan 2021

the weather seems to have been a bit colder than I was anticipating, the pavements have been lethal at times. most nights have been around or below freezing. obviously I have forgotten what winter should be like.

up the steep path to Ceres Moor there is a point where the snow is always heavier,

and the path to Ceres, which is well trodden, over the top has icy compressed snow and puddles that are hard to avoid.

the hills around are beautiful with their white coverings, sometimes you can see the Cairngorms.

trees and snow are studies in monochrome

the trees draw lines with their branches and trunks

that are irresistible to me

I have to try drawing with black paint on white cartridge paper

I have to learn to hold back, not do too much, but be bold with the gestures.

there’s never been enough snow to stop everything, just enough to make pedestrians feel insecure. and enough cold to make my secondhand electric car, a Nissan leaf, use more battery for short trips than I would like.

this steep lane to a farm up on the hill where a loop path from Cupar to Ceres takes you higher was an inconveniance to cars as well. luckily for a walker there are wide enough grassy verges.

then we have a few days when the snow disappears from all but the most sheltered spots.

on one of those I spotted this kingfisher, in Cupar itself. the river Eden runs through, like a rushing coldwater tiger, but these backwater pools are the remnants of a mill leat. in the river itself there are otters, a friend saw four yesterday, I think a mother and cubs, the youngsters whistling and tumbling off the bank. There are dippers and herons too.

last Sunday we walked out of the town along the river bank. the river was rushing along as usual, and the ground was frozen hard, ruts full of inch thick ice. we took the path where it gets very close to the water, and the land closes in to make a shallow gorge.

there had been a hoar frost, even the snow had fractal crystals on it.

we had to avoid some very slippery paths and some iced over floods

and clamber about between withered stems of reed and rosebay, amongst these crystalline gardens and under huge alder trees hoary with frost. it’s a beautiful place, and the river noisy, greedy, charging past.

eventually we climbed back up into sunshine and great tit song and green fields and golf course, to walk back into Cupar.

I’ve been taking Bims to Tentsmuir, except when the black ice is bad and the car park too dangerous and they close it.

this was ice on the beach itself, quite slippery.

the weather has been very calm and the waves tiny, which must be what causes these ripples in the sand, with broken shell like ice crystals lodged in between.

pink foot geese are as much a thing here as in Norfolk, they fly over us here in Cupar on their way from or to fields to or from roosts on the Tay estuary.

here is the Cupar heron, a very scruffy bird, under South Bridge in the middle of town.

Looking for kingfishers, another bird inspired painting.

 

 

moving in

Posted jane -->on 31st Jan 2021

on the 5th of January my worldly possessions arrived in Scotland. it was a day of thick black ice everywhere, pavements and the cul de sac road impossible to walk on. I can still see the fibres stuck to the pavement where the removal guys put their blankets down. so then my house was a chaos of boxes, furniture, bed in pieces, the usual. Luckily for me I am in an extended household with my daughter and her husband, so having spent another night with them, we arrived at the house in the early evening the next day and a lot was unpacked, the bed put together (but where were those special bolts? – never turned up)

the view yesterday morning from my kitchen window.

At the same time I was trying to get the studio sorted out (also chaos and desolation, especially as a full pot of acrylic gesso fell down in the lorry and broke open) and the joiner has turned out to be very slow and not exactly perfection when it comes to laminate floors. so I have gaps around the edges in the bathroom, hall and back bedroom, and he has to redo them and take the skirtings off in the process, but not until lockdown is over and I’ve been vaccinated – which could be months.

very very slowly order is being reimposed. the wonderful thing is that I have these big blank walls to hang big paintings on. the studio now has to have the electrics redone (it was the garage) and then a couple of coats of white emulsion over the OSB board it’s been lined with (over kingspan insulation on floor, ceiling and walls) so a lot of paintings are indoors or in a garden shed, as there had to be space to work in there, though luckily the joiner and his mates got the walls, ceiling and floor done before everything arrived, though not the front wall completed. the garage door is still lying in the drive, too big for the skip.

having the paintings indoors has given me the opportunity to reassess, in one case quickly splotch a few brushfuls of paint on – and that may happen to others.

I made an unexpected discovery – the intense deep blue walls in my kitchen enhance this large oil painting, painted I think a couple of years ago. and the painting enhances the kitchen, makes it a conversational space – my long table is underneath it, so I have a dining area with a bit more dignity to it.

I’ve hung this painting in the front bedroom, opposite another big oil abstract, which was

started in 2003 but finished about the same year as big blue. it’s the first one I put up, it’s a natural for a bedroom, sunny and light. lots of texture and craquelure, and thick paint pushed about, then a top coat partly rubbed off, of very runny Swedish linseed oil outdoor house paint, which gives it some almost watercolour-ish runs of barley-coloured paint.

this is the huge painting I did for Cley 2018, and I have ordered a low storage unit from Ikea to go below it so that there is room for it to hang. the pigeon-hole shelves came out of my old studio, but there may not be room for them in the new one. a lot of things are still not sorted out in the living room, the audio equipment for one thing!

this diptych is a good example of how different things look when you bring them into a new space. I had not thought of putting these two paintings together, but I need big pieces in this room, and they speak to each other.

Idris Murphy, one of my favourite Australian landscape artists, talks about the effect of a 5th edge in a diptych, the division between the two sections. it’s very interesting.

so I ordered a frame, the widest I could get, luckily the painting is exactly the right size, four feet wide.

this one is just slightly smaller – “The path holds tokens of waking” 120 x 75 cm – and although the two paintings started off separate, they came together early on into a diptych. It hung in my studio, but really not a great setting. put here, it’s wonderful, it springs to life!

then this part of the wall, next to the bay window, has become somewhere to photograph smaller paintings

the light is very good and the pale grey walls show off paintings very well

I like this one best

in the hall, which is the same grey, I’ve made a monochrome arrangement.

the smaller bedroom is a reading room, with an Ikea version of a traditional Swedish farmhouse sofa bed. I love this green so much I am going to paint the rest of the woodwork with it. but probably not until the flooring has been sorted out.the painting I think still needs some work, but I definitely like it there. Of course, technically all these paintings are for sale. it would be nice to sell them so that I could paint new ones for the spaces.

on Friday I went to have a look at this waterfall in Dura Den in Kemback, which really reminds me of the painting.

I painted this one last week after walking along the river Eden. subject of another blog post to come. it’s called “How the River Shines Today” – gouache and watercolour pencils over acrylic on heavy watercolour paper 28 x 38 cm, for sale £90 unframed including shipping, as part of #artistsupportpledge a generous culture and dynamic economy between artists and clients needing no gatekeepers dreamed up by @matthewburrowsstudio to help artists continue to make a living during the pandemic. here’s the link to my big cartel shop should you be interested.

 

 

two places

Posted jane -->on 28th Dec 2020

to walk that are close by and I’ll be visiting regularly – Tentsmuir and Kemback. both are have woodland, but at Kemback it’s about giving me a workout – there are Jenny’s steps – something like a hundred shallow steps – to climb, and from where we park the car in front of the little church one climbs from 50 to 120 metres very quickly, mostly by the steps, but then there is more incline to the top of the woods near Blebo Crags, 150 metres above sea level.

as soon as you are in the woods there are cliffs, quarries and caves in the horizontally bedded sandstones.

there was some lead-mining here in the 1700’s, but mostly the sandstone was quarried.

on Boxing Day we went higher up than before and found a dry path with birch trees and moss and ferns.

leaf litter and peat underfoot, and cliffs on each side in places.

we may have got as high as 156 metres above sea level.

then gradually down, and through open birch woods, with fern and woodrush very green

denser pinewoods receiving the worst gusts.

we had deliberately come to Kemback in search of shelter from Storm Bella.

and it was only when we arrived at the bottom of the great steep valley edge that these woods clothe,

that we felt icy gusts of it

the green pasture glowed through the trees

waterfalls running down through the wood fill this pond above Kemback House. there is much more to see along the Ceres burn and the back road to Pitscottie, evidence of the flax spinning industry so widespread in Fife in the 19th Century, and geology particularly evident in cliffs and rockfaces in Dura Den, a gorge the river runs through upstream of Kemback.

we went to Tentsmuir on Sunday, a cold but blue and bright day, and caught these sanderlings along the beach

flying up as a flock

turning and twisting and flashing from silver to grey over the waves.

we had been there earlier in the week on a completely different day

the sand seemed so dark, just the shells flecking it with some lightness.

this place continues to inspire paintings

liquid watery gouache and the white of the paper showing through.

even though it was the Sunday after Christmas, and the car park entrance was backing up

and the tide quite high

it gave, and always gives, the impression of great emptiness.

Yesterday we could see this forest and beach, and both of the estuaries, the Tay and the Eden, from a walk up to the other side of the Kemback woods, from Strathkiness to Blebo. at its highest the path passes a trig point of 168 metres above sea level on Clatto Hill, and we could see the Cairngorms, all covered in snow, except one great rampart of dark hill which must be the Angus glens.

here the hills undulate away south in parallel, bright green with winter wheat. always visible across the fields from Strathkiness is Drumcarrow, 218 metres above sea level, with its crags, ruined broch and hut circles, and just below it a fort at Denork Craig.

back in St Andrews, in Lucy and Scott’s garden the late-ripening apples attract blackbirds. I haven’t seen any thrushes here, perhaps it’s just too close to the window (a huge “picture window” of the profligate late sixties) although bullfinches and siskins accompany greenfinch, and blue, great and coaltits.

 

 

 

more walking and painting, under tier three

Posted jane -->on 20th Dec 2020

I’ve been very busy making a new Big Cartel shop where my paintings can be bought with a couple of clicks and a credit card, uploading the images onto my website and in parallel with the shop. I had a couple of issues with scammers trying to catch me out through the website, so the shop feels much safer, as well as easier if you do want to buy something. plus it allows gorgeous large images of the paintings! the link is here

we had some snow at the beginning of December, and some icy mornings. this is from the front windows of my new house in Cupar. the line of trees at the top marks a footpath that goes all the way over the hill to Ceres, a two mile up and then down, and there’s a café there, for better times and weather. I have to edit out the houses, I’m not used to being amongst so many and such similar buildings, but it’s rather lovely having this view. the hill continues further over to the right.

at the top there are sweeping views across to Kemback

and towards Tentsmuir, which is about the same distance from Cupar as from St Andrews. I have bought a season ticket for their parking. as we are to be in Scotland’s Tier 4 on Boxing day, I am crossing my fingers it will stay open. during the first lockdown it was closed, as were the car parks for beaches in Norfolk.

there are small woods either side of the footpath full of long-tailed tits and other woodland birds; this small painting on paper is On winter’s edge/long-tailed tits/black plastic – they have covered the sloping field next to it in the plastic, with straw on top, and a banner of it had got caught up in the trees on the wood’s edge. I’ll be interested to see what is under it in the spring or summer.

the wood is called Owlet wood, so I named this painting On winter’s edges/owlet wood/muir road,

but one area has been cleared, I think to take it back to heathland, or muir/moor, as in Norfolk where so many old heaths have been overgrown by silver birch. it’s a bit of a shame as in the last month or so they have cleared the last strip of it through which a path ran, mossy and heathery.

it’s very wet after the continual wet weather we have had, and water runs off the pasture fields and the woods

making a little rushing burn down the side of, and across the path. there is an old limestone quarry about halfway down, overgrown with trees, which I thought might be pleasant, but there is a marooned shopping trolley and a lot of bottles lying about, so it might be a haunt of teenagers trying things out away from adult eyes.

it’s certainly a good walk, it will keep me fit. there are plenty of walks around Cupar, the local ramblers society have produced a folding A1 sheet of them.

the fields at the top have a fairly gentle form of agriculture, very mixed, so in better weather I’m hoping to see meadow pipit and lark, maybe curlew.

meanwhile I am still in St Andrews; this is the view from the Duke’s Old Course on a wet day. it’s called Braw View, twenty minutes walk from this house via Lumbo Den.

my furniture and studio stuff will arrive in Cupar on the 5th of January (Tier four allowing), by which time the bungalow will have had its makeover, new boiler and all, and the garage should be ready to receive the studio things, forty odd paintings, two tables, a plan chest, etc. I hope there will be room to move in there. but I will probably have to wait a while for an electrician to change all the lighting fixtures very much not to my taste.

the Duke’s golf course is rather wonderful, full of bits of woodland and gorse scrub, and a big artificial pond surrounded by trees,

plus that view.

usually you can see Tentsmuir beach and forest, the Eden estuary, and the West Sands beach of St Andrews.

all these small gouache paintings on paper express a feeling of place, and I suppose it’s stronger when you first come to a new landscape to live.

I have thirty three paintings for sale in the shop, and there’s more.

all painted on the guest room bed. I run out of paper and have to order more. it’s beautiful thick watercolour paper made of cotton rag that doesn’t curl up or develop buckling when it gets wet. even the cartridge paper is a bit special. Making art is expensive and one needs to sell it to be able to make more.

 

 

 

walking and painting

Posted jane -->on 24th Nov 2020

a couple of weeks ago we came to this place, Crawford Priory, near Cupar. it was remodelled at the beginning of the 19th century as a Neo-Gothic “priory” (originally a 17th century hunting lodge on the estates of the earls of Crawford) by the sister of the last, the 22nd earl, Mary Lindsay Crawford.

she never married, but ran the estate and its coal mines with great competence. this was considered very odd in her day, especially as she had a wild roe deer as a pet, and you can see its gravestone in the wall. it followed her around like a dog apparently, and she had a great many other pets to which she left enough money to keep them all, and there is apparently a cemetery for them at the back. the epitome of an eccentric aristocrat ….

by the 1960’s the family could not keep up the building which must have been fairly neglected already, and it was abandoned.

what did not rot in the next 20 years was destroyed by a fire in the mid 90’s, so all the roofs, windows and floors are gone.

trees growing inside are breaking up the stonework. there is a separate stable block which has been remade into steading type houses, through the very fancy archway. and the estate is largely wooded.

we didn’t see it, but her mausoleum is slowly falling into ruin in one of the woods

it was raining that day, so we cut our walk short. sadly a lot of the weekends have been wet.

none of my paintings have referred to that walk yet, though there’s a poem I’ve been working on.

Tentsmuir continues to inspire

the light and the mixed ecology

reeds, the burn outflow across the beach

the alders around the various pools

the wonderful pine trees (I think the forestry commission planted Corsican pine rather than Scots, they are very similar, but the Corsican needles are about twice as long.)

I’ve also been inspired by bullfinches and other birds, blackbird, blackcap, on the sizeable rowan in the garden here, eating the huge crop of berries.

and a pair of stonechats along the field fences, between horse paddocks and arable fields, on the way to Spinkie Den.

in Lade Braes, the wildernessy park along the Kinness Burn which connects all these more recent housing areas to the old town centre, there is a heron

and Hallow hill is covered in 7th century christian pictish cist graves.

some have been left to show in the ground,

under the enormous Leylandii hedge that protects a big swanky house built there in the 70’s (that’s when there was a huge archaeological dig there)

all these paintings (and a lot more) have been painted using the bed as a table in the “guest” bedroom where I sleep.

I really feel quite liberated by gouache and watercolour pencil and thick watercolour paper.

goodness knows how this will turn out when I get my studio set up in Cupar and have canvases and acrylic to work with again.

 

 

Star Moss

Posted jane -->on 3rd Nov 2020

this sunday we went for a long walk around Markinch, near Glenrothes, a forty-minute drive from here.

it started with a stiff hill

into a wood at the top

with the brisk southerly wind blowing leaves up the path in front of us

once out of the wood we could see misty views of the Firth of Forth from Cuinin hill,

big rolling countryside, walking on lanes and tracks, and into the village of Star

then we arrived at Star Moss after a bit more road and track.

this is a raised bog, now wooded, which was extensively cut for peat in the past.

on its edges there are conifer plantations and arable fields, but most is reserved as a site of special scientific interest. I hope there’s not agricultural chemical run-off.

it occupies a shallow depression 2 km north of Markinch,

and it is of importance as the largest area of naturally vegetated peat in central Fife with a wide diversity of habitats, principally birch woodland, fen and grassland.


its centre is wet birch woodland (downy birch Betula pubescens and silver birch B. pendula) with a carpet of sphagnum mosses and soft rush Juncus effusus swamp around a small pool. the information sheet I found does not mention which of the 12 sorts of Sphagnum grow here, sadly.

woodland understorey species include narrow buckler-fern Dryopteris carthusiana, common cotton-grass Eriophorum
angustifolium, white sedge Carex curta, and marsh violet Viola palustris.

the north and south of the Moss has drier birch woodland present.

Locally abundant species representative of the woodland understorey here include chickweed wintergreen Trientalis europaea, patches of raspberry Rubus idaeus, heath bedstraw Galium saxatile, sheep’s sorrel Rumex acetosella, sweet vernal grass Anthoxanthum odoratum and scattered narrow buckler-fern.


the eastern and western edges of the Moss support neutral grassland and fen with stands of willow carr.  as well as its scientific status, it’s one of those places which invites me to see it as a thin place, where the real and the unreal are close together. especially as we walked there on November 1st, All Souls Day.

then our route master took us through muddy tracks and larch and pine woods

all edged with stone walls, we walked through Lochmuir woods and over the mainline railway

and Emmet was very excited to find a pile of carrots, trundled off with one to eat. Bims never eats while walking.

we ended up in a big estate, Balburnie Park, avoiding carrot tractors.

and passed a small stone circle

the route master said, somewhat dismissively

“there are masses of stone circles in Scotland”

but this was my first,

I thought it pretty exciting.

the walk then took us through wooded parkland, in front of the golf club,

with a tumbling burn

and more steep slopes

gorgeous beech trees

up and over Moot Hill, the original Dalginch, or Island of Thorns, where in medieval times there would have been out door courts and fair days.

a six-mile hike, including some fair hills.

some procrastinating and cogitating and poem-writing later I made these drawings

they might be the start for some paintings later, when I get my studio.

I hope I’ll get the keys to the new house at the end of this month, but will have to have some work done – nothing serious, changes of flooring and decorating, and the garage lined out for the studio – before I move in.

 

into the Cairngorms

Posted jane -->on 20th Oct 2020

on Sunday we drove up to Blair Atholl in Perthshire, in the foothills of the Grampian mountains, part of the Cairngorms National Park (since 2008). to get to it you drive past famous spots like Killiecrankie and over the Tummel river … and it’s only one and a quarter hour’s drive from St Andrews.

Fife and Perthshire are full of magnificent beech trees. obviously they are not native, but they certainly thrive. we parked in the village car park, as the walk-dedicated one was full,

and I am very glad we did or we’d have missed this part of the walk, alongside the river Tilt between mature beeches,

whose branches hung down to the river, and the river itself racing through a rock chute

then widening to pebble strewn beaches

we came at the best time to see autumn colours

maple trees are everywhere, obviously not native, but perfectly hardy for Scottish winters.

the walk was basically along the river, on a higher path, which took quite an effort for my lazy Norfolk legs to get up to, and then across and back along the other side. not to the furthest point as that would have been ten miles plus the extra from the village, so we walked seven altogether, crossing at Gilberts bridge.

small waterfalls and bridges on the path

once you are up the views are immense, and the landscape begging to be painted, not in the traditional way, but for me there were textures and shapes which made me think of Australian painter, Idris Murphy’s work.

the way the horizon and sky are often less present when you are enfolded into the hills

and the rock comes through the vegetation

and the trees are sparse and characterful, with their coatings of lichen

much to think about for the future

the phone camera doesn’t capture the brilliance of the colours – I’d call the overall impression orange-tawny, with notes of bright mustard and rust,

offset by the dark green of conifers

we stopped for coffee and snacks in a little grassy, sedgy spot just above the river where it raced through another chute

and trees cling onto the sides of the ravine

rowan, ash, larch

this dying trunk colonised by funghi

then not much further to Gilberts bridge where the river is much calmer and the tree colours perfect – more beeches too.

Bimba perfectly matches all these autumn tones

this photo looks like an English park

but soon we were out under these steep sheep pastures

walking downhill

through woods

of birch

and larch

these repetitive trunks surely are the food for paintings

I’m taking pictures on the march

always behind, never catching up

except when Lucy stops to photograph, and these larch turning golden-russet are a stopping point.

we slowed towards the end to pick sloes, and in the hedge were these rowans. I am sure I’ve never seen rowans turn this colour in Norfolk.

brighter than the Japanese maples which are quite a feature in suburban St Andrews just now.

how special it is to be so close to all this magnificence.