8 Ardtornish flowers

Unusually for me, this small bookwork was made more as a reminder of a lovely holiday with some lovely people, rather than being a "serious" part of my practice. I taught the kids (and some of the adults) in my extended family how to make cyanotypes "in the field," exposing them to the Scottish summer sunshine and washing/processing in the open. These are a few of a series of postcards I made once the kids went off to do other things.

mountain study

Every now and then
I go up into the mountains:
fire and snow-
trudging for hours
along the black line of the river
following it right to the crest
or, when the snow's gone
moving up through the forest
to the thin grass and the rocks
the high country-
up there in the stillness
thinking of nothing
only the body moving

extract (section 2) from Kenneth White's Mountain Study, from The Bird Path - Collected Longer Poems 1964-1988

studio table top

hydrangeas from my folks' garden

various found stones (galena, pyrites, quartz, gabbro)

almond blossom

Vincent Van Gogh, Almond Blossom,  1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

I've just returned from Amsterdam with a postcard of this image, now pinned above my table in my studio. I don't think I was expecting to find the work in the Van Gogh Museum so stimulating since the last time I probably really thought about it was as an undergraduate painting student when I was still a teenager. But it's good to be surprised by artists you think of as being so mainstream you hardly dare give them a second though. Crucially, it was looking at this work in the flesh that made me aware of it's beauty.