May – blossom in a slow spring

 

This magnificent pair of wild cherry trees (gean) is near Abdie Old Kirk 

and it’s peak bluebells about now. The may is not quite out yet, so casting clout season not quite here – we have only had a couple of days warm enough to open garden doors and this last weekend has been two of those low cloud almost raining days, with haar blowing in off the coast.

The woods are so green with new leaves

and the ferns are all uncurling themselves.

from this a week or so ago

to this today. These ferns are mostly shield or broad buckler.

Last week I visited Edinburgh for my monthly gallery catch-up. This is from Michael Clarence’s exhibition Half-life at Detail framing where they have a very good space and glass frontage to the framing business, and show a succession of impressive Scottish artists.

These are all quite small paintings, oil or a mix of oil and acrylic, and I found them affecting and interesting and painterly. There’s a catalogue pdf here

I caught the bus from where I had parked the car in Stockbridge, to get around with my senior bus pass.

Next stop was the Royal Scottish Academy for their annual open. This friend is definitely a rising star – Adrian Gardner, in front of his painting “Thorn Lake”. He has been accepted for everything I have not! Including getting to the second stage of the John Moores Prize.

I also admired Jennifer MacRae’s watercolour (she’s an RSA member) for characterisation and loose paint-handling on a medium to large scale for watercolour.

And I was quite gobsmacked by this huge painting by Robbie Bushe (RSA), Battle for Bridge Over the Stockbridge Colonies (Post Abercrombie Plan). There were only one or two abstract paintings.

Then I walked back to Dundas street. And Gallery had interesting stitched paintings on hemp sacks by Hanna ten Doornkaat, but they made my hands ache in sympathy!

Lastly the Ingleby Gallery with a big set of drawings by David Austen to go with words by Hisham Matar. This was a project started between them during lockdown, and it developed into a novella – The Boys: An Adventure and a suite of 73 gouache drawings. The work above is not from the suite but from some individual gouache works with text, hung upstairs. The text is collaged on and painted over and inspired me to print out a couple of my recent poems and use lines from them –

this is a corner of a remedial paint-over of a 2021 figurative painting. I think half burying the words in the paint might help me to resolve the central figure of a naked woman. Perhaps it’s going to end up being more about sleep and dreams than the erotic body of Ariadne on her bed in the wood. A night-picture.

I have a lot of canvases started in the studio, or restarted.

A lot of watercolour ideas floating about.

studies in sketchbooks

which I hope by working on them in parallel

to have a more cohesive body of work.

I am pulled in two directions – the abstract and the figurative.

This tiny abstract “Greentime” (only 20 x 20 cm, on plywood) has been selected for a show in Halifax organised by Artist Support Pledge. It will have to be framed and sent by courier, then retrieved by courier.

The garden has been grabbing a lot of my time, but now I have things under control, tomatoes, peppers and courgettes in the greenhouse, beans and peas outside, and to my delight, self-seeding from all my prairie plants, including the coneflowers and echinaceas.

an embarrassment of seedlings in fact. When I cleared up the dead stalks and seedheads in February I emptied the seedheads onto both flowerbeds. But also the prairie mallows have self-seeded massively, and the Mexican feather grass too, although about half the grass I put in last year succumbed to the frost.

I am about to have a huge show of foxgloves too, all from seed gathered from hedgerows.

Yesterday in the drippy haar we went to Dunino Den, very near St Andrews, which boasts a “sacred well”;

in my opinion a natural feature, a large pothole made by flood water swirling stones around, as the whole site has been formed by the action of water at a higher level and in much stronger force than possible since the ice sheets of the last Ice Age melted.

Huge sandstone cliffs have been eroded into a narrow gorge.

The stone looks similar to that at Kemback. Every little hole has coins pushed into it, and trees have prayer or wish ribbons attached. A fairy grotto, or druid sacred site, according to your fancy. There were/are some standing stones near the church which may have been a stone circle. Of course that is late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, which has nothing to do with Druids. But the geology, as with all of Fife with its volcanoes, caves and fossils, doesn’t disappoint.

Little N got her fair share of paddling and exciting smells in the undergrowth. The bluebells and wild garlic were spectacular, and the trees, which grow very tall in these deep dens near the coast, all in their new leaves. We felt soaked in green, as well as a bit wet around the ankles.

There was a luminosity about the damp light of the myriad water droplets of the haar which lent itself to these watercolours I painted later in the evening.

helped by the family’s bright raincoats

I love letting the colours run – the gold, the mauve, the green …