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.

Au bout du monde

Back from Western Australia having spent several weeks doing design work on a 1905 Arts and Crafts house I find the shock of returning from temperatures in the 30's has been lessened with anend of March heat-wave. I have four short weeks of gardening and painting before heading north again to Scotland. I will be taking a few more paintings with me to a Campbeltown gallery with new works of The Mull of Kintyre. The Mull has since childhood been a magical place for me, being out there at the end of the world and yet Ireland is only 12 miles away. From here it will be onward and upward as far as Lewis where I'll be continuing work on the bunkhouse at Tolsta mixed with some more painting at "une autre bout du monde".

My informative childhood years were spent on Kildalloig Estate outside Campbeltown and were markd by what I now look upon as an idyllic post war period. Days were spent roaming free along Kildalloig foreshore knowing every knot of rocks between the slithering squelchy seaweed, every dip and fold of the horizon far across on Arran and every bend in the branches of my favourite climbing trees was as if everything that surrounded me was simply an extension of my own body: From the hills that climbed steeply up behind the old walled garden through the thick bluebell beech woods and beyond across a fragrant land, where the hill-sheep grazed tight the meagre grass. Higher still where soft low cloud often covered the very top of Ben Ghuilean, there where the brilliant yellow scented gorse gives way to the random patchwork of purple heather and fresh green bracken. All this was mine to roam over, the flat fertile fields running along the coast road where we tilled the soil, tedded the grain, singled the swedes and raked the green appearing ground. The constant soaring cliffs of Davaar Island squatting toad like in heavy swell, a vast plug restricting and sheltering the mouth of Campbeltown harbour. Ours was the crunching pebbled foreshore from out beyond the point, the seaweed bearded rocks that border the coast road from the Dhorlin to the babbling cascades of New Orleans glen and beyond the brooding bulk and wrinkled slopes of Achinhoan Head.

My memories are those stimulated by the vivid visual images that coloured my early years on the Mull of Kintyre and that at the age of four I filled my very first sketch book. In 1961 at the age of eight I left the Mull without explanation or understanding, feet first and flat out in the back of our Vauxhall estate while still recovering from pneumonia.

Feathered fantasy birds 2

Feathers and fluff fill my studio once again. After the successful sell out of the last flock this summer and having been told that feathers are in, I decided to open up the bottom drawer of my desk that houses my old bank statements but more importantly feathers. Neighbours who have seen my work bring me sealed envelopes but country walks and road kill still provide the bulk while my time in Australia often adds a spark of colour.

For the last week in August I am opening my studio to the public and have decided to reopen the gallery next door. This gives me the opportuity to display my many and varied creations. The gallery Ar C'haou Dall was first opened in 2001 and each summer I held a show there until 2003. It was then transformed into a holiday let but after two years I' had enough. So now after a repaint it once again displays within local landscapes and illustrations from my book on vernacular architecture as well as sculptures and shell work. This exhibition will run until the end of the month when I then open a very different exhibition at the Tourist Office in Carhaix entitled L'Oiseau est mort.

L'Oiseau est mort.

L'Oiseau est mort. (an attempt to produce unsalable art)

It is now twenty two years since I gave up antique dealing and started to take myself seriously as an artist. Those tentative first steps were taken with much fear but also a certain sense of pride that I had the courage to take the plunge and hold an exhibition of my work. I emptied out the two front rooms of my house in Frome to display paintings and sculpture and was heartened by the support I received. Moving to Brittany meant I was free from any money worries and in Central Finistere I found myself to be one of just a handful of artist. I accepted that isolation would inevitably be part of my working pattern. It was relatively easy to become known and after a few years I opened a gallery alongside my house and studio. A decade on and in the depths of a financial crisis there are very few people locally with any form of disposable income that enables them to even contemplate buying art. Having now had sevral exhibitions where there have been no sales I have been forced to look at my pricing, promotion and subject matter. Reducing my prices is simply not an option since they are in many cases only half of what I charged two decades ago. Promotion via a new website is underway and I will be looking to holding exhibitions further afield, however if I am to continue to show locally I have decided that I must attempt to produce unsalable art so as not to be disappointed with the outcome.

A few years ago a friend brought round a small bag containing a desiccated blackbird she had found in a drawer. Quite how the bird had ended its days stuck there nobody was even prepared to guess. The bird joined my collection of bazar objects and there I had found my unsalable subject for surely no one would wish to hang such an image in their home. Since the images were made specifially to be unsalable it followed that they should either be destroyed or given away after being exibited. So I showed them to a few friends and was somewhat surprised to find they loved them and although none came out with their cheque book. I felt I had as yet not succeeded in my goal to produce unsalable art and the bird, even though well and truly desiccated had taken on a new life finding within the images movement, and once again the dead bird flies.

Interest in death came as a natural consequence of living on a farm where at lambing time birth and death were accepted as an integral part of life. None the less there was a child's fascination that meant when one of the farm cats died our shepherd Neil Tyson would not let my brother and I see just where he had buried it being sure that we would only go and dig it up again. Aged four and five we had not yet learnt about respect of earthly remains and the rotting process but now all these years later I handle bones wth a certain reverence for their structural beauty. I imagine that in a former life I could have been a sun-baked Egyptian archaeologist armed with a soft brush dusting away the sands of time rather than that grave robbing child who would scan the midden for any recent signs of burial.

Vive la differance"

All beauty has a strangeness within and an element of the "forbidden". If an artist is unable to portray the real beauty before him, what ever the sex shape colour or age of the model, then he performs the art of the voyeur. The inability to accept and appriciate the beauty of all our differences if left unquestioned becomes the root of racial hatred. The pornographic industry and concentration camps alike proclaim the cheapness of human flesh. An artist's job must be to see that priceless jewel of induvdality that lies within each of us. If the world remains unable to see the beauty in all human forms then the case for cloning of humans can only become stronger, "Vive la differance!"
Life drawing is perhaps the most important part of being an artist and yet I hear they no longer teach drawing in many art schools, no matter what form your art takes it is essential I find every couple of years to touch base and look again at the human form. The self portrait is yet a another almost theraputic tool which in my case allows me to remain connected to the human race reminding me that I too even in my solitary monastic existance am part of something much bigger.

Now you see it, now you don't.

Everything is in a constant state of change on our planet often so small we hardly notice the difference but then just occasionally there's a big one. Towards the end of last summer while up on the Isle of Lewis I took a stroll along the length of Traigh Mhor beach and up along the cliff edge to Tolsta Head where during the nesting season Skewers fly in low threatening to vomit or shit on any intruders. I spent some time sketching the dramatically weathered cliffs and magnificent pinical forms and later did an oil painting from one of the sketches.

This spring I returned to Lewis to continue building work on the barn adjoining my house at 17 New Tolsta. One day while in Stornoway I bumped into a neighbour who was eager to inform me that the great stone stack at Sgeirean Thealair had fallen. I struggled to remember just where this was and then realised that it was that which I had painted the previous year. So what you see in the picture is not what you get as hundreds of tons of rock have crashed into the sea leaving a considerably blunter form.