STUDIO JOURNAL 10

From 15th May 2022 newsletter

For the last couple of weeks I have been working in the studio on compositions on paper as well as making gesso for some small panels plus sourcing a supplier for some large 150cm and 180cm panels. I’m excited about this supplier, they make bespoke poplar plywood panels. Their poplar plywood is sustainably sourced, PEFC and FSC certified and is approximately 40% lighter than birch plywood. In my push to make my creative practice more sustainable I’m looking for panels which don’t use tropical hardwood ply and as I said before, birch ply stocks come from Russia. They’re also made in the U.K..

STUDIO JOURNAL 8

From 3rd April 2022 newsletter - Drawn to nature

Here on Friday morning in South-West Wales, we woke up with melted, hardened, snowy hail. Crunchy under foot, the school run brought back memories of Scottish winters driving through creaky snow laden roads.

I grew up in the Scottish Highlands, in an area of rich soils and deciduous forests, between the foothills of the Cairngorm mountains and the sea. For some years I spent every weekend during winter with the Cairngorm ski club; season pass strapped to my arm, balaklava and hat pulled high to protect my face from the often fierce and bitter weather. In fact, lunchtimes were regularly spent thawing out our gloves and balaclavas under hand driers whilst eating squished semi-frozen egg sandwiches.

However, when the weather was clear and dry, it felt like the most beautiful place in the world. More corries than peaks, deep and snow covered, it was a place where you looked down rather than across or up.

Infact, the Scots don’t call their hills mountains, they’re hills. I think there’s a modesty to it, they aren’t towering and grand like the Alps. Yet within this modesty belies an awe. They are awesome in the true sense of the word and having spent some time away now from both Cairngorm and Nevis Range, on occasion to return I have been humbly brought to a standstill.

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In 2007, whilst travelling from West Cornwall to an artist residency in the Northern Isles (Shetland), I stopped near Inverness with some great friends. One of them, Mandy, lent me her book Findings by Kathleen Jamie. Handing it to me she told me I should read it. It took me half of the book before it fully got into me. And it got me.

While I was doing my fine art Masters I was looking for books to see how writers tackled the subject of nature and landscape. I read Thoreau, Emerson plus other great writings but they were not what I was looking for. I wanted something to really resonate with my approach. Kathleen Jamie’s Findings led me on to discover The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. The difference in these writers to the previous readings was what I was looking for. Less conquestorial, more about place and the poetics of it.

Cairngorm from the A9

The Living Mountain is a personal account of being in and knowing the Cairngorms. In the studio this week, listening to it this time around, it is sympathetically read with a voice which lulls one into the miracle and beauty of nature.

I quote The Living Mountain, Chapter 11 : The Senses

‘For the ear the most vital thing that can be listened to here is silence. To bend the ear to silence is to discover how seldom it is there. Always something moves. When the air is quite still, there is always running water, and up here that is a sound that one can hardly lose, though on many stony parts of the plateau one is above the water courses. But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute and listening to it one slips out of time.

Such a silence is not a mere negation of sound. It is like a new element and if water is still sounding with a low far off murmur, it is no more than last edge of an element we are leaving, as the last edge of land hangs on the mariners horizon. Such moments come in mist, or snow, or a summer night when it is too cool for the clouds of insects to be abroad, or a September dawn. In September dawns I hardly breathe. I am an image in a ball of glass. The world is suspended there and I in it. ‘

Passing the Eastern edge of the Cairngorms on the A9.

I have another friend, who now lives at the foot of Ben Nevis. She is a geologist and mountain guide to put it lightly. Her current job involves a walking commute to a very specific area of Nevis Range to monitor moss and grass. Her walk to work is 6 hours one way. She used to live in the Cairngorms and told me once that she doesn't get lost there, doesn't actually need a map and compass (although she’s got a heid enough to take one). She said, even in fog she knows every rock and can find her way.

Now this, is knowing a place.

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It is difficult to better the mountain and sea air and they are places that I have always been drawn towards.

All of these photos have been included because I have always really appreciated how both fog and snow rub out features (and sounds) in the landscape, altering distance and scale. Everything becoming visually simplified.

One of my favourite south-west Wales beaches local to us.

And yes, it is a secret!

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Studio journal 4

I've got a little box of watercolour tubes that I've had sitting around for a few years. My father-in-law gave them to me, his father was a painter. I, or perhaps they, have been waiting for the right time.

I've found it difficult to get motivation moving these last two weeks. It is far from a usual problem. Perhaps there's the overwhelm of moving house and trying to clear a pathway into my studio where things have been strewn amidst the chaos. Plus the bliss of finally being in a house and wanting to slack out on the sofa.

I did something I've often done when I don't know how to get started. I went to the sea. I packed my special off-piste snowboarding rucksack - used for day long adventures. It helps me to create intention of letting go and exploring what comes up. Off to find a wild, windswept, isolated beach I did.

I packed a little portable set of watercolours. Perhaps the time is right now to explore watercolour but…note to self to not drift too far into the allure of what they can do - the pooling, the reticulation - not make 'watercolour paintings' per se but to use them in my own way. For this, they seem a good quick sketching tool.

The morning started with a thick freezing fog at home, the journey to the sea opened out and the long steep walk down brought a pool of sunshine to where I positioned my belongings on a flat boulder.

The day was beautiful.

The sea was calm, small waves dolloped the shoreline dragging pebbles away with them. Such a beautiful sounds that makes you sit very still and Listen. Out at sea cloud was low and colours were limited to gorgeous greys and aqua of the small cresting waves.

By the end of the day I was watching the freezing fog roll in and envelop the beach.

Play the above video to watch waves dolloping onto the shore in fog.

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