the rest of April

Walking from Dairsie up to Fingask my first swallow of the spring, on April 21st.

sunshine

butterflies (a small tortoiseshell, which I usually see around there),

the jut of Craiglug

and lambs, which were called by their mother away from the wall next to the road when she saw me – and the dog.

back to the studio and this one –

I knocked out a lot of the busy stuff

while even washing a lot of that off with spray bottle and kitchen roll …

the studio was quite warm, we had some warmish weather –

but I had to put some layers of glaze on, and then off again, trying to warm up the colour a bit –

it’s hard with acrylic not to kill it with layers

it started to look a bit unfired clay dull

In fact after looking at it for about two weeks I have just put on a very subtly coloured glaze.

The thing was that the photo looked like this, but in actual life it didn’t. Now it does!

I have been doing lots of watercolour studies of figures

and found that I could get much the same effect with thinned down acrylics on these canvases that I have gessoed the fine linen onto.

So that helped me resolve this one –

the image is from a snowy walk back in 2021 through Owlet wood on a Sunday afternoon with my daughter Lucy and her husband Scott.

We saw a tawny owl.

The graphic shape of the trees in this reminds me of the tall kissing gates in Cairngreen wood,

and of the wonderful pen and ink illustrations of Charles Keeping – see here

which had an enormous influence on my artistic development as a child.

This tree alarmingly looks like one of his drawings –

Lime trees make skirts like this when they are browsed by cattle or deer. Normally the bushy development is at ground level.

But tree shapes are so complicated it’s really hard to simplify them down to what works in a graphic way.

Their details are so fantastical.

It’s best not to look at the photos too much.

This is also Owlet wood, with broken glass all over the ground. Not hard to guess what happens here. But it’s very close to a currently active badger sett – today I noticed several big entrances looking well used.

It’s full of this onion smelling wild-flower, three-cornered leek (Allium triquetrum), and some snowdrops much earlier in the spring.

Cherry blossom is very much what’s happening just now.

Clouds of this pink one everywhere in Cupar. I really enjoy it.

but also there are plenty of wild cherry trees – naturally occurring and planted.

This is one of several in the cemetery and on the golf course next to it, and the woods are full of them. Gean in Scottish.

The willows along the river are in flower too, making them look golden.

back to the tiny Ivory sketch book

I bought a book on Vuillard, since I didn’t know much about him,

these tender little portraits and interiors are what I like –

closer to my imagination –

i am continuing to work out how I can use the human figure in my landscapes

watery blobby watercolour seems to help

So I achieved a better resolution with this painting while I was doing Open Studios last weekend

I am much happier with it, the blue with the painted over collage balances out the pink, which I thinly painted over with an earth green.

And I leave you with these primroses amongst the young wild cherry trees planted on the edge of Kemback wood – another spring flower along with the violets that are in the woods just now.