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...