Summer

Field, north east – oil on panel – 25 x 20 cm.

Field, looking north – oil on wood  92 x 60 cm.

I’m back in the studio after a week away up north in Orkney. I had forgotten how heart stoppingly beautiful midsummer nights are there – ‘simmerdim’, when it never gets fully dark. A gentlest of light dusts the hills and fields, soft breezes sigh, ripple the water on the loch. Time stands still, for the briefest of moments, and memories of this place return.

It is the field boundaries, the edges, that I paint, back home in Fife. The open space is one I am attempting to get to grips with after so long in the complications of a wood. It is a different voice and one that I am starting to articulate. It feels like every painting of a field I make is like a breath.