in the woods, of the woods

in the woods is where my eye is seduced by shape, atmosphere and mysterious personalities.

In Scotland so many trees are outspoken individuals, in an almost silent language of posture and rhythm.

These are from the woods on the Northern slopes of Lucklaw hill in North East Fife, a lovely wilderness of mixed trees and heath; some of it almost seems like Old Caledonian forest with blaeberry and Scots pine.

There are larch growing naturally and large birch trees. On the way down off the top there are several large beech and sycamore with divided trunks making shady bare places with multiple branches and deep canopy.

Here you might meet a roe deer, if you wandered into my little painting, Kempt, only 12 x 12 inches, or 30 x 30 centimetres. I am on a run with small paintings at the moment, all of woodland, forest or trees.

At the very top and above the quarry there is heathland. In August the heather smelt wonderful, great waves of honey scent came off it. Now it is turning a rusty colour.

You get a panoramic view, around from the Tay, the Firth of Tay, the huge dark expanse of Tentsmuir forests, the Eden estuary, St Andrews Bay, and the new wind farm which is now rapidly rising from the North Sea off East Neuk.

Closer to our feet were the shiny yellow flowers of tormentil, which is a kind of potentilla, and as a herb was traditionally used (and probably still is) to treat colic, gum disorders, wounds and inflammation.

On the way up to the trig point you look across the Tay valley from grassy fields.

If there are no cows in the fields, that is. Otherwise you have to walk down a very minor road past the quarry and up a different grassy field that’s very steep.

The woodland on the way down is your reward (as well as the views).

Last week I joined other artists and makers for a social evening in the old station master’s house at Ladybank station. It’s been converted into a community arts venue and is running a weekly evening of tea, chat, skills exchange and space to do your own thing. Once a month there will be taster workshops. I used to enjoy the Bale Art club, so I went along, and worked on two small paintings.

This one is Kerb, 8 x 8 inches, painted over a small abstract. the more paint you paint over the better it gets! Also painting  in the frame is good if you are doing it in your lap.

This was the starting off point, watercolour in the sketch book.

This one, Knoll, is even smaller, 7 x 5″, quite fiddly to work on.

from this in my sketchbook

These figures have the potential to become something much more mysterious and otherly. I have been listening to an audiobook on a favourite subject, The Naked Neanderthal, by Ludovic Slimak. It is scientific but also philosophical, discussing how we can’t dress this other humanity up in suit tie and hat and say we would not notice them on the subway, much as plains Indians were stuffed into European suits for portraits in the nineteenth century – how they remain unknown and unknowable, their Eurasian territories once colonised by us, Sapiens, much as North America was colonised by Europeans. They were not at all like us. Even their thumbs are slightly different. And our standardised way of going about things, so successful at this colonisation thing, will be the death of us if we are not careful. Our art has not changed much since the Paleolithic, we recognise Sapiens cave murals as equally potent and accomplished as modern art, but we have no idea what Neanderthal art was, whether it was in beautifully crafted tools or in some other manifestation. Recent interpretations of feathers in their sites as decoration are specious, as we can’t tell what they did with them, there is no evidence of them being used for decoration, that is an idea from our Sapiens viewpoint, and other reinterpretations of objects such as shells crafted for jewellery stored in museums as from their surroundings seem to have been mixed up and dated wrongly. But one new fact that I learned from the book is that in their heyday, about 120,000 years ago, there was an interlude of global warming, when the global temperature was about three degrees Centigrade warmer than even today, and what had been the vast open cool climate plains of Eurasia, became temperate forest. Although the fauna and flora changed, it was a very rich habitat, which they seemed to have adapted to without problems.

So that moves me to think about forests and how we interact in them. (this is a 30 x 30 cm  small acrylic on board). And what we might interact with in our imaginations. In the forest.

Unholy, 8 x 6 inches, another board, is a thought from the big painting, “Sometimes that holy feeling meets me in the forest”, which in its early stages had a figure so vague that it might have had horns or ears on top of its head.

Then I coincidentally saw this painting, one of several by Richard Jellyman in the Contemporary British Painting Prize exhibition in Huddersfield Art Gallery (he won the prize). Funnily enough these have another Other involved in their making as he uses AI to produce the image which I then presume he paints himself as they are wonderfully painterly. Not very big, this one is I think, 35 x 26 cm. It reminds me of those grotesque furred and horned monster outfits that people dress up in, the Krampus.

Equally the rootballs of fallen trees that pretend to be monsters intrigue and sometimes alarm me in the woods.

And I think of Sibelius’ tone poem Tapiola,

about Tapio, the animating forest spirit mentioned throughout the Kalevala, the Finnish epic folk poem.

So currently I have plenty of ideas to work on, and I am having fun with all these small woodland paintings.

Another small one, 8 x 6″ from Kinclaven in August.

I didn’t get to Edinburgh this month, and missed a couple of interesting shows, but will be back there in October.

Meanwhile my garden is bursting with colour. The asters have come into their own this month, along with the rudbekias.

I have a problem (as in a murder of crows) of courgettes, two plants is one too many.

I made a courgette, lime and pistachio cake to use up a bit of courgette, but currently there’s a queue of double sized and finger sized ones in the fridge. The plants have got enormous and covered the bed I made for salad leaves.

It’s been at least a month since we walked at Kinclaven, and we’ve had smaller expeditions to Cambo mostly –

these little paintings from the Kinclaven woods have come out well and gone off to other lives.

This Sunday we did another trip to Creiff.

A lot of photos were taken.

We walked along the Earn, under mature beech, horse chestnut, sweet chestnut,

plenty of lichen,

the river running fast and high.

There were sloes to pick

quite a haul

and feasts for the eyes too. This is Puddock (old Scots for frog) Pond, its edges deeply overgrown with willow, and tucked into the edge of a wood where the track levels out after skirting the steep slopes of Creag na Gaoith. In Norfolk there are ponds in every field, either old clay or marl pits, or natural pingo type features made by ice sheets. The geology is very different here and ponds are a bit of a rarity.

We didn’t know what fungus this feast was.

Evidence of different ways of life, massive gateposts and a great stone wall running round an estate, and the path we walked on once full of horse-drawn traffic.

But this walk is well signposted and well kept, and well-touristed, especially along the river.

These remaining edifices of a long gone railway line seem like mysterious artefacts of ancient Rome suddenly appearing in the temperate jungle.