Black crows rattle in the trees like dried peas in a tin. Bark scars pinch, scrafing, bleached and picked. Did you know the mouth of the burn grins baleen roots of trees, whistling a wind across the North Sea ? The silence of snow is coming.
Like walking in the rain and the snow when there’s nowhere to go.
Ink and charcoal on paper 23 x 33 cm.
Unfurling.
oil on panel – 28 x 36 cm
Into the woods- a drawing workshop.
On Saturday 12th May I will be leading a drawing workshop with ‘Off the Rails Arthouse’ in Ladybank Fife. We will be walking, drawing and exploring local woodland and hopefully making some large and small monochrome works with paint and charcoal.
There is more information on the Off The Rails website-Â http://www.offtherailsarthouse.com if you are interested and might like to join us.
Thanks and happy valentines day to everyone !
The bones of winter.
Oil on wood – 92 x 60 cm
The walk
Oil on plywood – 64 x 46 cm
Where field meets wood.
Mixed media on paper – 37 x 50 cm
Remains.
Ice fills an imprint of my boot in the mud. Maybe from my last visit or maybe before then. My footprints cover the track, heading this way and that, a woven diary of walking. A mole has left its own trace at the place where I want to paint. I rest the paper on the crumbly earth hills, it softens and sinks and settles . In the burn I spot a broken piece of blue and white pottery. Fishing it out I look at the cobalt glaze painted in China or Japan or Wemyss down the road and think of the ceramic artist marking their pot. I trace the woods in charcoal and paint. When finished all that is left are a few squashed mole hills and some paint spattered leaves.
Mixed media on paper 140 x 60 cm.
Lavender walk.
Mixed media on paper 33 x 23 cm.
A small adventure.
I climbed a tree today. To get a different perspective of the woods. The author Nan Shepherd would have known why. So I found a beech tree with low lying branches and started to climb.
I have forgotten, or rather my body has forgotten how to climb a tree easily or gracefully. It has been a long time and it’s difficult, and I feel scared. Scared I will fall, not so bothered by injury, but rather stupidity if I do. I have also forgotten the feel of the rough bark on my hands and the smell of lichen and moss on my fingers. I climb as high as I can, which to be fair is probably not that high but it feels high. Squally wind rocks the top of the tree as I sit with my back to the trunk and start a sketch of the branches ahead of me. All I can see really is a tanglewood of limbs reaching upwards and if I look down the forest floor tumbles down to the burn. I am caught in the space in between, neither one thing or another. I am suspended. A memory of sitting in a tree with my best friend smoking cigarettes, secretive, queasy, longing for adventure.We left the rest of the packet in a bole in the tree for another time. Sometime later it must have rained and we found them sodden, broken. My legs start to stiffen and decide it’s time to climb down. Near the bottom I hang from the lowest branch my legs kicking the air and jump to the ground. A small adventure and a different perspective of this landscape. At home I can still smell the tree on my skin.
dominique cameron RSW 