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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

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

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!

 

 

 

bigger

Posted jane -->on 21st May 2021

the wall in my studio challenges me to cover it with canvas, so my next painting is even bigger, more like a square. I struggled with it, but didn’t alter my studio layout until I’d finished it. now I’ve put the table in the window and have 2 painting walls, and an extra two feet to step back. not much admittedly …

this painting is not about the wood, but more to do with Cairnlug and Cairnfoodie, the hills across the Eden valley from Cairngreen.

drawing with this Pentel brush pen on paper is quite like sloppy acrylic

and floppy brush on canvas.

but I often forget just how good this brush is, a signwriter’s brush from Handover, and don’t get it out.

the under-drawing is just a start, although I do like some of that fluid stuff to show through later

and the yellow was a hopeful thought …

plus some bits of drawing/painting on paper collaged on

I had another walk around there on about the last nice day we had recently

there were red campion flowers, the first I’d seen this year

lichened stone walls under the barbed wire, and sheep-grazed fields looking the worse for wear.

then this row of beautiful beech trees along the road, all with specks of pale green leaves, making one think of Hockney’s spring paintings.

cherry trees too. the first half of May has been glorious for their blossom, whether hybrid ornamentals or the wild “gean”.

and now we have the full electric yellow of the rape fields. they make it easier to identify other places we’ve walked from a distance.

so all these things go into the mix. I rather think I should have stopped here!

I found a wonderful quote from Arthur C Danto about the Japanese artist Chuta Kimura which is apt, and something I would like to aim for;

“to occupy a third position, not intermediate between these but alternative to them, that may be referred to his Japanese roots. It is as though he wanted the landscape to express itself, wants there to come to the surface what does not necessarily meet the eye: a force, a stirring, a shifting and a wildness, a spirit one has to provoke by some counter-energy on the artist’s part.” Here is an example of a painting by Kimura.

“It is as though the landscape were some sleeping dragon disguised as hills and meadows, as some peaceful place, but which, with enough prodding, reveals its true power, dissolving into something that writhes and whips and flashes before it subsides back into colors and shapes, leaving the memory of something untamed.”

could one bring the excitement of all that

into this? at this point I have got rid of most of the excitement! the graphic part of the painting almost painted out.

perhaps this has brought it back.

then there is Tentsmuir, which is so dynamic. Kinshaldy beach to be more exact

drawing the clouds

and the long lines of the sandbanks

I have to go back to this.

my painting of the clouds “Cloud Shadows Walk Back and Forth” is in an online exhibition from today called Re:connect.

https://ssa.viewingrooms.com/viewing-room/5/

I am rather pleased, it’s on the Society of Scottish Artists’ website, and is one of only 30 selected. a good start to my painting life in Scotland.

 

more walking and painting and prairie gardening

Posted jane -->on 22nd Apr 2021

on Saturday mornings I drive to Bowhouse near St Monan’s to pick up a local veg and other foodstuffs order, so I have been looking for walks nearby. last week’s was one of those. this week I did a circuit of part of the coastal path and inland around the Balcaskie estate.

first along the coastal path above those rocky beaches with all their geology laid out

and the sloping cliffs covered in gorse with linnets singing in the sunshine on the top twigs

I think the footpath may follow a raised beach, where the land has been rising through the Holocene, due to the release of pressure from the weight of ice sheets.

and a clump of alexanders, so familiar in Norfolk, which knocked me back as I haven’t noticed it anywhere else here yet, this spring. it looked like the frosts has browned it off a bit.

the hedgerow plants really have not got going yet inland, though I did see a stand of jack-in-the-hedge at Kemback on Sunday.

Pittenweem and St Monan’s both have sea-filled swimming pools cut out of the rocky foreshore. all year round swimming has really become a thing over the last year, everyone seems to be doing it.

the pretty little East Neuk (Neuk being the Scottish for nook, or corner) fishing harbours all look a bit the same. this is St Monan’s. I avoided the Pittenweem one because of the steep steps down to it which my knee finds difficult at the moment. it is the most active commercially apparently, a small number of boats remain, nowadays mainly fishing for shellfish. several fish vans from Pittenweem deliver inland, blasting their horns as they roll up – one outside this house – but their fish will be coming from a central market I’d guess.

from St Monan’s there’s a not very exciting stretch along the road to Abercrombie and then across a couple of fields to the ruined church. Abercrombie, recorded in 1157-60 as Abercrumbin, means ‘mouth of the river Crombie’. The first element is the Pictish word aber ‘river mouth’. Crombie is a stream-name derived from the Gaelic word crombadh ‘bending, winding’.

with old gravestones to read and ponder over. a new plaque in the wall celebrates the lives of Tom and Ingrid Pevsner, he born in Dresden in 1926 … what story lies behind that I wonder. I completely missed five sculptured stones, showing Celtic ornament, in the walls, mention found online.

so why was this medieval church abandoned and allowed to fall into ruin, some time in the seventeenth century? something to do with the presbyterian movement? the graveyard is still consecrated, presumably, as it has more recent memorials, including the Pevsners.

walking on round the estate in the marvellous sunshine

over a formal bridge

past redpoll cattle with two young calves

and the very restrained house, no mad gothic stuff there …

the madness reserved for the lime trees, all pruned of their whiskers and skirts

and two clumps of snakeshead fritillaries rather isolated along the verge.

the button-push gates and the lodge with its matching doocots (dovecote in Scottish)

are quite fancy. from the right hand doocot you can just see Kelly Castle, under Kelly Law, another walk I must do.

I am taking my four winds sketch books on all my walks, I just started the sixth one.

very quick drawings, done on varied papers, some already drawn on, or patterned, bring a life and intensity to painting.

I also have a new tool, a brush pen, designed for calligraphic writing, specifically Japanese and Chinese scripts. it brings a broader more intuitive attitude.

the new book has some different papers

from envelopes (a Mina Perhonen invite card envelope, which is an art object in itself) and birthday present wrapping.

it already has some hints inserted

the first one only took me a few days to get through, but now it’s a couple of weeks. they are thicker, though, more signatures (book-binding term for the packets of folded paper in sections that form a book) sewn in.

meanwhile the new painting has been taking shape, a lot of green brush-drawing

then a coat of translucent yellows,

and something else started to happen, which will have to wait for the next blog

meanwhile ALL my little prairie plants are outside in the growshed, wrapped in wool liners to keep the night cold (and frost) off.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the hills around my town

Posted jane -->on 22nd Feb 2021

I forgot to say that the week before last I had my first Covid “jag” as they call it in Scotland. the Pfizer one. so pleased I didn’t feel slowed down by it in any way. it’s like a miracle. just shows what science can do if it’s given enough money. think of all the misery we could stop if governments and corporations really wanted to.

really I am feeling ten years younger after spending three months or so with younger people, who get up early, have a smallish breakfast and get out for a short walk, walking fast and up hills and then at weekends six mile walks with more hills, fast … I have lost inches around hips and waist and can move on up a proper Scottish hill in a reasonable manner. as in the path in the photo above.

I thought I was doing plenty of walking before, but there really are not any proper hills in Norfolk. from the top of Kemback you can see two big hills, East and West Lomond, still patched with snow on Friday. I have been to the top of West Lomond, about five years ago, but I had to stop and start, could not keep up with Lucy, some sort of breathing problem, I am not sure quite what it was, I used to get it a lot. it was a very cold day too.

at Kemback the woods are full of bluebell shoots, exposed by the deer I think

such gorgeous sweeping steep woods.

 

this is a view from my house. I have not walked quite up that hill, as it has sheep on it, but my usual morning walk takes me up to about that height.

on a rainy day this week, I walked up the usual hill then left into Owlet wood, taking a new little fourwinds book with lots of inserts sewn in, as a notebook

this is from India Flint’s online workshop

making these is an ideal way to keep up a practice which I have let drop, of making notes on walks,

since I stopped being able to take part in Jonathan Ward’s Writing Outside workshops, due to Covid restrictions

I took a red crayon and scribbled in the rain.

yesterday we walked up that. it is a short but quite hard walk, even Lucy found it quite tough. of course Scott was running about in front of us, making Bims want to run too.

it is the Hill of Tarvit, and it’s 211 metres above sea-level with tremendous views in every direction

you can just see the sea this way …. it was very windy up there.

down in the beautiful woods that surround Tarvit house there were spring flowers – crocus

and masses of snowdrops. I am waiting to hear when I can collect snowdrops from Cambo Gardens to plant in my garden.

snowdrops in the family mausoleum

with a very very sad plaque for Little Jim, who died at eleven months and ten days old.

starting a new fourwinds ( see @prophet_of_bloom ) notebook with a list of all the hills visible from the top of the Ceres Moor path, or rather from the higher place in the cut down wood that is the remnant of the Moor itself that isn’t under cultivation.

Letham. Lindifferon. Kilmaron. Kingask. Foodie. Craigfoodie. Myrcairnie. Torr of Moonzie. Kedlock. Colluthie.

Hoping that Scottish placenames on the OS map are less anglicised than Irish placenames. but there’s a website where you can look them up. Foodie, the translation is ‘Place of peats or divots’. Moonzie, formerly *Auchtermoonzie, is the name of the settlement near which the Moonzie Burn rises, and of the parish through which it flows for the first 1.5 km of its course. It is probable that the settlement-name derives from uachdar qualified by the burn-name Moonzie, ‘the upland of the Moonzie (Burn). I love all this – Assuming that Moonzie is in origin a hydronym, it may be related to moineiseach ‘low, inactive, diffident’ (a by-form of mainneiseach ‘slow, sluggish’, an adjective from mainne ‘delay, sluggishness’, according to Dwelly). This is apt enough for the Moonzie Burn, which is slow-flowing for much of its course, dropping only c.7 m in its first 3 km. There is a Moineiseach Burn in the Don catchment area. Alternatively, and equally aptly (see next paragraph), it may be related to  mòine ‘moss, bog’, with –es-extension. It could also be argued that the development of the stressed vowel in Moonzie is more likely to derive from mòine (cf Balnamoon, Menmuir ANG, for baile na mòine/mòna).

Birds listed, seen and heard this morning. a song thrush on the hill up to the Moor, a mistle thrush in Ceres, several larks, and two yellowhammers.

also thinking about Tim Robinson a lot ( noted Irish landscape writer and cartographer who so sadly died at the beginning of last April from the novel coronavirus) and the connections between place names and going really deep into landscape.

this is what my new studio practice will be about

here’s a stash of paints that arrived last week. some are expensive and some are inexpensive. but all are lush and exciting.

new canvases stacked up indoors

and in the studio, which has had the electricians in to put up a couple of good “daylight” lights and rather a lot of sockets.

now it’s just a matter of waiting for a couple of coats of white emulsion and some strong arms and backs to push the various plan chest/heavy kitchen dresser/ trestle tables around so there’s room to paint. I’ve also got a four foot by six foot shed coming to keep all my boxes of pots and old paintings in.

footnote

Kemback – G ceann + G bac

‘End of the bac’, which can mean ‘hindrance; bend in the ground’, from Middle Irish bacc ‘angle, bend; corner, especially of a field, used as a shelter for horses or cattle’. It can also mean ‘hollow or bend’, especially on the body (Angus Watson 2001). The element is not discussed in Watson 1926, but twenty years earlier he translates Bac nan Cisteachan in Applecross parish ROS ‘ridge of the chests’ (1904, 217). This word is not to be confused with the loan-word bac from Old Norse bakki ‘bank’, meaning ‘moss, peat-bog’. This is the first element in the Gairloch place-name Bac an Leith-Choin, which Watson translates ‘moss of the lurcher’ (1904, 228).

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

losing the saltmarsh

Posted jane -->on 30th Aug 2020

walking at Morston again this morning, I reflected that this kind of landscape is one I won’t find in Fife.

there are sandy beaches with dunes and flowery machair

and rocky beaches

and reed beds in the Tay estuary at Newburgh.

at Tentsmuir there is pine forest behind dunes, with heather and ferns, more beautiful than Holkham’s pinewoods.

but there is nowhere as liminal,

where sky and land and sea segue into each other

with this very special mixture of plants – the sea-wormwood, the sea lavender, sea purslane, shrubby sea blite, sea beet, all the succulents that grow on the salty silt, especially the samphire.

soon to turn orange and red, their autumn colours, along with the mauve and yellow sea aster.

this morning the high wind was in our ears, echoing the surf thundering on the sand banks; curlew and redshank  loudly disapproving, although the nesting season is well over.

tide on its way out

and bladderwrack left behind, attached to its brick holdfast, all barnacled.

the texture of this place is extraordinary; pebble-studded, sometimes slippery with black silt; smooth clay deposits; loose sand;

stinging sharp marram stems; dry paths; wet channels and pools. always the pools that reflect upwards the light of whatever weather happens on the day.

I counted twenty swans in the Stiffkey’s freshwater outflow

and in the marram grass were these tiny ghosts of crabs.

on Thursday there were these ghosts of Covid-19 – disintegrating latex gloves all over the purslane lawns next to the channel

in the sun and wind it’s hard to remember the pandemic, still a rising tide.

in this seemingly empty place, empty except for me and the dog, for half an hour, until we turn back and meet more dogwalkers.

it’s full of life, of course, birds, insects, fish, crustaceans, seals, even hares. I shall miss this place most.

but now I want to paint its looping shapes and its colours, its drama, now when my studio is all packed up and I am busy organising the move, the change of address, and the last skip ……

 

 

 

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