water lily lochans, Les Nymphéas, and other ponds

midsummer is water lily season. the pond at Kemback just below the wood has lily leaves but no flowers yet.

I have been imagining the water lilies in the lochans of Assynt

which will be flowering around now. when we were there at the end of April a few old stalks of bogbean poked through the surface but no more. this particular imagining got painted over by the way, and there are no pink ones, those are cultivated. while I was painting these I had quite forgotten about Monet’s water lily paintings.

the first ones I ever saw were in New York’s Moma, almost totally abstract, huge square fields of pale yellow and green with some painterly marks in white somewhere near the centre denoting a lily flower. then eventually I went to see Les Nymphéas, the massive set of paintings at the Orangerie in Paris. I was stunned. all that vibrating colour. there is a theory that when Monet had his cataract operation, and the lens removed, because in those days they couldn’t replace the lens, his eye was open to ultraviolet light, which normally your lens protects you from. (birds can see it but maybe in a different way) and so his colour vision was changed, probably towards blue and purple.

this painting itself made me think of the water lily lochans (little lochs) in Assynt, rather than galleries in New York and Paris, as I worked into it. white waterlilies, Nymphaea alba, are native to Britain, all the way up to the very north of Scotland – don’t believe the Wildlife Trust which says not. they need very clean water and no disturbance.

in Assynt there are lochans all across the hummocky lower ground of the Lewisian Gneiss with no pollution or agricultural run-off, perfect for water lilies.

the water alternately reflects sky, land, shadow, mountain, cloud. between black and quiet grey or stunning ultramarine.

the high lochans in corries scoured out by ice are different, too cold for waterlilies. but they still hold brown trout, and are a challenge for fishermen who like to climb.

there is a book I have had for maybe ten years, At the Loch of the Green Corrie, about one of these high lochans, about Norman MacCraig, the poet who lived in Assynt, and fished there, and about Andrew Greig, the author, and his fishing and climbing (and regrets) as well. it’s all a bit masculine, though he does quote Nan Shepherd.

it’s made me think about the ephemeral pools in Bale Wood, which come into paintings I made in 2020.

and how water is so important, and so beautiful to paint.

today I followed a different path at Kemback, which promised waterfalls and upper ponds

after a steep and mostly pathless climb we found no ponds, but muddy springs,

about halfway up, below rough fields.

then we followed the contour line along an old wall amongst the trees

until that ended and there was a faint path up the slope again. the OS map has some very definite tracks marked, but as is so often the case in plantations, things have changed since the map was made and many of these tracks have disappeared and new ones come into play, especially ones made by the mountain bike people who have a lot of very hairy fun going down near vertical slopes between the pine trees.

at the top we were back in familiar territory around the edges of the old quarry. On the way back from the far end of the wood I  was looking for a deep pool at the top, perhaps a blocked quarry, but I had forgotten the way to it. it’s not marked on the map.

a painting from earlier this year, I think this is much more watery now I’ve put it in context.

almost echoing this which is the big pool or lochan at Star Moss.

we have the river Eden to walk along here in Cupar. at the moment parts of the banks are head high in flowering grasses, comfrey and bees.

the water levels are quite low at the moment. I wonder what that means for the fish (brown trout, sea trout) and the otters that live here. the pottery at the top of the Kemback woods has lost its ornamental fish to an otter.