Month: April 2020

 

This pair of drawings are for Chris and our local walks collaboration, which currently may be a publication/video poem/storyboard/contact sheet. We are not certain as yet, but we’ll see what emerges.

 

Charcoal on panel – 19 x 26 cm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oil on panel -25 x 20 cm.

This is the beginning of a collaboration with a poet friend Chris Turnbull from Ontario, Canada. We often speak with each other on social media and met a couple of years ago in Edinburgh, fleetingly. I have loved her work for ages and am delighted to work with her on this project. We are intending to ‘trade’ local walks that we are taking whilst in Lockdown. We will respond to each others text or photographs or drawings/paintings of our respective perambulations, whilst also offering our own reflections on our known landscapes. I don’t know where it will go, or what it might become but the similarities and differences will be interesting for us both.

 

 

Oil on panel – 100 x 80 cm.

This it where it ends – Dreaming Peatbogs, the point at which I will go no further.  A week of  brushing, wiping, stripping, and smearing has brought me here. I have been holding my breath for days.

The title is a line from one of Mark Goodwins poems and whose poetry will be alongside the drawings and paintings of Rannoch Moor in a book we are currently working on. His words have kept me company through this work.

 

 

Oil on panel – 25 x 20 cm.

 

 

Work in progress – oil on panel – 100 x 80 cm. Day one.

Detail from painting.

 

It is  lockdown day…….? I can’t remember. I am dreaming of peatbogs, sinking in to the black butter. I decided this morning this would be the day when I would start my big bog painting. It has taken a while to summon the courage to start. Apart for the cost of paint, I have been waiting for the right day, which might sound odd, but painting days , such as these, starting days, are strangely particular, and I know on waking if it is going to be such a day. Today it was/is. Where this painting goes, I do not know, when it will be finished, I don’t know, much like everything else at the moment, so perhaps it is apposite, my bog, this day.

Mid way through this morning I walked on the painting, I wanted my feet to feel the paint- the moss, the sedge, the peat. They are now stained green, black.

Tomorrow I will continue. More drawing, walking, in paint. I’ll let you know from time to time how it is going. This is my voyage from the house, my bringing forth the nature of the moor. It is my way of being there, when I cannot.

 

Charcoal and watercolour on paper – 38 x 28 cm

 

 

Oil on wood – 12 x 11 cm.

 

 

Oil on panel – 25 x 20 cm