Acrylic, charcoal, cold wax, marble dust, mica flakes, oil and oil stick on canvas, 80 x 70 x 4 cm
the title is from the OS map, the pass between the peaks of Quinag. Bealach means pass, Chornaidh stony.
trying to keep the feeling of the preliminary work on paper, but remembering all that Lewisian Gneiss, the gritty twisted rock with its nooks and crannies, the tiny special flowers, mosses and ferns we found.
Acrylic and charcoal, paper on canvas, 61 x 61 cm, 2022
from a poem I wrote this spring, which continues ” there is only the hackle of a hole where the wind blows never a gap in the horizontal/ the sea-eagle passes/ overhead exchanging beaches forging a faraway helicopter coming/ and going
Diptych, acrylic and collage on two canvases, 150 x 200 cm, 2022
In Cairngreen wood, about two miles from my house, there are eight tall kissing gates in the deer fences. Now the trees are grown the fences are redundant but the gates remain and several are still in good condition, although only one is in regular use.
Acrylic, water soluble graphite and charcoal on panel, diptych, 2022, 76 x 152 cm.
My title is from a piece of landscape in Assynt, below the big corrie in the main wall of the hill called Quinag, or in Gaelic, Cuineag, meaning the milking pail. BÀTHAICH is a byre, and this piece of land was a shieling, or a summer pasture, from the days when the people of Assynt would take their cattle up to clean fresh pasture high up for the summer, and there they would make or repair bothies to sleep in, and live quite a different, free and light-hearted kind of life, making butter and cheese from the milk. This is before the Highland clearances of course.
Acrylic paint, gold powder, charcoal and collage on canvas, 100 x 120 x 4 cm
In January I had a frightening experience in a blown down plantation of Corsican pine – the further I got into it the more difficult it became to get out again, and this has something to do with that.
the labyrinth listens in the dark
what coat I wear to lie down
in the fern bed
& the needle leaves –
acrylic, charcoal and paper on cradled panel, 2022, 76 x 76 cm.
Another square panel with a poem inside it
– small voices buried –
I am fierce frosted breast cut
and lungs trying in the heather
[Spring and visionary]
today
swinging in the windy dark/thrush flourishes his trumpet/picks and picaloes and changes tune
Acrylic, charcoal and paper on cradled panel, 76 x 76 x 2 cm, 2022.
I’d been writing a poem in an online workshop that ended up being about the watermill on the river Tas, in the village I lived in as a child. We used to catch minnows and sticklebacks in the gravel shallows of the leat, and paddle through the culvert tunnels. The mill waterwheels had gone, but the river went down through the tail race in a scary fast oily way, through the metal bars, and under the wooden building of the mill. From inside you could see the water, and the road through the loose boards. This painting references all that, with words carved into the paint.