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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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

three hills

Posted jane -->on 3rd May 2021

up on Ceres muir one can see a whole range of hills on the North side of Cupar, and I aim to walk round them or up them, depending on accessibility, eventually.

so starting on the most easterly hill, last Sunday I reconnoitred Craiglug, Craigfoodie Hill and their surroundings, parking on the edge of Dairsie. this is opposite Kemback woods and Blebo Craig, which I walk around regularly.

I had planned a different walk, but consulting another dog owner, it seemed that my route might be blocked by a field of cattle and other difficulties. I hadn’t been keen on this five mile plus circuit, as it takes in a main road, but it seemed to be the best way to check these hills out. there is a direct route up to Craiglug, which looks the most crag-like, but it doesn’t lead anywhere else.

a stony farm track leads up

with views of Craiglug’s cliffs and gorse scrub.

and other smaller hills, Wester Craigfoodie, with plenty of little silver birch patches full of willow warblers. and larks singing above the open fields. this side of the walk we were sheltered from the east wind.

over to the west more hills swell up

this one would have been part of my initially thought-of walk

the summit of every hill in Fife is wooded, probably with an abandoned quarry for the stone that has weathered out on the tops, resisting the grind of the ice sheets dumping fertile clays and till between them.

after Fingask farm, turning North, past a gully full of scrub and a willow warbler and a cottage or two

eventually round to the east

all easy walking on tarmac with just a little traffic

primroses and a big house, Craigsanquhar, now a hotel

Craigfoodie hill looks a long way away, the wide-angle effect of the phone camera

at the top of the road (only about 150 m above sea-level) immense views of the North Sea, the whole of Tentsmuir forest and Kinshaldy beach, and the low cloud further out between us and Denmark.

Craigfoodie hill (foodie being an anglicised form of the Gaelic fòid or fòd (OG fót) ‘peat, sod, divot’, presumably refers to an area one of whose chief resources was peat).

a long downhill to the A914 at Muirhead

with a line of lovely roadside trees, mostly beech

and more cherry blossom. the main road is not too bad, there being a footpath, and soon you are off it down tracks past Pitormie, which has an almost invisible castle, screened by trees, and below Easter Craigfoodie back to Dairsie (pronounced with a z sound)

to the car, parked opposite the village primary school. now I have an electric car I go for very short trips clear of any guilt – about it being bad to do a short trip because the engine doesn’t warm up – or about driving anyway.

meanwhile in the studio things evolve. this is how last week’s painting ended up.

and now I have a roll of primed canvas, which I can roughly stretch with the staple gun, onto my wall, and roll up ready to be stretched onto a frame of stretcher bars at some later point, when the painting is done. it’s 180 cm, about 6 feet wide, so this time I worked on the two halves as separate paintings

after the Craigfoodie walk the left hand one became this

and then this …. as I had a bit of a spring greens bonanza …. Walking Around Cairnlug/ Three Hills …

and after walking around Cairngreen with an A4 sketchpad of heavy cartridge paper and drawing in it with compressed charcoal

the righthand, greener painting became this –

Walking Around Cairngreen/ Four Larch Trees. the larches are extremely bright with their new needles at the moment.

allowing me to play with these beautiful greens.

However, I think I have to think carefully about the edges of these paintings, which will be lost on being folded around the edges of the stretchers. it really works for me that there is a pale edge framing these two, that the darker, thicker paint is abutting in a painterly, messy way. I shall have to be organised and leave a deeper margin.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

painting, walking, drawing – and gardening

Posted jane -->on 18th Apr 2021

this week a lot of the seedlings which have been occupying my bay window seemed big enough to pot on.

I decided to make my back garden a prairie – dog allowing – rather than a wildflower meadow, which she mostly ruined in Norfolk. there will be a bit of lawn, but not much. at the moment it is mostly very sad lawn, on clay with the topsoil removed, made even sadder by sporadic digging – she can’t help herself when she’s excited – and the classic yellow and brown patches cause by dog pee. anyway, I bought a lot of seed packets, for rudbeckia, echinacea and various prairie coneflowers, a few blue grasses and drop seeds, prairie gentians and clover. I am going to have an awful lot of plants. I have already used up 100 paper pulp pots and there are more needing taking out of their first nursery trays.

today was sunny and less chilly than of late, I felt a bit of a glow on my face after having lunch outside. this magnificent shield bug liked the colour of my chair.

I was given a grow shed for my birthday. there are no small greenhouses available to buy, anywhere that I can find on line, so this is a cheap substitute. it will give shelter and warmth to boost salad veg, harden off the seedling flowers, and hopefully give me a tomato crop …

if it doesn’t blow away. the guy ropes and pegs seem a little inadequate. I have tied it to the neighbour’s fence as well. though the main worry is that the frosts just seem to go on and on, so I can’t actually put any of the seedlings I have indoors out there yet!

Bims was quite ecstatic to have some outdoor sunbathing.

on Friday we walked around St Andrews’ main attractions, Lade Braes and the two dens, Spinkie and Lumbo. I heard a blackcap singing in Lade Braes, but mostly it was chiffchaff chit chat.

it’s been very dry, and the burn in Lumbo was so low we paddled (in B’s case) stepped on stepping stones (in mine) across to the other bank and the wilderness usually too full of nettles and crisscross brambles to bother with. interesting to see the den from a different angle.

it is the season of lambs, and the best place to see them is Kemback. also the bluebells are just starting there ….

last weekend I tried out a walk from Colinsburgh, just in from the coast, with splendid views of the Firth of Forth

a beautiful estate with much flower planting in semi-wild areas around streams and under trees, and a higher path around farmland

and a secret path starting under and through rhododendrons and over the burn

up to this gothic folly on the crag

overlooking a house of many gables hidden amongst trees, Balcarres, owned by the Lindsay family since the 16th century.

a week when drawing in the landscape

started this – it had its good points but not many

so it received some collaged bits and thinned down paint

and suddenly became this which was cloud shadows walking back and forth from drawings I did on the beach at Tentsmuir…

and another small diptych emerged from boxes, to have an airing

and a coat of satin varnish. I found a better way to turn the lefthand panel too, so this is actually finished, officially – it has a title, “The fence resolves/the rocks agree to run away”, acrylic on canvas 40 x 80 cm, and I’m very pleased with its balance of calmness against the energetic marks. I want to find more of that balance in my paintings.

so a new start in the studio with some drawing

and a new 100 x 100 canvas ….

 

 

 

the last day of march 2021

Posted jane -->on 31st Mar 2021

is when I’m starting this though I’m not sure I shall get it posted today. the last post was a bit of a cliff-hanger, I had started a painting and was not sure how to resolve it. somehow I strode into the studio a few days later and started in with a brushful of blackish paint and things happened … but I had stuck some ripped up painted paper on first.

I had made a drawing in my sketch book at the end of the day which was very helpful though

 

so I covered up the questionable black mark marks in what was the foreground, if there is such a thing in these abstracts, worked over the top of the rather neat and tidy first attempt, blocked out a large area in the middle defined by my black lines, scraped it off again with a toothed metal kidney tool left over from the ceramics studio

added more paint

turned the painting around

ending up with this which I am really pleased with. I think the months of painting with gouache on paper have really helped.

we made an expedition to the river, the Eden, which has settled to a quieter persona since I last saw it, when it had spread out over the surrounding fields (its flood-plain) and got into the kitchen of a house by the old bridge in Cupar.

the tufts of leaf and reed and other debris show high high it was. now this willow is showing the first signs of its new leaves.

it looked very slippery dark and deep, and started me off on another painting, on one of these 100 x 100 cm box canvases, same as the last one

the usual beginnings – glued on ripped up painting and marks with a drippy brush

going on to stick brightly coloured tissue paper and some “gold” leaf I had in my stash. a lot got on my fingers, I’m too impatient to be a gilder

and then scrawly stuff about the river

another day and I’m back in there with more paint

but then I covered a lot of this up

and it became a very spring-ish painting

pinks and greens dominating

some things left uncovered

bits of the gold leaf and tissue paper, for “How the river shines today”

my next project is some deep mapping of the hills opposite

Craigfoodie is the first target

meanwhile I am tramping the by now well trodden paths tracks and lanes

around Ceres Moor and Kemback

I found a new track the other side of Kemback

and today on the way back from Cairgreen Wood I found a new way to get across to Owlet wood

without walking down the road as we had before.

this is a painting about, not of, Cairngreen. Today there were five roe deer on the field outside the wood

and a little flock of siskins flew past me and settled in a small gorse bush next to the path.

I found a larch tree in bloom. I never knew they showed off bright pink flowers amongst the tufts of bright green new needles in the spring.

 

 

and then it almost feels like summer

Posted jane -->on 20th Mar 2021

for one day, that is, the day before yesterday, the temperature rose to 17C and I sat out in the garden to have my coffee. but today it is 11C and the sun in and out. it’s a good sign though. There was a chiffchaff singing on the path to Ceres Moor, so that is definitely a sign that spring IS here.

on walks in the last week, snowdrops are still in flower and looking fresh, and the blackthorn is not out yet, though the buds are showing signs. in Norfolk I am sure it will be out and the snowdrops definitely over.

we walked round the loch at Kilconquar (pronounced Kinnocher)

last Saturday and came quite close to two herons. the snowdrops there were wonderful.

yesterday  I walked in Lade Braes in St Andrews, it’s full of snowdrops, crocuses and drifts of bright blue scylla, – heard a chiffchaff and saw a bumble bee. but for some reason didn’t take any photos, these are all of Kilconquar.

the day before yesterday we went to Kemback, climbed Jenny’s steps (there must be a hundred of them)

on the way I admired the Lomonds – I looked them up geologically, and their shoulders are sills of volcanic rock that flowed (when hot) through the horizontal weaknesses in the sedimentary sandstones, and their peaks are the pipes through which the molten lava rose to the surface and erupted as volcanoes. Largo Law is another such remnant.

not much sign of spring in the woods yet. I expect if I was there at five-thirty in the morning the dawn chorus would be deafening, but mostly it was quiet, with a couple of mountain bike enthusiasts zooming about.

I think in another month there will be bluebells.

another expedition to Cairngreen wood, walking round it widdershins/against the sun this time. you always see different things walking paths a new way.

the latest little pocket book/four winds book is filling up

the quicker the drawing the better it is

the top of Garliebank, the steep hill I can see from the house, has great swooping perspectives, and you can see the snowy Cairngorms peeping over the top of the local hills. I have a plan to walk round all the local hills which you can see from Ceres Moor and from Garliebank.

for now the newly ploughed ground with its scalloped edges and strips of green catches my eye.

in the studio new work on canvas has begun

things disconcert by going too quickly

so some collage disrupts that

but then this one took matters into its own hands

and became this

and then,  a small act but a major decision today, I turned the right hand panel upside down, which oddly enough fits well and makes the whole thing more dynamic. and finished.

whereas the square canvas has much to resolve, although it’s become very much more interesting

the black features at the bottom are the problem, I love the marks but it seems very unbalanced at the moment. the dark in the top half does have various purple-brown and maroon marks that you can’t see in this photo

but on the whole it needs something more interesting going on across it.

the reworking came from this very loose painting in my big sketchbook. which itself benefits from having two halves, like a diptych.

it’s always good to have a problem waiting for one in the studio, even if you turn it to the wall for the time being, and read a book, or tackle the garden instead, it’s working away in your brain.

 

 

winter comes back

Posted jane -->on 7th Mar 2021

at last I have a usable studio. there is stuff in it – boxes of pots and paintings – that will go in the small shed I have ordered and will receive this Thursday – but I have been able to work in there. it’s been very cold again so as I can’t afford to spend lots of money keeping it warm I haven’t had a lot of time, but things have started. Also there is an issue with the bottom of the door – a large gap as the joiner didn’t make the new floor extend over the step enough.

I have 2 trestle tables, the one on the left will have even more space to lay out all my paints etc when I have resolved the problem of where certain other things should go. the logistics of moving from a place with masses of sheds …

it’s great having walls that are smooth enough to bluetack the work onto. before I only had flint cobble, or shiplap wood. So I’ve been working on paper as it feels safe, I’ve got rather used to it over the last 6 months.

it can be tidied away into folders or plan chest drawers, and it’s very cheap compared to canvases. I have lots of blank canvases which I am ignoring for the time being.

the old paintings, from the 90’s which we edited down to a smaller stack in the summer, will go in that shed, and then I will have room to bring in the studio easels, and to use the piece of wall opposite the table I’m painting on, as a painting wall.

meanwhile I am also walking to paint, doing research with my feet, taking little notebooks out in my pocket

to scribble in and try to find the essence of the local landscape

Cairngreen wood is one of these focii

from my door to walk to it and around it is almost six miles, with some steep bits.

it has a wonderful shape on the map, which I am intending to work on as the basis of some paintings

you can see by the concentration of contour lines the “steep bits”.

parts are conifer plantation, other parts, higher up around the quarry, are sparse skinny birch and sycamore between rocks, the rocks and the bases of the trees thick with bright green moss.

these paintings on paper are beginning to express the ideas of landscape, paths, textures, shapes.

another place I am focusing on is Garliebank. I can see this side of it, the very steep side, from my house. pity that streetlight is always in the way.

but if I walk up to Ceres moor

and turn right

I am up on top of Garliebank, with a view across to the hill of Tarvit

where a magnificent fox crossed the ploughed field in a leisurely fashion the other morning

the notebook received several swoopy lines and scribbled-in areas

these books are made of paper folded and cut

and then scrap paper of all sorts folded and stitched inside each of the three main folds (In this case the “spine” has four sections, a “four winds book” from India Flint’s Nomad school of arts course taken through February)

and they are included in my “morning pages” routine, before I get up with a cup of tea and the dog waiting … I am finding them extraordinarily fruitful.

the papers themselves will suggest pattern which can be co-opted in a painting

the faster I do them, the better – here while walking down the steep hill below that foxy wood

and the scalloped edge of the ploughed and the unploughed field

yellowhammers sing up here, they like the gorse and the open sky.

larks too,

though the promise of these catkins has been put on hold and spring seems far away. the municipal daffodils are still fast in bud.

 

 

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).

 

 

 

 

back to tentsmuir

Posted jane -->on 22nd Feb 2021

we hadn’t been because of the fiercely cold weather and the snow, which combined makes the back roads very slippery, and they tend to close the carpark if there’s slippery black ice

we had been to to the Old Golf Course which backs onto West Sands beach, in a cold east wind. it looked like and felt like tundra.

but the beach would have been colder.

another two days and things were radically different, although there were lumps of snow about for a week, things felt much warmer, and better underfoot. there was still a cold wind, it was so strong that the next couple of days I had a sore hip from trudging down the beach against it.

B seemed immune to the cold and the strength of the wind

and the sand smoking along it in stinging flurries

I used the Hipstamatic app and got some inspiring photos towards paintings

where the little burn exits onto the beach is a marvellous in-between place of reflections

and peaty water

directly influencing more acrylic-on-paper kitchen table paintings

more the beginning of something than ends in themselves

I got a bit carried away with the lushness of the paint

and this one has a lot of scraping on and off

end point of the walk

a marker and a mark in the landscape

on the beach itself it’s always about the light

but also then there are delicate objects that catch the eye

reminding me of my friend Daphne Wright’s work in plaster and resin.

another interesting piece arrived this week, I swapped it for this one

with Shelford Chandler, who makes these sculptural abstract landscapes with found materials

it looked too lonely up there on the wall by itself so for now it’s keeping company with my big norfolk landscape

there are elements in both that speak to each other, especially in the colours and subject matter.

 

 

 

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!

 

 

 

 

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