January by the Tweed

Winter Tree and Flying Ducks

Ignoring bruised ribs from a fall on the pavement, last week I walked out into the frosty countryside, down by the Tweed, up the lane and along back through the small wood.  All kinds of birds about, fieldfares making their curious chirring clatter of a noise in the beech wood, I think an alarm call.  Walking by the river I came up quiet close to these two swans, who were much engaged in feeding. (Yesterday I saw a black swan, flying along the river, something I haven’t seen for years).

Swans on the Tweed

Swans on the Tweed ii

The light on this frosty day was delicate, and the snow seemed to mitigate the glare/darkness  that the camera produces in winter when it is pointed towards the sun.

Winter Cloud

Reflection

Plants in Winter

Shades of  Blue-Violet

Snowfall the last few days, grey light. Need to get back to the studio, back to birds feeding outside the window, music, new ideas, work.

Winter Sky

After packing off paintings for an exhibition, I put on my boots and went out  into air becoming more wintery each day. Walked out alongside the Hirsel course, where the small path will become impassable in a few years because of the new holly trees planted there, which might scratch out the eyes, like a bad spirit from a folk tale. Never met a soul walking up there. Just before reaching the communications mast on the edge of the woods, I looked out over the fields towards the hills and the sunset, and took these photographs, before walking back on the actual golf course.  Among the leaves were many forsaken golf balls.  Is there some mystique about this? Anyway, I collected a dozen or so and put them in a little pile, then set off back home.

New Year’s Day

Paid no attention to New Year as an event, heard a few fireworks in the distance at midnight, but for me Christmas is the celebration; though on the razz in Edinburgh at Hogmanay must be an experience.  However, New Year is a good time to make some vague decisions, and mine this year is to make a point of going out and drawing from life, alternating this with the camera, which I have grown fond of, as it makes me look at things, rather than walking in a dworm. I never really looked at the skies until I went out with a camera. How strange. And I never used a camera except to take details of scenes for illustration. So painting, and having a digital camera, are new delights.

The pictures for exhibition are nearly ready, but on New Year’s Day and on January 2nd I went out in the afternoon, away from The Tardis, to walk by the Tweed. I have tried to take pictures of somthing other than trees silhouetted against the sun.  The camera does very much change things when one points it at the sun, this dramatic darkness set off by the flaring light is alluring and dramatic, but it is not the true light of January afternoon. The  trees and foliage looked foxy red in the light of the declining sun, against the blue of the sky.

 

Why I am attracted to shadows, reflections, shifting light, translucence, mirrors.

Spent the day today fastening mirror plates to pictures, that aren’t quite finished, and will need to be varnished later in the week, except those that have a a top scribble of oil pastel. My work is narrative, still full of musicians and children, but over the past year, which is the first time I have had time and space and sponduliks sufficient to just work away on doing paintings, new ideas and new methods are creeping in, and I look forward to exploring them this year.  But I think I have forgotten how to draw, if I ever knew how, so that is the project for the future. I will encourage myself by trying to put a couple of drawings a month on the website. Things are changing in the work, but this has to just happen while in the process, there is no point in having an idea of one’s own importance and trying to live up to this.