August – that feeling in the forest

Well here we are at the end of August and I have too much to go into one blog post.

You’d expect beaches in August – it hasn’t been so hot that we couldn’t go more or less at our usual time. In fact it hasn’t been hot at all, hardly any warmer than 20C. It’s the month for these lions mane jellyfish which will give you a really bad sting, probably send a child to A&E.

One morning I found a lot of these little purple jellies washed up along the high tide line. They only give a mild sting. None of this encourages me to swim at all!

This freshwater pool almost always has swallows and martins dipping for a mid-flight drink, but I can never catch them with the phone camera.

The sea-rocket clumps are at maximum now.

The dead porpoise that Bims rolled in in the winter is now whitened bones.

There are a few bird remains, but nothing like last year.

So it looks as if we are over the main avian flu epidemic. Now one can look at bird bones and enjoy the aesthetic.

Kinshaldy is very much a beach of tree bones.

At each end there is an estuary, and trees and branches float down after storms, especially on the Tay.

This is my turn around point, and I usually have a short sit down. It is a massive part of a willow.

Our Sunday walks have included beaches too – this is at Earls Ferry, on the Forth of Firth. If B is on the lead on a beach she does huge bounds which pull me about so I delegate her to younger stronger people. She pulled me over so quickly once I did a face plant, scratched my glasses and bumped my nose, and since then I have felt it’s safer to have someone else on the end of that.

We walked over the top past these WW2 installations, from Shell Bay, which is quite steep. You can’t really call it cliff, as it’s all grassy. at the bottom are masses of black volcanic rocks, and a walk you can do at low tide with the aid of chains.

The top path is more suitable for dogs.

As for horses in paintings, I got quite enthusiastic

and photographed several

but actually I think the piebald girl is the most interesting, then it becomes something else, as the appaloosa did.

I have made a start on a bigger canvas, 150 x 100 cm

On which various things happened

including this pony

but it has gone back into the shed for now, until other things occur to me.

So I got several things out to do more work on. This was a good start, but not enough was happening on it.

I had this little board painting, as an example for it NOT being a snow scene. And I wanted the text to be more important.

I translated it into Scots Gaelic too, to the best of my ability, and painted both the complete English and in the end just Uaireannan, sometimes, onto it.

But afterwards I didn’t really like the printy look, and the serif font, so it mostly got painted over again.

It’s still there if you really look.

And ripped up print-out stuck on and glazed over.

This is the final version – at the moment. I have an exhibition to submit it for.

So it has a little of that abstract thing going on, and the words scratched into the wet paint too.

And it no longer looks like a snow scene.

I got this one out and mostly got rid of the brush-marky speckle of colour.

I want it to be less “sceney” but I don’t think I am there yet.

This one got a lot of translucent green to change the dynamics of space in it.

And I got a 120 x 100 cm grey-yellow abstract out of the shed and basically ditched the whole thing, started again over the top. If you look at the watercolour of the black and white pony you will see a note about this painting at the top of it. I heard a conversation about a piece of music called “Cavatina for Midnight” and it was the trigger for this. More in the next post though.

Finally another walk! My daughter had a weekday off, so we went up to near Aberfeldy, north of Dunkeld and did this forest and loch walk with tea and cake.

Some of the forest – being commercial sitka – had been harvested. It always looks bleak and terrible.

Presumably this is storm Arwen almost two years ago; the tree’s roots have pulled up a great section of moss like a carpet.

These root masses with their moss drapes were the most interesting thing amongst the crowded tree planting of this place.

These trees look like disciplined warriors, it makes me think of a samurai. I have just read A Daughter of the Samurai, by Etsu Sugimoto, a memoir of daily life in a northern province of Japan at the beginning of the modern era, when the ancient nobility, the samurai class, had to cope with the loss of their role, and financial status. She married a Japanese businessman, a friend of her brother’s, in the US, in Cincinnati, in 1905, but came home with her two daughters when he died, so there are two phases of cultural adaption, one of her in America, and the second, of her young daughters, going from the freedom of the West to strict familial expectations in Japan. She lived at a time when Japan changed completely, and she became a Christian, but she kept her values of duty to family and state, and her gentle acceptance and ability to make the best of everything shines through this book, written in 1925.

The loch, Kennard, was lovely with its silvery reflections and island.

A good place for a picnic, with a paddle for the dogs

It was warm enough. Not a hot day, but when the sun is out in August it feels a lot warmer, even in Scotland.

Mostly there was plenty of shade

and shelter for bears ….