Month: March 2022

Start of rehearsals for upcoming performance with Rebecca Sharp on Drumcarrow Hill this week, with horses 🙂 !

‘Head 1’ will be part of the Drawing show with Fidra Fine Art , from May 14th to June 26th 2022.

Blue, blue sky over the ‘Blue Toon’. Visited Ken, gave him my painting of the graving dock. He talked about playing in the dry dock and nearly drowning, about how boys who were going to go to the fishing were not taught how to swim. If they couldn’t swim they took more care on the boat’s deck and the fact that if they did fall overboard their chance of survival were at best slim, perhaps it was better that way. He also said that young men would have all of their teeth pulled, no point having toothache two weeks into a fishing trip. He remembered only one toothbrush in his own family. It was never used. Lunch in the lilac cafe and a sweet piece from the cabinet. Down to the harbour, over the bridge to the most easterly point of Scotland. A huge orange crane, a dead seagull. Granite boulders the size of elephants marking the boundary to the North Sea. Over to Boddam and the lighthouse, past the pensioners hut, an ancient green painted railway carriage, stripey painted sheds and washing poles on the green. Dogs and laughing kids.

The Buachaille Etive Mor, Stob Dearg. Pools of blue ice refelecting the sky, everything steeped and sunken against this east wind. Serpentine roots of heather curl round smoothed boulders of granite, skelped lichen crusting. Sun shadows as the sky quickly darkens, rain clouds gather. Drawing lines and shapes of moor and rock. Downhill I follow a burn, only a hands width as it travels, carving small canyons in the peat. Here the water falters, slows then drops, cascades, ox bow bends, divides and splits again, smaller and narrower bronchioles over the moss sponge lungs of the mountain. Looking back, snow catches on high ledges, drifts in gullies, zig-zagging. A golden eagle swoons the southern flank, a herd of red deer watch as I scratch a likeness of sorts.