this is how it feels...

At last then, with great excitement, I am happy to announce that my online exhibition catalogue is live at this link: https://issuu.com/maggieo/docs/maggie-ayres-brochure-2019/ My huge thanks goes to my amazing husband who has really worked hard to bring it all together for me. It’s great to see my work brought together like this. There are quite a range of pieces to see with accompanying context in situ shots and detail images. I have also written a little bit about each one. I hope these give you a good sense of my paintings. And of course if you are interested in buying anything, then please get in touch. All my details are in the catalogue.

Since I returned from my residency at Caerlaverock last week, it’s been a whirlwind of getting things in place for this year’s forthcoming online exhibition. I will be writing more about my inspirational week with the geese and sky in blogposts to come, but for now it is finished work that is taking centre stage. I am more than a little excited. I only had to make the work and write a bit about it, but my wonderful husband Kim is the one who makes it all look good and presents it to you enticingly and irresistibly! He has put in so many hours away from his own practice and I wouldn’t have known where to start. Subsequently, this year I have a full colour catalogue to be perused at your leisure. You will be able to choose from a mixture of some encaustic pieces and more oil and cold wax paintings. At the moment I have no plans to make more encaustic work, so you might consider this the last chance to buy. There is also the anticipation of showing fresh work which Is taking m...

from my Caerlaverock sketchbook Out on my wanderings today around Caerlaverock, I was much more aware of the big sky down here than I have been so far. That is a surprise to me since “sky” is what I thought this project was really about after all. Birds are important, but I thought that was so much to do with their necessary relationship with that big sky. Of course it’s all to do with the geese effect and in particular barnacle geese. After all I am here at this time of year especially, to witness at least a tiny part of their overwintering. They are so present, so distinctive in their gorgeous monochrome plumage and their yelping cries. When they are flying, I must look up. It is mesmerising. I am beguiled by their return each year from breeding grounds in Svalbard. 2716 kilometres they fly. I love that continuity and constancy. And that’s the bit that resonates so much. I have returned to this place too, though I’ve not travelled so far in distance. But I was o...

It was raining all night. I know because it was lashing on the skylight windows of my bedroom. Cosy and comforted, it reminds me always of childhood. It’s the same sweet recall when I open the window wide to watch for the geese and feel the chilly blast of the wind on my face while I am cocooned in warmth. It’s only a short walk from the cottage to the WWT site and there’s not much traffic in the lane. I am accompanied all along with birds rustling and calling in the hedgerows and the near constant background “Goose Music”. (Aldo Leopold’s essay from Round River). Then I see them. Black, silvery grey and white wonders beside me in the field. There are puddles all along the roadside and I take a diversion at every one. Why would I risk getting my feet wet? I wander along the main avenue of the site. Wind is picking up. Rain can’t be far away again. The feeling is joyous but still I make a zig zag route around so many large muddy puddles. But I have wellies on here, ...

A rough night’s sleep but happily I was awake before the sun came up. It’s important to rise before the dawn... As the sky changes colour emanating from the left of my direct viewpoint, the movement begins. A flurry of crows land on a nearby tree, each one turned to where the sun is about to appear. It seems like it must be inherent in their bird consciousness - the wonder and expectations of new day beginnings, for all time. Then I start to see the dotted trail lines away in the distance, appearing apparently from the inner sky, threading through the brightening light. I watch and open the window wide to listen. The geese calls increase, crying the dawn. Mesmerised, I watch their fabulous mark making in the pink light. Then the lines move in tangles right over where I am leaning over the windowsill. I can see the bellies of them - gorgeous shapes as necks stretch out and the constant beating of wings. The air shifts and the day has begun.

Packing list for going to Caerlaverock tomorrow: many layers of clothes my new fab stripey ankle wellies bobble hat and gloves and scarf enough vegetables to make plenty of tasty soup seed bread from Earth’s Crust in Castle Douglas (and maybe just a bit of focaccia - please?) far more books than I will ever be able to read in just one week but how can I leave that one or this one or that pile behind? map camera binoculars sound recorder every nuanced kind of sketchbook, in various weights and textures of paper, I could find including that gorgeous concertina one pens - bamboo and other assorted and necessary pastels Indian ink watercolour sticks brushes with useful water reservoirs and so much graphite in different formulations that there may well be a global shortage! Did I ever say how much I love graphite? just a smidgeon of my packing...

The Solway sky was the first sky that I looked up and saw as a tiny infant. A sky big and open and I was imprinted on it. My sky... All last year, I had been dreaming of spending time on my own in some isolated bothy somewhere off the west coast of Scotland in order to feed my work, but then I visited the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust site at Caerlaverock here in South-West Scotland. And so it was, that just over a year ago, with breathless revelation, I started mulling over the possibility of making an artist’s residency for myself, down there on the Solway coast, no more than a couple of miles from where I first lived as a child. Why had this certainty not occurred to me sooner? I must have been seduced by romantic ideas of rugged west coast wildness, transforming soft graphite lines into dramatic Hebridean mark making. But when at last the relevance of the sense of this place slotted into my vision for my practice, there could be no more reckoning. By the end of 2018 I h...

More and more paint. Mark and mark again. What else? Always, especially when I feel there is a resolution approaching, I will turn the piece I’m working on round - 90 degrees, then another until I’m back where it started. I’m looking for something better than I’ve got already. And this is what happened this time. Suddenly it all made sense. A quarter turn and I sighed. More work to do but...yes. (detail) A bit more paint. And a scratch here and there… It feels a bit odd to sum up what I do in so few words… “Well I put on the paint with a few tools and mark into it a bit until it is finished” It can take me days, weeks, (months?)... Sometimes I experience a freedom and lightness. Most often it is intense. It is abstract and I feel like my head is turned outside in trying to reach that itch. And still I love it. The newness of every single painting I make. And then the fighting with it. And myself. Chasing whatever it is. My artistic world is currently ...

Now I have swathes of colour and a tracery of cuts and lines in front of me and the history of the piece is shaping up through numerous layers. Making the painting now will be to work over the earlier applications of colour and inevitably I end up using a large amount of white... But it feels like I have barely begun. This is a good place to acknowledge the know-how of artists Rebecca Crowell and Jerry McLaughlin and their book “Cold Wax Medium - Techniques, Concepts and Conversations”. It’s been really instructional. Their technical input along with my urge to explore ideas and dabble curiously, (ok, what can I do with cold wax medium?), has given me fresh direction and means of expression. Thank you Rebecca and Jerry! I have spoken about the mark marking process itself but a lot is determined by how wet or how dry the paint is. When cold wax medium is mixed with oils, the drying process is speeded up a bit. Some of the most subtle effects can be made when the surfa...

My painting has a good solid foundation now. It means I can build more paint on top and importantly work into the base layers to create texture and form. Scraping, gouging, cutting, scoring, scouring. Gentle rubbing. With every action the depths can be revealed - a flash of yellow, a shadow of indigo. It’s always inevitably early on in the making, that I find the urge to make scoring marks or draw in lines, almost overwhelming. Sometimes I use graphite in tablet or stick form. Sometimes I choose a scratchy bamboo pen dipped in Indian ink. I think I have said before how much I love process and where there is a process there are tools to aid me. The photo below shows the ones in near constant use. Making expressive marks is the whole point of my work. The laying on of paint can make shifts and shadows of colour appear. The scraping back and gouging of lines through layers, or the addition of graphite or ink can all create visual depth and narrative to the surface. ...

I’ve seen other artists writing about the various processes they go through to make a painting and then showing the finished piece for sale. I’ve always found it quite interesting so thought I would give it a go and show you here just what it is I do. There will be a few blow-by-blow posts with images to illustrate the development of the work as I go along. By the end of this week you will see it complete and then have the opportunity to buy it if you wish. Ready to begin then… ...take a wooden panel ...edges covered in tape to keep them clean ...three or four layers of sanded gesso to provide a smooth surface. Nothing much to see so far then... But the title is decided already - “happed in sky” - so now I can set up my palette and how I love setting up my palette! The joy of choosing which colours of oil paint to squeeze silkily out of tubes onto the glass is huge and significant. There will nearly always be Indigo, Payne’s grey, Terre Verte, Indian Yellow, Dioxazine Pu...

Book reading and a word pops out. I write it down in my notebook of interesting words. Another remembered word floats up and then a phrase, sighing inside me. Scratchings of old familiar language and place. A song perhaps? I find it, listen to it. Memories and feelings and heady exploration. Another idea for a title of a painting is there. This time the book is “The Old Ways” by Robert Macfarlane. The word is swathed. The remembered word is “happed” - Scots for wrapped up, enfolded or clothed. The song is “Happed in Mist” by Michael Marra. The title for the painting is “sky happit”. I expect that one day soon I will make it just as a few years ago I made “path from wanchancy"

Spring Fling, busy flow familiar and unknown faces questions: "damar resin?", "make it up as you go along?" explanations offered hot and cold wax comparisons talking layers: cutting, gouging, revealing talking air, sky, transformation, mental health, flow visualisation kind words deep words people carrying work away

I was thinking that it’s been a few years since I offered a painting for a prize draw at the Spring Fling open studios event. It’s a good idea so now I have the dilemma of which one will it be. Encaustic or cold wax? Painting with molten beeswax and resin and fusing with a blowtorch is dynamic and exciting. I can build up numerous layers. For most of the last few months, I’ve been exploring working with oil paints and cold wax medium using scrapers, squeegees and palette knives. I can build up numerous layers. A tricky decision then, but I am keen to introduce my new work so I’ve chosen a cold wax piece. It is called “when air moves” and if you come along to my studio this weekend (25th - 27th May) you might like to have a chance to win. I hope you think I have made the right choice!

Next weekend, Saturday 25th - Monday 27th May, will be the Spring Fling open studio event across Dumfries and Galloway, SW Scotland, when artists and makers welcome visitors into their studios from all across the UK and indeed the world. This is an exciting time. I stopped making work about a week ago, which is quite extraordinary for me. My inner voice commands “More, more, more!” But with only a few days left now, all thoughts turn necessarily to a chaotic "getting the studio ready". All the obvious tasks are involved here: sweeping a floor that doesn’t want to give up its accumulated detritus, tidying waxy paint encrusted work benches, patching and painting bits of the walls where too many nails and bluetack have made their indelible marks. Paintings have to be edge painted and strung for hanging, even before I can decide where to hang them for optimum effect. Then there are arcane considerations of how to make the studio look suitably “working artist’s studi...

As I start again with a change of title and more regular postings, I thought it would be more than timely to catch up with where I left off. Oh how time does pass! "Box" became part of my solo exhibition, "Orchard", at Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries last year. I showed six large scale wall pieces and each was accompanied by an assemblage work (six boxes). I was thrilled at the way it all worked together. To create a kind of narrative stepping stone from my last post to now, I've decided to show images for each of these boxes. I am listing the pieces in the order they were shown in the exhibition. "nestling breath" "but she hadn't realised 'til much later what had been lost" "the conveyable burden" "creation and reduction" "for nervous and other diseases" "realising the Queen of Sheba's jewels"