toads snakes and christmas presents

well here’s the toad, taken from my 1971 sketchbook,

hugging a pot in the foreground of a large pink expanse loomed over by suburban housing. I make no apologies for the pink, these are dreamscapes, unstable and tattered, gaping and glimmering.

the watering cans are companionable guardians.

I love painting their shapes.

Sometimes I do baking too – for Lucy’s birthday, a forest floor cake with meringue mushrooms ….

This lovely Cy Twombly book emerged from the piles when I was tidying up somewhat –

it’s having an effect on my paintings, giving me a way of curating the dribble fest …

and there’s a lot of rain, rivuletting itself over paths and filling up the river.

there’s a rainy thing going on

The echinaceas are dissolving

the winter garden is untidy, allowing insects and birds to use it over the winter.

Cy Twombly has encouraged me to make the stalks and seedheads more expressive.

and the snake is back …

I Will Come Home …

Paintings are invading the living room

I need them to dry more quickly so the radiators are being colonised.

more rivulets and streams

woods with their vertical lines

playing with Hipstamatic filters for colour

if you scale it up and down, the stems in the garden …

a rainy night? Maybe.

Quite a bit of a poem on this one, it’s Tir Nan Òg, for Molly, and the poem is part of a pamphlet I am working on. Tir nan Óg is of course the Celtic land of youth, or the mystical island in the west where everyone stays young and never dies. As I was working on it I got the news that my friend Molly Bullick had died.

Molly was the one friend who welcomed me to Scotland, inviting me over for tea as soon as it was possible after lockdown.

We met on various courses at Hat in the Cat in Newburgh over ten years ago, getting our hands blue in indigo vats, making marks with cola pens, experimenting with vegetable dyes.

Molly was a printmaker turned jeweller who loved working with textiles and made beautiful scarves and shawls. She was totally open with techniques and recipes and over the years we shared many ways of doing things.

I painted “for Molly” on this painting. I will miss her a lot.

Another interest we shared was sewing. This was quite a challenge, I made it for Lucy’s Christmas present. Sadly Molly had been unable to continue many of her creative activities in the last couple of years, due to pain in her shoulders and back.

I also made a pair of trousers for Scott, with quite a lot of details I’d never done before, like this pocket. So the painting has taken a bit of a back seat.

Bims’ foot has healed completely.

I did some potato printing ….

on craft paper, making wrapping paper!

So it’s Christmas here in Scotland, family time. We indulge ourselves and each other in the name of a child born in Palestine, in Bethlehem, one of those West Bank places where illegal settlers and the IDF are persecuting Palestinians. It’s horribly ironic.