Bims’ op, a snake in the garden, and a trip to Edinburgh

 

Part of a painting by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, at the Fruitmarket Gallery, which I had not visited for over forty years. Somehow I had forgotten how close to Waverly Station it is.

All went okay with the removal of the toe cyst, though healing is not easy on a narrow chicken foot toe …. huge bandages for nearly two weeks, too many visits to the vet for bandage changes which reduced B to a shaking panting wreck …. bouncing back as soon as she was out of there of course. The very good news is that the biopsy showed nothing sinister. Just a non-malignant overgrowth of cells.

The bandages were great, she mostly did not interfere with them and it was relatively easy to protect them enough for short walks, around Cairngreen Wood was a good place, no other dogs or cats to get excited about. But the wound needed fresh air, so as soon as granulation started, it was barefoot,

and then it would have been a disaster if she licked it, so the rather harsh solution is her basket muzzle with enough tape on it to keep that tongue away from her toe.

There is no way I can get anything onto her foot to protect it that will stay on, so the walk is even more restricted at the moment, and some penicillin spray on a cotton swab to clean up after any outdoor forays. We are both pretty frustrated by this. I am building up my time on the bike in the bow window, much to other dog walkers’ amusement, and I have had to put B on a diet, she has put on a kilo already! The cheese to assist dosing with large antibiotic pills does not help.

Here’s the late autumn view from my  indoor studio. The birds have been eating the seeds on the echinaceas, and sprinkling them around, helping  reseeding.

The winter jasmine is flowering already, and the early miniature tête à tête daffodils poking through.

The kitchen is more or less done. I am so pleased with how my Sabine Nemet and Stephen Parry storage jars look on the oak counter next to the pale green tiles.

Here’s a Clive Bowen slipware platter, a Susanne Lukacs-Ringel little lidded pot and something of mine sitting in a Jean Nicolas Gerard plate.

Then these assorted neo-medieval floor tiles from Martin Wess back in the day when he was making them for Westminster Abbey and selling off the experiments and failures. They make great trivets.

Once back in the studio this canvas came indoors – it has had several layers, wiped on with crumpled newspaper and flooded with solvent, meaning it’s had to sit around in the outside studio to dry.

Some of these marks suggest things, and a facebook friend thought she could see a snake in it … I am painting over an abstract which had a lot of different textures in it.

So – a grass snake in my garden …

These watering cans, as simply painted as here in another painting, gave me huge trouble as they did not want to be simple.

They got scraped, dribbled, everything i could think of.

This was an image made with layers in Photoshop. What a mistake! I could not abandon this idea, but found it completely unachievable in reality.

a watercolour study for the foreground.

and it did end up pleasing me.

Once I was reconciled …

I was able to leave Bims with Scott in St Andrews on Friday last week, and go to Edinburgh on the train from Leuchars. (Why on earth did they cut St Andrews off from the railway??) I had two targets, firstly the new exhibition in the Fruitmarket Gallery, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and secondly a room full of Barbara Rae prints at the Open Eye Gallery.

The prints were hard to photograph because they are behind glass (not the non-reflective sort). This is a screen print, Sierra – I can hardly imagine how many different screens are involved in this.

Rae makes work from her travels – memorably in the Arctic, and New Mexico, as well as Europe.

She is 81 now but doesn’t seem to have slowed down.

I liked the carborundum prints like this one of the Arctic, North West Passage,

and this, Glacier, best, they have so much texture. I have very little idea of how they are made, I would like to find out.

this massive painting was also in the gallery. Her work is so impressive!

you can find more details here https://www.openeyegallery.co.uk/exhibitions/118-barbara-rae-dbe-prints/ 

I found there were strong connections visually between the two exhibitions, even though Rae comes at her sense of place from a colonialist nation and a position of immense privilege.

This is the left panel of a diptych by Quick-to-See Smith, a renaming of a continent named by its colonial masters as if it didn’t exist before. I can think of so many places where the colonists assume that it was non-existent before they “discovered” it or took it for themselves because the inhabitants lived a simpler or different sort of life. Including Palestine.

I walked back to Waverly Station and through to the Fruitmarket, picking up a young woman – a stranger to Edinburgh who was also going to the gallery and needed directions. Happily she was meeting Raven Chacon so I briefly said hello. He is the Navajo sound artist who curated a festival of sound/noise art for two evenings to go with the visual art. A book was indicated which I was very pleased to find … a great birthday present for my audiovisual essayist daughter.

The work in this show spans much of Quick-to-See Smith’s career, from the late 1980’s to this year, when she so sadly died of pancreatic cancer while making pieces for the Fruitmarket with the help of her son, Neal Ambrose Smith.

She said ‘My work comes right from a visceral place – deep deep – as though my roots extend beyond the soles of my feet into sacred soils. Can I take those feelings and attach them to the passer by? To my dying breath, and my last tube of burnt sienna, I will try’.

Fruitmarket says on its website “The first posthumous exhibition in a public gallery or museum of the work of the artist, activist, educator and curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation.”

“This exhibition was conceived in conversation with the artist before her sad and sudden death at the beginning of 2025 and will be the first time her work has been seen in Scotland. The exhibition’s title came from the artist, who from our earliest conversations wanted the exhibition to engage with the history and politics of land stewardship. Her tribe has links with Scotland through Charles Duncan McDonald (1897– 1995), a founding member of the Tribal Council of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, whose grandfather emigrated from Loch Torridon, Scotland in 1838. Smith was as interested in who owns, controls and cares for the land in Scotland as she was in land rights in the US, part of her dedication to justice and visibility for Native American people, not as part of the history of the US, but as fundamental to its present and future.”

I love the intimate drawings in these big pieces which are collaged together, with newspaper articles and other found texts and photographs, but also the installation of all these small drawings as “Coyote Stories”

“This exhibition includes paintings and a large canoe sculpture made by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith especially for Fruitmarket,

together with a selection of paintings from throughout her career. With important works from her ‘I see red’ series of the 1980s; works that take a critical and creative look at the map of the US; and paintings from her last series of ‘Tierra Madre’ mother earth figures from writer and conservationist Rachel Carson to Native American activist Wilma Mankiller; the exhibition is an opportunity to get to know the compelling work of this artist attuned to the importance of paying attention and taking action.”

Well worth visiting – I found it inspiring – especially the use of text, which is something I used to do more, and I think I should go back to.

Fruitmarket has a nice little bookshop and a café – and somehow manages to make its exhibitions free.

I have a small painting on the go – it has a toad hiding amongst the flower pots.