Category: Journal

 

 

Oil on wood –  20 x 15 cm.

 

 

 

Oil on panel – 200 x 84 cm..

‘We have no prairies/ to slice a big sun at evening’ – Seamus Heaney ‘Bogland’.

This is my final large work of Rannoch Moor. In the next few weeks I will start on next year’s project – Glencoe. Just down the road from Rannoch the landscape changes from one of endless expanse to an ever narrowing pass, where the mountains squeeze and hold you in their grasp before realeasing you into the valley below. It is an intense experience, in ways so very different to Rannoch and a challenge I want to try and meet.

I have another trip up to Rannoch shortly to make one final work. As with all my projects it feels sad to be leaving. My connections to these places become very close and as I may have said before, the resulting work I make feel as much portrait as landscape. I hope I have done justice in some way to the vast, wild beauty that is Rannoch Moor. Traversing the Moor, one is walking on time, beneath, our history is bottomless.

 

 

(Details from painting.)

 

Charcoal and watercolour on paper – 150 x 50 cm.

 

Charcoal and watercolour on paper – 151 x 51 cm.

 

watercolour crayon on paper.

Wind roars in the tall beech trees, where willows creak and scratch. Snowdrops scatter, speckle the earth as snow showers blast through the blackened trunks of alder.

 

drawing – watercolour and acrylic on paper – 70 x 59 cm

 

Charcoal and watercolour on paper – 38 x 28 cm.

 

Oil on wood 20 x 15 cm

‘Inwards and downwards’, is a line from the poem Bogland by Seamus Heaney.

The painting has taken six months to make, waiting for the layers of paint to dry. I think it is finished but then like the peatbanks it might have more layers yet.

 

Charcoal, watercolour and pastel on paper – 38 x 28 cm.

 

Charcoal, watercolour and pastel on paper – 38 x 28 cm