The finished work

Standing before the finished work the corner of my mouth raised in an involuntary smile I allowed the imp of contentment to rest on my shoulder a while as together we looked at the image. A title comes to mind, this 80x80 oil is from a sketch done at Ghearadha Beach a few minutes walk from my house on the Isle of Lewis, looking inland to the contrasting brown heather and beige bracken up on the escarpment and down to the beach where I stand with my “back to the sea”, fresh water from the loch seeping out in a great fantail beneath my feet. My normal reaction is to search for any glaring mistakes; difficulty of composition, correctness of drawing, and discrepancy in colour or simply something not quite finished. How does one know that a painting is finished when Lucien Freud would take a hundred hours or more while another will run the perfect trace across the canvas and declare it finished? All is down to the individual artists and for me it’s a point where I know if I continue the painting I will risk loosing rather than gaining. That single perfect line can be sublime and in its execution it sums up all that is essential to the subject, the nub of the matter, the ultimate simplification or abstraction that still retains within it all that is required to recreate that image. I have always enjoyed paintings that look as if they have been easy to execute rather than something laboured. An easy light touch results in a level of spontaneity that imparts a feeling of lightness and joy, it may also result in transporting me back to the place where I feel the breeze and smell the salt fresh air. On the rare but none the less enjoyable occasions when I walk with friends through a landscape I note also the difference in what we see. My eye can be equally drawn to the curve of a bleached rabbits jaw bone tangled within the vivid yellow trefoil or the white dart like gannets dropping from an inky blue sky way out at sea as well as absorbing its enormity and passage of time within a landscape that holds me there truly looking and ready to draw. It is important that I find that tranquillity, rage, brilliance or brutality within the landscape and then having passed through me I can impart that emotion with paint and brush. “Paint it as you see it and always push the boundaries” is what I try to tell myself, whether that be in size, format, colour or subject matter. Being a rational romantic is not always easy when wielding a brush full of paint.

There are times when that stopping point slips by and I fall into correction and overworking as was the case with the second done on the same format from a collection of drawing of the island of Davaar that my parents once owned. A confusion of perspective marred the first effort and even after several corrections the following day they left me just as disappointed with an image that was not imparting what I felt when crossing over the Dhorlin. A radical change was required and so I removed much of the foreground and continued to repaint.

Sketches can say so much more.

For almost twenty years now I’ve roamed with my sketch pad to the wild and remote coastal Australia, the quiet and calm of eucalyptus forests, or the bustling tourist throngs of inner cities and always I am happier with the results of sketching than the snap-shots from my digital camera. Maybe if I had read the instruction the results would be better, but still for me there is nothing like a sketch to transmit a true feeling and sense place and having sat for ten minutes or more observing thoroughly the surroundings I am easily transported back to those places by that simple sketches, a sketch that contains in every mark of the pencil or flick of the brush a direct connection with being there. The top shelf of the armoire is filled with my carnées de voyages from Scotland, Spain, Brittany, New Zealand and above all Australia.  Many are now lightly splattered with oil paint as they served to create a studio study and a few have been cannibalised in an effort to sell the occasional water colour sketch but on the whole they remain in tacked as a testament to my travels. In early years they took on the form of a visual diary but increasingly the writing has been kept apart with just the occasional comment. This latest trip to the south west corner of Western Australia has filled another sketchpad that conveys the summer of 2013 as being a relentlessly hot one. There have been delightful encounters with the wild life and the discovery of more early ruined homesteads and rusting fishermen’s shacks. The relentless coastline and beaches north of Perth often seem devoid of interest and featureless, giving every outcrop of crumbling limestone disproportionate importance. In contrast much of the accessible Southern Ocean coastline is filled with curious granite outcrops and headlands. Driving inland the more interesting roads are red, rutted and dust filled, much has been cleared for cereal production and the remaining bush interspersed with crystal white salt lakes that occasionally sport a colourful algal bloom. Fire is a constant worry and although I smelt bush-fire smoke several times at night there was nothing that came too close. I arrived in Esperance a week after a serious fire had curled north of Pink Lake leaving burnt out vehicles and the remains of a caravan in the bush bordering the road. Now in the quiet of my studio looking back at these sketches there is an immediacy that I will struggle to convey in any oil painting but that will not stop me trying.

Creative Casualties

CREATIVE CASUALTIES

In overnight temperatures approaching 40 sleeping with Betty Swollocks can only be fitful. No air movement, no cloths and not even the lightest of covering the entire night spent dozing in a shallow dream-filled sleep. I awake dazed at predawn as if from an all night cinema showing X rated children’s horror films where people are transformed into sugar coated icing their limbs so fragile and yet irresistibly tasty. I visit other-worldly places where a Scottish peat bog borders soft white sands and mountain crags rise from hot foaming seas, where giant birds wearing wellington boots and plastic raincoats talk earnestly of wanting to remodel their ostentatious Palladian abode, and as the tsunami approaches I attempt to save only the most valuable and rarest from the museum supermarket shelves.

For the past two days I’ve been putting up plaster board lining and I marvel at just how fast Mat can work in such heat, the sweat dripping from his brow as he swallows another glass of cool water replacing the 15 beers he had the previous night. A vague smell of something rotting drifts across the back of the house from the bush, perhaps that magpie I buried a few days back. The speckled breast feathers joining those of a green parrot, a black duck and a Sparrow Hawk. Bird road-kill is surprisingly low particularly with small birds given the speed at which vehicles are driven but maybe the lack of bends means they receive sufficient warning of oncoming cars. There is however plenty of foxes rabbits and kangaroos that fail to apply the green cross code and while staying at Boyup Brook I witnessed a sheep explode on the roo-bars of an oncoming car.  My peripheral vision skims the verges for any likely casualties and this trip I’ve skinned a particularly well-marked Racehorse Goanna and a large blue tonged lizard or Bobtail. Like the one and a half meter long Carpet Python I skinned a few years back these will go to cover boxes. There is a certain risk in transporting reptile skins it being illegal even with photographic evidence that it was indeed road kill, that changes nothing in the eye of the law but to my eye there is a beauty that I can not resist and that I know I can transform into something spectacular.    

Strangely enough I was terrified of feathers as a child every visit to my uncle's farm in Buckinghamshire left me forever grateful that every last one of the hens were safely behind bars. The noise alone on entering the sheds would have driven any tartan army into immediate retreat. In 1961 we had moved down from our thousand acre hill farm on the Mull of Kintyre to a cottage with three acres in Glostershire. My father decided the only thing to do on our restricted plot was a few pigs and battery hens. My heart sank since I realized sooner or later I would be asked to help out. Sure enough the day arrived when de-beaking had to be done, a soldering iron was pressed up against the birds beak and melted to prevent them from pecking each other while squashed three or more to a cage. The smell of burning was appalling and it was my job to hold the bird still.  I lasted less than half an hour and when yet another bird broke loose flapping in terror my irrational fear overwhelmed me and I ran from the barn much to my brothers amusement. There seemed no limit to the cruelty one could inflict on battery hens at that period when everything was seen as simply another justifiable step forward in modern farming techniques and food production.

Today my evenings are filled with feathers and fluff as I work away on the kitchen table gluing the smallest of brightly coloured plumage to my imaginary birds. From freshly plucked road kill I am able to create fantasy feather birds that have never and will never exist. The discarded feather another one of natures detritus which would otherwise have rotted is turned into something that merits a second look. 

Stone Age

The starlings finally vacated their nest at the back of the house and I was free to start work. For the past four years I've looked at the grassy lump and wondered what structure lay beneath and just what age its origins might be. There are other lumps scattered around New Tolsta all that is left from an age long before the 19th century farm.There would have been serious cerial cultivation as depicted by the mass of lazy beds ribbing the land that runs down to the beach.
The dry weather meant that the usually lush grass was relatively easy to remove and so I started the job of finding the foundation stones and raising the walls. Having worked for years on old houses I'm used to nothing being straight vertical or level. Many of the large granite boulders were beyond my strength to lift and so I rolled, made ramps and pushed the stones up to perch above where I was working and then bring them back down as the wall slowly rose to shoulder height. This would be the limit for this year as I let everything settle and plan the roof which rest on the inner meter thick walls. Tradition would have me turning turf onto the roof to be followed by thatch and all held down with heather platted rope and granite boulders but I remain open to a few modern touches like an old fishing net to hold it all in place.

A few more feathers

Cooking up feathered friends

If I'd given it the slightest thought I might have realised plucking a robin at the kitchen table while the mushrooms and garlic were frying gently on the stove could perhaps be difficult to explain should my eldrely neighbour come calling.

"Sorry to disturb but....... there was an obvious pause while she stood in the doorway trying to make sense of the image before her, while I searched desperately for a responce to the inevitable question. Therese had become used to wandering into my kitchen and finding all manner of things but plucking robins never.

"You won't get much of a feed of that", I could tell I was expected to back with something equally witty.

"Its alright the other two dozen are already in the oven, terrible fiddle but this the last one", I kept a straight face.

"You're not serious?"

"Yes they were doing a spcial offer at Huelgoat Intermarche."

"No!"

"No of course not" the look of relief was only fleeting "I found it in the greenhouse not a mark on it".

"So why are you plucking it?" a reasonable question in the circumstances.

"I'm making feather bird pictures".

"And what might feather bird picures be?" I could see where this was going so got up from the table and turned off the gas I would not be eating just yet.

"Oh no don't stop you'reabout to eat" she said puting on a concerned frown still not convinced that I wouldn't still fry the dead robin when her back was turned. Therese new full well that all artists were strange which was a good enough reason to excuse their often odd behaviour.

"Its no trouble and anyway I'd like to show someone, you know just to get a reaction". I'd found Therese a remarkabley astute judge of what the general public would tolerate. Therese followed me through into the front room slopping in her slippers on the slate slab floor and then up the steep open-treat stairs to my studio. Even at 76 she mae light of the stairs they others found difficult to climb, she knew them of old as a young girl then later as mistress of the house.

I opened the yew wood armoire door and took out the leather covered book that had hung around for years on the "could be useful" shelf and opened it to the first page. There it was in all it's glory, a peculiar specimen with impossibly flamboyant tail and massive red crest but a bird none the less.

"Well thats a rum looking bird if ever I saw one", Therese's responce was just as I had expected and I turned to the second page.

"Ah now thats more like a pheasant isn't it?" True I had used some pheasant feathers in that one but I'd also used mallard wings and a kookaburra tail feathers. I could see Therese was struggling, trying to work out what she was suppose to make of my latest creation. As we moved throught the next four images she began to relax and at last found the fun but also the beauty in what I had been working on. This was definitely not serious art.

Last week I opened the back door to find a jam jar wih a headless bluetit in it, a present from Therese, thught it might be useful.