Up the garden path again.

Trees and Mausoleum WIP

(acrylic on board, 30 x 30cm)

Another day at Gateshead Art Society, another landscape. Somewhat inspired by The Tower in the Woods, I've begun another building in the woods. The woods in this case came from a sketching trip to Auchterarder and the mausoleum I found on a holiday in Majorca. They came together in my mind, a meeting place for many impossible things before breakfast.

I think it will work OK but in what way, I'm unsure. At the moment it looks a little eerie but whether my sunny disposition will win through, only time will tell.

Private View

Here's the invitation to Figure 8's new show at the Biscuit Factory. I'll be showing eight of the Rock & Tree series paintings, including the two new Auchterarder Hedgerow pictures.

If you can make it to the opening, I'd be delighted to see you there. Come and say hello! If you can't get there, maybe you can get to the Biscuit Factory before it ends on 4 March.

Failing that, you'll find all of the paintings on my website.

Through the Hedge

Hedgerow No.1 (work in progress)


Hedgerow No.2 (work in progress)

I'm working under pressure again. I have about ten days to provide the images of all the paintings I intend to hang in the Figure8 show at the Biscuit Factory in February (details for you nearer the time) and so far I have only four completed. I probably need two or three more and recently have found ideas in short supply.

To clarify: I have lots of ideas for paintings, but having chosen a particular theme (Rock & Tree) for this show, I need to make some new paintings that fit that theme and ideas for such have not been readily forthcoming.

What I thought I would try, therefore, is see what I might be able to do with some hedgerows I found by the side of the road at Auchterarder when I was there in 2009 on one of my annual painting trips. I'm in two minds about how these are going; certainly I'm happier with the first than the second, but as I've put in more time on the first, that's to be expected. I'm very much feeling my way with these and intend to keep looking for more ideas in case they don't work out.

Meanwhile, if you have any thoughts on these paintings, I'd be interested to hear them, but do bear in mind they're very far from completion.

Auchterarder: 1st Day

Branches, White Moss Loch (4B pencil, watercolour, sketchbook)

We arrived at Shinafoot Studios around 4.30 on Friday night and after settling in, went out again looking for a good restaurant. Unfortunately, Auchterarder is something of a restaurant desert. we settled on an allegedly Italian place whose menu included only pizza and two other Italian dishes. My spaghetti all marinara was really well cooked, but I had to wait an age to find that out and overall the restaurant was uninspiring.

We came home up the windswept main street and paused for a moment to watch the local kids playing Toss the Dustbin Across the Road.

Today we split into two groups, one to check out the bridge at Kinkell, the other to walk up into the hills and find the quarry at Craig Rossie. I decided to follow on a little later (I'm really not an early morning person), taking the quarry route, but somewhere I took a wrong turning. Ending up on a long boring rock-strewn track, winding through freshly tilled and thus empty fields I emerged at a farm where all the domestic and farming detritus in the whole of Scotland had come to rest.

Or so I thought, but later I found that the rest of the area was a fly-tipper's paradise. There was a golf course and there were colossal prosperous-looking farms, and there were also car parts, Coke bottles, mattresses, sheets of corrugated iron, tractor tyres, car tyres, plastic bags, garden chairs, dead Xmas trees, in every ditch and hedgerow. The good folks of Perthshire should be desperately ashamed of themselves.

I came to White Moss Loch which boasted many water birds, although I could see few of them from the track that skirted part of the lake, but allowed access only by climbing over a pile of plastic tubing (various sizes) and ended at a breeze-block and corrugated asbestos building which had been bulldozed then allowed to crumble into the landscape.

I did this drawing while randy mallards chased one another round the lake and a swan came by looking for sandwiches, but I had none for him.