more snowdrops, collaging, and swoon-worthy paintings in Edinburgh

Snowdrops at Cambo, snowdrops alongside muddy tracks, hidden in ditches and quiet pathways, along river banks, even in my garden.

Fancy ones at Cambo, these are quite big and really not as pretty as the plain white drops, or the doubles.

at Kingsbarns

and back at Cambo.

This black and white printed paper (from loo roll wrapping) seems to have some of that snowdrop blanket quality. I am continuing to make collage both in this concertina book and small ones on paper.

These are definitely more about landscape than my paintings have been for a while, and I think that is filtering though to the paintings. Meanwhile I have 3 poems in this Spring’s edition of Tears in the Fence, which is very exciting. They were all written for Tears in the Fence workshops run by David Caddy. Collage for me has become a way of making art visually and linguistically.

this one, about Assynt, collages geology terms, Gaelic, assonance and alliterative connections, and the history of the Highlands’ colonisation …

well Tentsmuir – so much one can put together …

I am even doing collage in cloth!

I have so many photos of snowdrops – this is from the Hill of Tarvit NT grounds.

 

And as always, too many photos for one blog. Spring really does feel on its way now as we are coming up to equinox, and there is light before seven in the morning, and it’s as late six in the evening  when I feel I need to draw the curtains. (It would be later if I didn’t live on a housing scheme)

our Sunday walks have included a trip to Almondbank in Perthshire

picnicking along the river here

and then walking up to precipitous edges above it

here past more snowdrops

by a private loch (is there really such a thing in Scotland?)

last week at Wemyss on the coast of Fife, with the castle lowering out of the cliff and the beach at the bottom being eroded away.

I had a terrific visit to Edinburgh

parking at a friend’s – so we popped into Details, a framer with a great exhibition area

for Rowena’s show. I love these – they have the transparency of watercolour but the pigment-richness of oil paint.

the two owners of Details were really good promoters of the work, being knowledgeable in a way that only a good framer, or a fellow painter can be.

a plain workman like space with an almost completely glass front. very good for strong colourful paintings.

Then for something completely different, I went over to Dundas Street, – first the Open Eye Gallery, where I absolutely fell in love with this huge painting by Robert MacLaurin, though so figurative is not usually my bag. He swaps between similar scenery in Oz and Scotland, so it could be Tasmania, or it could be here, said the gallerist who I took to through shared excitement about this.

Then to the Ingleby Gallery, via And, and Arusha. Neither had work I was terribly excited about, but I enjoyed seeing this Callum Innes at Ingleby, with its gorgeous surfaces.

This was the main event of my visit – I must have heard of Andrew Cranston, surely, but really had not registered – so I absolutely swooned over it. I think it was partly the interesting surfaces, he has stuck fine linen onto the canvas (something I have been doing, and am plotting to do again) so the sky area is one piece, and the purple area (river? lake?) is another, with quite crunchy edges.

more watercoloury transparency, but muted in colour. Cranston uses distemper paint which he makes himself – basically it is rabbitskin glue with chalk, oil and pigment, or maybe without the chalk.

very hard to show what made me so excited! But this painting with its moody colours, granulated drippy pigments, and quirky flowers and watering cans (shades of french antique watering cans I made into a knitwear design) and garden furniture under a night sky (look there’s Orion’s belt) so bright it is casting shadows just tripped something in my brain. He will be having a solo show there in June, so I am planning to go to the opening.

I caught a bus to go back to my friend’s and had a great visit looking at his paintings ( https://www.instagram.com/here_is_ag/ ) and then got a puncture in his driveway by driving onto a low brick wall …… but even though that was horribly expensive and stressful I got to look at more of his paintings and he was very kind and fed me, so it wasn’t so bad. A memorable visit in more ways than one.

Back to collages.

And the studio again. what shape for this diptych?

It grew into another of these, with the yellow peeking through in places –

all these ugly stages

surely some of these images influencing it –

(Lindores Loch with some help from Hipstamatic)

and sketchbook work reinforcing it –

and the poem I was writing last week about passage graves and 70’s new towns and henges and pilgrimage paths in Fife. I made a list of words beginning with K which go back to Old English, like kith and kernel and kindle

scratched them into wet paint

got brave with colour

allowed the landscape back in –

oh yes, I am sure my trip to the galleries of Edinburgh had its effect. So I am still working on the previous blue one, but this one,

 

“From before, from beyond, untold, under, until” – is finished, and submitted to the Royal Scottish Academy’s annual Open, so I am preventing myself from any further tweaking.

meanwhile …… there are new paintings started in the studio