indoor studios

I have settled into indoors for my studio now. We are having a much more traditionally cold Scottish winter than last year, when I managed to keep the studio bearable – and when putting the halogen heater on was more affordable.

The old table in the bay window, which I use for germinating and growing on plants in early spring has become a laboratory of ripping and sticking,

Mostly into this pretty sketchbook of heavy watercolour paper given me by a friend a few years ago.

It is ideal as it can take the torn pieces of etching and acrylic on paper,  and also do nice things with watercolour pencil marks.

On sunny days (we have had a few, searingly cold with heavy frost but pleasant indoors) it’s comforting to have the sun at my shoulder while I do this simple but very useful making.

 

The winter has been alternately really cold, with the studio (some heat comes on at night when my octopus Go tariff  is affordable, although more than double what it was up until December) down to a few degrees above freezing and frost staying all day, and heavy rain which has filled up the aquifers and left puddles on paths, streams on tracks and lakes in fields.

So far this January there has not been snow, and the pavements have stayed reasonably safe.

Frost makes patterns of all sorts.

Yesterday morning we had to get our walk in early, so I wrapped B up in an extra layer, a thick fleece jumper under her warm coat.

Bare trees and shrubs make inspiration for drawing –

more a gestural feeling than anything literal –

icy textures and colours and the river’s surface opaque and wrinkled,

surely inspiring these new works.

And then there’s the beach.

On Wednesday the burn outflow from the flooded dunes was full of ice.

The sand was hard with frost, even these ripples were as set in concrete,

and dark cloud seemed to threaten a snowstorm

but it blew away over the North Sea and up the Angus coast.

The beach seemed dark with creamy lappings of the tide

not so frozen as to refuse footprints along here.

This part of the beach where estuary becomes bay continues to erode into the marrams.

More related, but not literal, or deliberate, collage work.

Last Sunday we went to Cambo in East Neuk, where a burn and lots of trees come right down to the beach.

This place I always find interesting in winter – the patterns of the bare trunks and branches and the horizontals of path, burn and sea –

which definitely influenced a painting made in 2020, before I moved to Scotland and had just been visiting over Christmas. (It’s been bought by a friend in London). The Path Holds Tokens of Waking.

Working on two canvases like this echoes the pages of a sketchbook double spread. It makes a fifth edge (see Australian painter Idris Murphy), as well as making a big painting much more manageable for moving, storing and hanging, until it is framed, when it becomes unwieldy and fragile. As this one was, and in attempting to send it to a gallery it suffered an unfortunate accident, probably run over in its box by a UPS fork lift. Of course they blamed my packing. I have restored it, and it has been framed again in its new home, where hopefully it won’t need to be moved or stored.

More trees, looking through them down from Owlet wood to the Eden valley and Cupar. Mostly beech trees, this narrow strip of wood is visible from my sofa, where I am sitting to type this.

On the home stretch and downhill after walking over the hill to Ceres.

Sun in the frosty woods at Kemback/Blebo –

high up, so from Blebocraigs you can see the snowy hills of Perthshire, the southern Cairngorms,

and more to the left, the volcanic stubs of West Fife, the Lomonds.

The wandering beasts of Blebo now have a nice big field and plenty of hay –

and a bit further along a few fieldfares in a field. There were seven – does that make a flock?

An overflowing spring had solidified on Shepherds’ lane, and made a big patch of frozen water on the road at the bottom. There was just enough hard mud edge to get by here. But now the frost has gone, and ten centigrade is forecast for this week. If it doesn’t rain all the freezing should have dried out the paths and tracks – let’s see.

In the kitchen this happened. Absolutely the result of doing the collage experiments, and seeing Lilian Neilson’s painting in the Scottish Gallery last week, with its expressive swooping palette knife work.

1938-1998 a friend and associate of Joan Eardley, but not as well-known.

I worked with the canvases laid flat on the table –

it’s easier to lay thick paint down, and not to worry about top and bottom and what is which

but just enjoy the paint for its own sake.

The only thing I can”t really do, for the sake of the table and the floor, is have runny paint pouring off everywhere. And I don’t have the special neutral daylight lights that I have in the studio, of course, so it will have to go back in there to be photographed properly.