river mouth and forest god

I’ve been finding new inspiration in the landscape from my reading and work has been coming out of it. the places themselves produce ideas

here’s a lovely forest monster looming out of the path

and another. these steep slopes at Kemback were once busy with mining – all the stone for St Andrews is supposed to have come off this hillside – and there are roads cut into it.

ghostly diggings and troll-like humps sitting under trees

this tree has fallen against another

you have to duck under it, and I noticed yesterday it was quite a lot lower, I wonder after the storms last night, when we must have had a couple of inches of rain, will it have shifted more….. maybe I should go round it rather than under.

I discovered how to go through a door that’s been open for a while recently

I have been photographing our walks on the beach, and drawing

but always felt constrained by the horizon.

I looked at an exhibition by an Australian artist, Peter Stevens, at the Defiance Gallery – a whole series of paintings about river, estuary, very elemental, which showed me what I should be doing with my drawings – forget the horizon, draw as if from above.

so I’m quite excited about what’s coming out

all the textures and lines

which have lured me on for so long

it’s a nice breakthrough

and a change in colour too

this is a little one, a resolution to a painting that has been waiting to be finished for some time.

the orange spots – must do more of that!

colour can be so transformative

hipstamatic does these random things

but the blue is important

and tiny bits of red showing underneath

that have been painted over from the first and second passes.

another one today – here are details

it has a piece of raw linen canvas glued over the primed canvas, across the centre, from edge to edge.

charcoal into wet paint

ocean at the river’s mouth

Acrylic, linen, charcoal, oil pastel, on linen, 60 x 50 cm.

My eyes rusted and lost/containing seawater/and my hair full of saltmarsh. /I ask for its touch, brimming/its voices and reasons.

and this morning, after a night of violent thunderstorms

what waits in the wood for me

guarded

embalmed in resin

water will have washed down the steep trails

it won’t be the same