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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.

 

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’, which I mistakenly thought refers to an area one of whose chief resources was peat, but actually it’s more about pasture, grass, and a pastoral agriculture).

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.