this is how it feels...

Since I set up a table in our living room, locked out of my studio, oh it must be years ago now, I’ve been getting used to new ways. Moving water and paint around in fluid flows across comfortingly weighty papers has been my distraction. Making a fresh familiar. Trying not to listen to any predetermined directions that I offered up, I have splashed and poured and spilt and stroked. Torn boundaries. Isolated eddies. Dried markings. Swirling and coalescing  into the beyond. I see worlds that are watery and sky. Land that is undefined and one. Sky and land together, inseparable. And so began a new series of small works on paper - collages with watercolour, India ink and graphite on textured paper. About the wholeness of our environment. No separation. Made slowly. This narrative thread trails on along many paths and ideas. And there will be many workings on the theme as I try to make sense of their meaning. For me. And for universal connections too. From time to...

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, ...

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"