oil over acrylic on collaged canvas 120 x 100 x 4 cm

I noticed how Bims blended into the dry beech leaves on our walk from Rhynie on our Aberdeenshire holiday, so this is a memory painting with a little help from photos. We stopped for flask tea on the edge of the lane. It only rained a little that day, we got quite a bit of sunshine – poetic licence!

oil on collaged canvas, 120 x 100 x 4 cm

This painting is the result of our short holiday in Aberdeenshire, staying in a cottage on the Asloun farm near Alford, a few hundred metres from the ruined round tower of Asloun Castle and the very pretty Mains house next to it. As we left, on a rainy mid May morning, I took a last photo of the landscape out of the living room window, rain-spattered and full of these curling ash branches, still only in bud. The painting took several passes, I did a soft pencil, and then an oil pastel drawing, both a bit stiff, and it took a lot of readjusting to be more open and loose on the canvas, eventually using very long handled brushes.

I drew the branches  with a graphite stick into the wet paint and then with the extended handle brush. The beautiful Elisabeth Cummings book Radiance was a great source of inspiration as to how to paint landscape.

Oil on collaged canvas, 120 x 100 x 4 cm

My echinaceas again, a promise of late summer, slightly veiled with a greenish misty glow …..

oil on collaged canvas, 91 x 91 cm

Almost hidden in the foliage of honeysuckle and clematis under the pergola, by my tall garden gate, the delicate roe buck doesn’t quite look us in the eye. He is a thought-beast, like Ted Hughes’ thought-fox, there to remind us of what we humans take when we make our homes on green fields, and grow our food where once was wild wood.

oil on collaged canvas, 120 x 100 x 4cm

I started this last summer, got it out again recently and added the little white dog and beefed up the roses. It started as a kind of self portrait via the pots, which live on the french door steps outside my studio, and are some of those I have left from being a potter from 2003 to 2016. Then that hot July afternoon light took over. I follow Bonnard in hiding the little dog – my daughter’s terrier – in the shadows. It will be in Graystone gallery’s Festival show this summer, in Edinburgh.

oil on canvas 120 x 100 cm

the bird is a wren and it’s singing, perched on the trellis, upper left. Bims has snuck in too, bottom right. My veg corner, with the fennel and the courgette flowering, and apples on the apple tree. This is also in Graystone Gallery’s summer exhibition for the Edinburgh Festival.

acrylic and oil on canvas, 50  x 50 cm.