The Self-Isolation Residency 9th may 2020: Day 41

Life outside.

This may well be something of a truncated post this evening, its been more of a relaxed and thoughtful day in which I've reflected on the 'outside', do we all remember the outside, and what I'm missing. Well the simple answer is I'm not missing that much, I just have to be creative with my time outside. I live in a beautiful part of the world on the Forth of Clyde in Argyll  and Bute. When I leave my house if I go 5 minutes in one direction I could to the wide estuary of the Clyde running out into the North Atlantic and if I go 5 minutes in the other direction I'm into the hills and those hills are the foothills of the Scottish Highlands. What's not to love?

This area of course plays a big part in a lot of my inspiration, I started off as a landscape artist visiting these places 30 years ago, walking and sketching these coasts and mountains. It's only natural that as I now spend even more of my time here that I should reflect for and more on this scenery as an element of my inspiration. But how does one capture this wide place and share it? In many ways I will always be a painter, although I will also lump drawing into painting for the purposes of this post, and so I tend to look at the world with a painters eye. The image at the top of this post was taken early this morning whilst I was using my limited time outside creatively. I'd actually been to do my shopping and yes I am very fortunate to have this view as my walk home from the supermarket. This is the spread of East Bay, Dunoon taken with the panoramic mode of my camera phone. Yes, I'll say it again, I know I'm lucky, but there are chances for us all like this if we just take the time to look around while we are out for our brief sojourns. When I saw this view with its mist and soft shades this morning the painters eye in me said watercolour and yes, perhaps, one day it will be. For now its an evocative photograph and perhaps that's enough, if you cant paint it certainly should be; look around you when you are out, don't make special journeys or extra trips out for heavens sake, just use the time that you have wisely and creatively.

At the foot of this post is another similar photo taken at a similar time of day last year. This is actually West Bay, Dunoon, less than half a mile from the first location. If you look carefully you will see the same line of hills in the distance but this time if we follow them to the West (right) we are looking out to sea. Again, will it be a painting? Perhaps, but that's not what I had in mind when I took it; lets say it's a photograph taken by a painter.

So now I come to the other 2 images I've included her today (immediately above). For me this shows the other approach to making the most of what we see of our 'visits to the outside'. Thes were both done last year but I feel they illustrate the approach I' m thinking of very well. On the left is a pencil sketch done in the forest just above Dunoon, its actually on of several that I did that day as I frequently do when I'm out walking. It and the others acted as the source inspiration for a series of paintings that I produced in the studio immediately afterwards. The sketch to me about 5 minutes, yes I draw quickly, it comes with practise, but anyone can start to put this kind of loose sketch down quickly with just a small amount of perseverance. This kind of sketch is a much better  [piece of source material for a painting than a photograph. Why? Because it is already edited and simplified. Because I was sketching quickly, as we all would need to right now, I only included the vital structure of the scene, I am absolutely sure that there were far more tress visible in the background of this view, but they were not needed for this composition and so I left them out.

This is a form of spontaneous editing, no matter what you may believe all artist do this all the time, even if they produce something that they would like for you to believe is 'photo-realistic', it really isn't and actually shouldn't be. The artists eye is in the editing and the interpretation. And this of course continues into the painting in the studio, look at the painting along side the sketch, see the differences; they are all choices that I made to give the painting the feeling that I wanted it to have. To exptress not so much what I saw but perhaps more what I felt.