Setting out

This is a new venture for me, into the world of blogging. It seems to makes sense to use it to put my thoughts into order and to put out some of the artwork I’ve been doing into the big wide world. It also makes sense to put it into a diary form, given my recent forays in the hills and woods of the upper Tay valley. I’m trying to get out and about once a week, walking, sketching and observing: birds, especially crows, rooks, jackdaws and ravens, trees and their leaves, stones, cup-marked and standing or piled into walls and the shades and forms of the landscape. So I’m going to try and put some of this stuff here now, instead of keeping it in my head or hidden in my tiny sketchbook.

This blog is also about a project set by Richard Demarco after the art masterclass he taught at The Watermill a few weeks ago. We met in the Birks, Aberfeldy on an October morning. Pick up seven leaves and draw them he said. Then he sent us home to paint them and set them against a background. I did my homework and brought it in a week later. ‘Go away and do it again, every two weeks’ he said. So, like a good girl, I’ve been doing my homework. Three pictures on and I’ve learnt something about painting with watercolours (they’re tricky) and about marking the passing season. We’re in winter now and the spectacular October leaves are turning into a soggy rotten mess as the frost starts to do its work. I suspect it will be more and more of a challenge to find something to paint as winter goes on and ferns, lichens and twigs may well become the main theme, as they are in my latest painting.

The thing with spending more time looking is that you start to see more, and then the challenge becomes setting boundaries and making decisions about what to dwell on. Trees are an obvious subject around here but I want to limit myself to one species, beech, and really take a close look. Beech trees are remarkably plastic, swirling and moulding into ridiculously complex forms and their smooth grey bark, that looks more like skin than any other tree, brings all sorts of human shapes to mind. But I want to look at them as Richard Mabey suggests in Beechcombing, for what they are, not what they represent. I tried drawing one yesterday, and it was hard work, there was so much to it. And I only looked at the bottom bit, the holdfast that they so often develop, helping it cling into the rock face it perched on.