Weather wise it's been a pretty rough month. Here in the Borders we have been lucky and missed the worst of the snow, but the last few days have been bitterly cold.
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| Signs of spring |
Our outdoor activities have been somewhat curtailed, feels a bit like ground hog day. Looking back to March last year at the first post of my weather diary,temperatures couldn't be more contrasting...18 c then, -1c now!!
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| Gorse at Kyloe (end of February) |
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| Kyloe |
Work in the studio has been steady. I seem to be fairly well motivated despite not having any real pressing deadlines. Strange for me but I suppose when you get to this stage in life making work becomes a need not a want.
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| Large Oil based on the coast |
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| Detail |
I've been finishing off a couple of large paintings. One linked to the coast (from visits made earlier in the year) and another to moorland in Northumberland.
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| Work in progress |
Both paintings have not been without their problems and I feel somewhat defeated by the last one.
The trail and tree motifs I have been working with seemed so perfect in the small scale studies in oil, pencil and watercolour, thatI felt confident and ready to scale up. But once I hit the bigger scale both trail and trees had to be abandoned. Compositionally they just didn't work!
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| Small Oil |
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| Small water colour |
Always a lesson to be learned when scaling up. Things which appear perfect on a small scale don't necessarily translate successfully into the larger format. It's all double Dutch sometimes and best abandoned?
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| Quick oil sketch |
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| Those pesky trees! |
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| A bright day at Bowden, early March |
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| An audience with the Bowden crowd |
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| Early morning sunshine.... a rare sight this pass few weeks |
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| Last week end |
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| View from the studio this week |
Meanwhile in between working on the larger paintings I've been planning out some plates for collograph prints....(my students have been inspiring me!)
I've worked with this image in a variety of media, oil,water colour, mono printing so I thought, why not a collograph as well. If the prints are any good I'll post them up here next month.
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| Collograph plate sealed and ready for inking |
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| Mono print |
The Easter holidays start next weekend. Hopefully the weather will improve and our plans to get up a few mountains will come to fruition. Everyone deserves to feel a bit of warmth from the sun on their faces, after all it is Spring!
