here comes the sun

it’s just started coming up over the hill a tiny bit earlier every morning, though there are more mornings than not where you can’t see it at all. this morning was a good one, the bright gold shimmer behind Owlet wood.

this is a photo taken near Lauder in the Scottish Borders where we went to meet some old friends on new Year’s Day. it’s about one and half hours from here.

we drove over the new Queensferry Crossing, which I think is very beautiful.

it was lovely to walk amongst these big hills – they have a wilder feeling than my new home country, which has rich soils and is quite intensively cultivated. shaggy grass, sheep and big plantations, upland and open.

it wasn’t a huge walk as we’d met up with a family. we had a picnic at the top in the shelter of a wall and a clump of trees.

plenty of sheep

and conversations.

I have walked in Kemback woods and Blebo Craigs a few times in the last couple of weeks, finding new paths

new ways of getting lost

there is a patchwork of old plantation blocks, crowded and dark

you are never quite sure if the path you have found will continue

or lead you over the edge of a cliff. I think this pool, high up amongst quarry workings, may be the source of a high waterfall.

pillows of moss

greening the glades

and smothering old spoil heaps

walls in damp places here in Fife are often covered in moss

mossy greens turning up in the paintings too

this is a stage, the painting started out in September with golden yellows and some dark reds  at the bottom, then it became something to  do with Scotstarvit tower, then it sat about for ages. the week before I painted a nude figure on it. but that wasn’t what I wanted, and the squeegee came out.

 

I wrote into the paint, and there were bits I really liked

but the next day it was looking too dark

it’s become this, with the many layers perceptible under the paint, and more text scratched into it.

I love this big area of pink

I pray you for days back
and your green man sent for
the crescent moon landed
cut off at the neck
just below the hair

I seem to have a pink series going on. my daughter made me this scarf, the pink a reflection of what’s going on in the work. punk pink, shocking pink, not little girl’s pink.

I have paintings without it though

the blues of those shadowy pine plantations

and the whoosh of waterfalls

at Kemback after heavy rain.

another painting; here

the paint is squeegeed thickly and written into. a pair in waiting to see if they are ready or not.