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The Framework Gallery in Troon

'Breaking mists, Isle of Arran'

‘Breaking mists, Isle of Arran’

Just a short blog this week as it’s been a quiet and quite uneventful few days.  I’ve spent most of my time working on a new 80 x 80 cm painting but to be honest it has been hard work and I’m struggling with it!  That said, I had a couple of hours working on it this morning and by the time I left around midday, there were a few rays of hope.

Anyway, I took three of the more recent paintings down to The Framework Gallery in Troon earlier this afternoon, ready for the run-up to Christmas.  If you’re a regular to this website then you’ll have seen the paintings before ….but I’d like to think that you’ll be happy seeing them again.  Indeed, if you live in the area you can get to see them up close and for real at The Framework Gallery in Troon for the next few months.

'Crossing to Harris, a damp April evening'

‘Crossing to Harris, a damp April evening’

For full details of the gallery please go to their website: www.frameworktroon.co.uk .The gallery at 83 Portland St, Troon, always has a good range of work by an interesting selection of different artists and its well worth a visit.  I hope you can get along sometime.

'West coast, Harris, May 2013'

‘West coast, Harris, May 2013’

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Blog 200 ….In the cloud

According to my records, this is Blog number 200 ….and of course, I’m late with it!  No change there, I hear you cry!  Anyway …here we go.

'On Mam na Gualainn, August'

‘On Mam na Gualainn, August’

As some of you will have seen if you’ve been to my Face Book page recently: Keith Salmon – Scottish Landscape Artist; I’ve finished the 80 x 80 cm painting based on our walk on Mam na Gualainn back in the summer.  As I’ve said before, it was a strange day with low banks of clouds drifting in from the west and breaking as they ran into the high hills of Glencoe and the Mamores.  Most of the time the cloud appeared at the side of the hill we were on and then either drifted on by or rose up.  As we sat near the summit however, not only did the glen below us gradually fill up with a great bank of cloud, but the general layer of cloud above us became very thick and dark and started to descend.  As we walked east along the broad ridge, the two almost met and it became very gloomy and dramatic.

This is a scene that I’ve witnessed a good few times over  the many years I’ve been walking in the hills and it never ceases to impress me and I often forget that for people who don’t walk in the hills, this is something they miss.  Indeed, six or seven years ago when I was walking over Shalloch on Minnoch with a group from our local club Air na Creagan, a couple of ladies who had joined us for what was their first ever hill walk ….asked what it was, as the cloud drifted briefly across the hill side ….they were quite taken aback when we said they were walking in the cloud!

But I digress somewhat.  As I was painting the Mam na Gualainn piece, I found it very difficult to capture that strange patchy view that you get when the cloud is just catching the top of the hill but isn’t completely filling in.  Thankfully last Saturday, Nita and I went up to Luss for a relatively short walk up Beinn Dubh and with the weather deteriorating as a weather front moved in from the Atlantic, we had similar conditions to that on Mam na Gualainn.  Once again, banks of cloud seemed to just appear at the side of the hill, at times forming a band around it ….the middle in cloud and the upper and lower slopes cloud free.  It was wonderful to watch this constantly changing scene especially when, as we got higher, the dark overhead layer started to descend and trails of cloud dripped down towards us.  We spent quite a time just standing in the cold wind watching this and it was time well spent.  When I went back to the studio the next day, I knew what I had to do to finish the Mam na Gualainn painting.  It’s all very well taking photos when you’re out ….but they really only act as memory joggers and sometimes not very good ones at that.  What I think you need, to create any painting, is actual experience of the subject……the few hours on Beinn Dubh made all the difference.

As a follow up to this, I’ve decided to try and create some new paintings which are specifically about being in the mist as it breaks around you on the hill.  I’m not sure quite how they’ll go ….I have a feeling that this might be an opportunity to work on a large scale ….but I’ve started quite small …this is a new 30 x 30 cm piece that is on the go.

Work in progress, 'Approaching Am Bodach, the Mamores

Work in progress, ‘Approaching Am Bodach, the Mamores

Cloud watching – from Mam na Gualainn

Layers of cloud from near the summit of Mam na Gualainn

Layers of cloud from near the summit of Mam na Gualainn

Being held up by road works and a red traffic light can be a little frustrating at times, – but not when you’ve been stopped by a traffic light in Glencoe …..as we were at about quarter past eight on Wednesday morning. It was one of those works where they run a convoy system and as we’d just missed the previous convoy, there was going to be a bit of a delay and so Nita turned the engine off. The mountains rose all around us with wisps and heavier banks of cloud drifting at different levels, breaking around the dramatic rocky peaks. As I opened the window to get a better view, we heard the distinctive calls of eagles and Nita and Guy said they could see three of these huge birds high above us. It was a great way to start our day and the convoy vehicle returned almost too soon and we had to leave the birds and these magnificent mountains behind ….but not too far behind.

From Mam na Gualainn

From Mam na Gualainn

We were headed for Mam na Gualainn, a 796 m hill set in a fine location on the north side of the fjord like sea loch, Loch Leven. Nita and I had first walked this hill back in 2005 and had been so impressed with the views from its high grassy ridge that we always said we’d return dragging our friend Guy with us…..he’s not a Munro bagger, but someone who simply appreciate a fine hill in a fine location….regardless of its size or stature. We thought he’d appreciate this one. Have to admit though, that it took a little longer to get back there than we’d originally planned!

Wild flowers on the slopes of Mam na Gualainn

Wild flowers on the slopes of Mam na Gualainn

The views we had on Wednesday from Mam na Gualainn, were spectacular, made even more so by an almost continuous flow of very low cloud drifting in from the west and breaking around and over the big hills of Glencoe to the immediate south of us and the high tops and ridges of the Mamores to the north. We had a constantly changing view all around, sometimes with peaks sticking out above the mists and at other times, the mountains almost completely clearing or disappearing. As we sat eating our lunch at the summit, the cloud rolled up the glen to the north of us, engulfing the West Highland Way far below, and then after another ten minutes engulfing us too. For a while it became very dark and we reached for waterproofs and maps but within half an hour it all passed and we were still dry and back to watching the mountains around us coming and going again.

On the steep slopes of Mam na Gualainn

On the steep slopes of Mam na Gualainn

I often say to visitors to my studio, that the best days on the hill are often not the perfect bright sunny days, but the days where the conditions are constantly changing. These kinds of day with the ever changing light and colours make a great location even greater and provide me with lots of ideas for paintings and drawings. Quite what will come out of Wednesdays trip to Mam na Gualainn, ….well, we’ll just have to wait and see…..but our nine hours of cloud watching have certainly got me reaching for the graphite pencils again and I’m tempted to try and do some new large drawings while the memories are fresh in my mind.

Cloud arriving ...the summit of Mam na Gualainn

Cloud arriving …the summit of Mam na Gualainn

Heavy skies above Mam na Gualainn

Heavy skies above Mam na Gualainn

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Next step

 ' A January morning, Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran'

‘ A January morning, Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran’

As any of you who visit my Face Book page will know, I’ve been doing some more drawing this last week.  The drawing, to be titled, ‘Rock, snow and water, Harris, May 2013’ is small than the last few pieces and is square as opposed to rectangular.  I wanted it to be similar in size to the 80 x 80 cm paintings I do and so cut the paper to this size.  As you know though, I do like my drawings to have a rough edge and so the actual image size on the paper is 70 x 70 cm, ….give or take few millimetres, leaving a white border all around..

When we were over on Harris last month we had, to our surprise, one day of heavy sleet and snow.  The following day we did a great little walk through a glen between the hills.  The snow was really quite low on the hillsides …less the 100 m and after a few kilometres the path reached a bealach at about 130m.  Even at this height there were several centimetres of snow on the ground and everything looked quite wild and wintry.   By this time though, it was thawing and the streams were really full, cascading down their rocky beds in a mass of white water and it struck me how similar it looked to the patterns made by the snow lying on the rocky hillsides above.  We spent a long time wondering and looking and I decided that I’d have to do some drawings based on this scene and idea.  ‘Rock, snow and water, Harris, May 2013’ is my first attempt and I’m already working on a second piece that will be more abstract, more about the patterns of marks.

'Rock, snow and water, Harris, May 2013'

‘Rock, snow and water, Harris, May 2013’

Anyway, this first piece is finished I think and I’ve decided that it might be fun to enter it for the forth-coming North Ayrshire Open Art Exhibition.  As you can enter up to two pieces, I’ve decided that I might as well enter one of the other recent graphite drawings too.  Of course, the next step is to decide quite how to have them framed.  I normally use a distressed ‘York’ silver frame with a simple mount behind glass, for my smaller paintings and I had at first thought I do with this.  However, I wasn’t sure whether the silver would work with these quite stark graphite images and so went to my framer at the Waverley Gallery in Prestwick seeking some advice and ideas.

I’ve always found selecting a frame very difficult and so to be honest I wasn’t looking forward to this part of the business.  Amazingly though, Tim had the perfect solution …a very simple charcoal coloured frame.  The moment he put it down against the drawing I knew this was the one and although we tried several other options we came back to this first choice.  To retain the ‘rough’ edge of the drawing, there will be no mount, just the glass sitting directly onto the paper.  I’m quite excited and am looking forward to seeing the pieces framed in this way especially as the second piece I’ve chosen is one of the large Glen Rosa drawings.

Well then, that’s about it for this week.  Nita and I are finally starting to get over the nasty bug we’ve had although my voice is still very rough.  Needless to say there have been a few jokes down at the studios about my needing to take up singing the blues instead of painting!  Of course though, we haven’t been out walking for over three weeks now and have been missing all the fine weather which has been most annoying and now that we’re starting to plan our next outing ….the rain is back on!  Hopefully by next week we’ll have made it out onto a hill and my next blog can include a few nice photos of the Scottish Highlands.

A tale of two Meall Tionails …..

The view from Ba Bridge

The view from Ba Bridge

For anyone out there who reads these blogs, you might remember that about a year ago I wrote about my plans to walk a wee hill tucked away amidst the bigger mountains of the Blackmount.  The hill in question was Meall Tionail …a rocky little hillock of just over 500m in height.  We’d been planning to walk this hill ever since my partner Anita saw it from one of its bigger neighbours and said that she’d like to sit and eat her sandwiches at the top of it one day ….it really is in a wonderful location, surrounded on three sides by bigger dramatic mountains and looking out on the other side to the expanse of Rannoch Moor.  Suffice to say that we didn’t make it last year as planned and so it had to wait until Monday this week before we finally got to go there.

Looking towards Meall Tionail

Looking towards Meall Tionail

With a pretty good forecast and following a reasonably dry period (the walk in involves crossing several streams) …it seemed the perfect place to go ….and so I rang our friend Guy to see if he wanted to join us.  Wanting to walk a tiny hill in the middle of much bigger ones seemed to be a daft enough proposal to him and he was all for it ….we’d pick him up from the station at half past six the next morning.

Looking east from near the base of Meall Tionail

Looking east from near the base of Meall Tionail

Meall Tionail is as I say, just a small hill …it’s the getting to it that takes the effort.  We chose to park the car at the Glencoe Ski Centre and walk the West Highland Way back south to Ba Bridge, then follow a path up the side of the river for around three miles to the summit of the hill…..I guess in total (though I haven’t made any accurate measurements ..about 13 – 14 miles for the day ….with a few hundred metres of ascent thrown in for good measure.  The weather was indeed, pretty good, the cloud was quite high and all of the bigger tops were clear …the upper slopes white with snow and looking very dramatic.  The sky was a mixture of dark clouds and bright sunshine and it made for some wonderful views and a great range of colours.  Needless to say we did a lot of stopping to look and snap away with our cameras and time went by faster than the miles under our boots.   Thankfully the path up the glen by the river proved a good one with small bridges over the numerous small streams.  At one point though the path appeared to disappear….and we were left scratching our heads and pawing over the maps ….we were confronted by a sizable stream and no sign of the path on the opposite bank.  Nothing for it but to splash our away across ….thankful now for the dry weather over the preceding weeks….and still we couldn’t figure out quite where we were or where we’d gone wrong.  We could see our hill though and on heading towards it and back towards the main river found our path …quite how it had got there was a bit of a mystery!

Lunch, but not at the top!

Lunch, but not at the top!

At around this point we’d been walking for about three hours and we still had a good distance to go to the base of the hill …let alone climb the thing.  As we’d set out at 9.15 am, it was looking like being a late finish…..much to my dismay there were murmurings in the ranks that perhaps we’d only get to the base of the hill.   In all honesty though we were running a little late and when we got to the base of the hill we did in fact decide that that was as far as we could go ….ahhhhhh, after all these years waiting to come here and the long drive and the four hours walk in …and not to get to the top …well, it was a bit galling.  We could have got to the top and back down to the car before it got dark …but we’d have had to have rushed it which was completely against the whole idea of going there in the first place.  Nothing for it but to return some time in the future …and allow more time.

We’d had a great day and seen some wonderful scenery, but I hadn’t realised how disappointed Anita was at not getting to sit and eat her lunch at the summit.  When we finally got home she said, ‘how about going back on Wednesday …the forecast is almost as good?’  I saw from her face that she wasn’t joking …and well, we haven’t done anything as daft as that for a long time …so Wednesday was booked and with an extra early start …up at 03.50, out and away from Irvine at 05.15!  Mad or what?!

Some of the mountains surrounding Meall Tionail

Some of the mountains surrounding Meall Tionail

Heavy skies over Rannoch Moor, wednesday morning

Heavy skies over Rannoch Moor, wednesday morning

This time though the weather wasn’t as good as the forecast had predicted and on reaching Loch Lomond it started to rain and both the Luss Hills and Ben Lomond disappeared into a grey wet slurp.  It continued to rain all the way to the edge of Rannoch Moor where at last we saw a few bursts of sunshine over to the east.  The mountains were all shrouded in mist and it was a very different scene from just 48 hours earlier.  This time Anita and I started walking at 07.50 and with fewer things to photograph and less stops we made good time.  It stayed dry all the way to Ba Bridge but after that the rain came back …and stayed for the next almost eight hours.  The beautiful snow covered and dramatic peaks bursting with colour in the bright spring sunshine of just two days earlier,  had been replaced by an equally beautiful scene of dark brooding hills disappearing up into the cloud.  It was cold and very wet …but we could see our little hill up ahead …its summit well below the cloud base ….one advantage of climbing a wee hill!

Wednesday morning ...poor weather

Wednesday morning ...poor weather

We arrived at the base of Meall Tionail and after a brief stop headed uphill on a mixture of grass and stone, crossing numerous small streams that were coming to life again with all the rain.  By this time the wind had picked up and it was blowing the rain along in sheets, but as we reached the top of the hill, it really didn’t matter …as Anita said, ‘This is even better than I had imagined’ …and indeed it was.  The summit is topped by a series of crags …the outer edge like battlements of an ancient castle …the views out over the glen towards Rannoch Moor quite stunning even in this wild weather.  Big mountains rose all around us, occasionally giving glimpses of the snow covered ridges for the most part hidden in cloud.  Wow, what a spot.  Anita did finally get to eat her sandwiches on the top, albeit hunched against the wind and driving rain ….but what the heck …we’ made it and it felt very special.

 From the summit of Meall Tionail....at last!

From the summit of Meall Tionail....at last!

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Variations on a theme

 'Approaching snow shower, Scottish Highlands'

'Approaching snow shower, Scottish Highlands'

Over the last few years I’ve done several versions of some of my paintings. Most of these started out as small 30 x 30 cm paintings but I’ve started to develop them at the bigger 80 x 80 cm size.

Revisiting a painting is not simply a case of reproducing the original but rather it’s a chance to create something that is new but on the same theme. One can try slightly different compositions, colours and marks, perhaps in a way, forgetting the original place and simply developing the paint and pastel.

The move from 30 x 30cm to 80 x 80cm has been particularly interesting. The increased surface area of the painting allows so much more scope, particularly with the consistency of the paint and the means by which it is applied.

The paintings included here are all based on a particular event one afternoon several years ago when I was walking with a group from our local club Air na Creagan. It was sometime in February I seem to remember and we’d travelled up to Braemar on a Friday evening with the aim of climbing Lochnagar the following day. We’d booked into the youth hostel for the weekend and were all looking forward to some good winter walking. Quite how wintry it was to be only became apparent as the weekend approached and we watched the forecasts. We arrived in Braemar in the early evening, crossing the high road through Glen Shee in the dark but with the first few flakes of snow falling lightly out of the gloom and being caught in the light of the headlights. As was customary on such weekends, first stop after arriving was the local hotel for food and a beer and by the time we started walking back up the street to the youth hostel it was snowing if not hard, then certainly steadily. Talk before we went to bed was of planning something less taxing than Lochnagar. If it carried on snowing over night we’d not even get the cars to the start point let alone want to tackle what might be thick fresh snow. In the end, the alternative was to do a circular walk out of Braemar and up and over Morone ….a gentle hill of I seem to remember around 800 m.

'Below Morone_ approaching snow shower'

'Below Morone_ approaching snow shower'

In the morning we arose to a good few centimetres of snow and although not too bad it wasn’t really the weather to be driving too far on small roads …and the wind had really picked up, so it would be uncomfortable higher up. Everywhere did look pretty wonderful though as we walked through the little town and picked up the path zig zagging its way up the slopes of Morone. But what a difference as we got out onto the high open and unprotected slopes near the summit. The snow was coming in heavy and quite lengthy showers and as they blew in the winds increased dramatically. There is a radio mast at the top with an access land drover track leading to it from the other side of the hill and at that point we stopped in the slight shelter offered by the wall of the hut. The wind chill up there was severe and despite this being a very modest little hill, this certainly wasn’t the place to hang around. Our planned route led across the summit plateau and then descended into a glen …before an easy walk back out and into the town. The walk across the top of the hill was difficult though…. the snow being blasted along horizontally in a real blizzard. It was hard to see for a while until eventually we started to descend into the glen ..and once again got some shelter from the surrounding hills. After a bit of a battle through in places quite deep snow we picked up another estate track and decided to sit for a while and catch up on a late lunch. As we sat there, we watched the sky darken and then very rapidly this huge snow shower poured over the hilltop at the end of the glen and raced towards us. It was a very impressive sight and one that has stuck with me….it is also the subject of these five paintings.

'Snow shower, Central Highlands'

'Snow shower, Central Highlands'

The snow didn’t go away over night and on Sunday morning we arose to quite thick snow …15 + cm and it was still falling.,. The Glen Shee road was closed and after waiting for several hours for it to ease, we set out for home…..along the only road out …..a tricky drive east to Aberdeen and then back via Dundee! As the whole of Scotland had been hit by the snow none of the roads were very good and our journey back to Ayrshire took many hours. It was quite a weekend!

'Approaching snow shower, above Braemar'

'Approaching snow shower, above Braemar'

 

'Approaching snow shower, above Braemar'

'Approaching snow shower, above Braemar'

 

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