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Isle of Arran | Scottish Landscape Art - Scottish Landscape Paintings

Posts Tagged ‘Isle of Arran’

‘The Saddle from Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran, March’

5 'The Saddle from Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran, March', Acrylic & Pastel, 2013, 76 x 23 cm

‘The Saddle from Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran, March’, Acrylic & Pastel, 2013, 76 x 23 cm

Price: £720

Price after 1st September, 2015: £1008

Well then, if you’ve just read my current blog you’ll see that we had some very unseasonable weather up in Assynt recently.  It wasn’t quite as wintry as this but there was snow falling on the high tops on a couple of days and it was certainly as dark and misty on many occasions.

Anyway, this painting is currently on display as part of my exhibition, “All four seasons” at the John Muir Trust Wild Space Visitor Centre in Pitlochry.  If you are travelling up or down the A9 anytime before the 29th June, do call in to see the show.

‘Breaking mists, Isle of Arran’

'Breaking mists, Isle of Arran', Acrylic & Pastel, 80 x 80 cm

‘Breaking mists, Isle of Arran’

 

‘Breaking mists, Isle of Arran’, Acrylic & Pastel, 80 x 80 cm,

This painting, based on a walk we did in the Arran hills a couple of years ago, is one of three 80 x 80 cm paintings I’ll be exhibiting at the Glasgow Contemporary Art Fair this year.  My work will be with the Ailsa Gallery.   The fair is on Saturday / Sunday 25th / 26th April and previews on Friday 24th.  For more information visit: www.gcaf.co.uk .  I hope you can get along to see the paintings.  Two of my colleagues here at the Courtyard Studios in Irvine, Alison Thomas and David Reid, will also be showing work with Ailsa Gallery at the fair.

Blog 250 staggering at times, but not quite out!

Wow, I can’t quite believe I’ve written 250 of these blogs …but well that’s what the records say. My first blog was posted on 3rd March 2009 and talked about the exhibition I’d just had at Great Glen House in Inverness. This is the headquarters of Scottish Natural Heritage and it was a very interesting place to exhibit my work. I have to say that it doesn’t seem like over five years since Nita and I hired a van and drove up to Inverness with the paintings.

Exhibition at Great Glen House, September 2009

Exhibition at Great Glen House, September 2009

A lot has happened since that show in 2009. The following summer saw me living and working as guest artist with the Künstlerbund in the city of Speyer in southern Germany. I worked there for four months and had a really enjoyable and exciting time, creating I think, 14 paintings and 3 pastel drawings. One of these drawings was the large 4.5 m x 1.5m drawing based on the vast great cathedral that dominates the centre of the city.

Just before leaving Scotland to travel to Speyer, I was asked to act as patron to “the gallery on the corner” in Edinburgh. This magnificent little gallery is run by Autism Initiative Scotland and works both as a professional gallery supporting artists affected by autism and other health issues, and as a place for young people affected by autism to learn new skills in retail gallery work and / or practical art …in the workshops attached to the gallery. It was a fantastic launch in April that year and since then; the gallery has gone from strength to strength. Many trainees have completed their apprenticeships and are producing some excellent work. I’ve been privileged to be part of this project and try and visit several times each year to follow the progress of the gallery ….and indeed to exhibit some of my own work there. In 2013 I was invited to hold an exhibition there and it was during the preview for this show that I first met Dan Thornton ….the Seattle based landscape photographer and documentary maker

Talking at the gallery that night, Dan and I quickly realised that although we worked in very different ways, we both thought very similarly about the landscape. Before the evening ended, Dan and his colleague David Feeney asked if they could join Anita and me on our next walk into the hills.

Exhibition at Great Glen House, September 2009

Exhibition at Great Glen House, September 2009

As it happened, the next walk we’d planned was to go back to Glen Rosa on the Isle of Arran. Just a couple of months earlier we had been walking in this magnificent glen with our friend Guy. It had been a very cold day with snow on the higher slopes of the hills and large patches right down to river level at the head of the glen. As I walked up the glen that day I first started to think about doing another Speyer sized drawing. Where as that drawing had been based on the idea of walking around the cathedral, I thought I could do another based on walking through Glen Rosa. When Dan and David joined us for this second walk in the glen….. I started to tell them about my plans for the drawing.

As you know, my plans came to fruition and just a few months ago I created this new large 4.5m x 1.5m drawing. After the walk that day, Dan had asked if I’d be interested in him making a full hour long documentary about my work and its close connection to the Scottish landscape. He was particularly interested in focusing it on the big Glen Rosa drawing project. Since the walk in 2013, Dan has made a number of visits to Scotland and has taken many hours of footage for the documentary. As I write we are now at the stage of seeking sponsorship to cover the costs of editing and producing the film. It’s all come along way since our meeting at “the gallery on the corner” in Edinburgh.

Of course, much else has happened since my first blog. I’ve had plenty of exhibitions and have walked many Scottish hills and glens in this time. It’s been a very exciting period of my life and this last six months with the trip to Brazil and the subsequent commissions has continued in a similar way. And it’s still going on.

Just last week, my colleague Alex Boyd, told me that he had been speaking with the people at the Isle of Arran Distillery and had told them about my work and the big glen Rosa drawing. They’ve been in contact with me and have asked me if I could hold an exhibition in their exhibition space during September and October. They are particularly keen to show the large Glen Rosa piece and have a perfect 5m long wall for it. I’m really delighted with this opportunity as I’m very interested in seeing the big drawing touring around Ayrshire…..and in particular going to the Isle of Arran. The distillery really is the perfect place for it as it is located beneath the very mountains on which the drawing is based. A very big thanks to Alex for opening up this opportunity for me.

So then, there’s lots of work to do to get ready for the three exhibitions that I have lined up this summer. First though, is to get 3 large pieces ready for the “Ailsa Gallery” who will be taking the work to the Glasgow Art Fair at the end of April. After that, I have my exhibition at the John Muir Trust “Wild Space” in Pitlochry during May and June and then quickly followed in August with an exhibition at “the gallery on the corner” in Edinburgh again.

Exhibition at Great Glen House, September 2009

Exhibition at Great Glen House, September 2009

Right then, that’s the end of blog 250. Here’s hoping that there will be many more things to write about over the next five or so years as I creep my way towards Blog 500!

 

Link to Press Releases and Information created over the last few years.

“Listening to Arran”, or “Us humans are very noisy you know”

Approaching the Isle of Arran

Approaching the Isle of Arran

Yesterday Nita and I spent five hours over on the Isle of Arran.  We weren’t up in the snow covered hills, or enjoying the wilds of Glen Rosa or Sannox however, instead we simply took our time wandering along the shore-line from the ferry to Brodick Castle gardens and back.  Now then, I know I haven’t been getting out walking much this last few months, but even I’m not that unfit that it takes me five hours to walk this relatively short distance!

If you follow my Face Book page, (Keith Salmon – Scottish Landscape Artist) you’ll have seen that I’ve been pondering over how I might develop my work if the little bit of sight I currently have, deteriorates.   Apart from the obvious solution, to return to making sculpture, I have over the last couple of years been thinking about the possibilities of using sound in some way to compliment the paintings and drawings.

You’ll remember that when I created the big Glen Rosa drawing last month, I had arranged for a time lapse camera to be fitted to record each days work.  This was done by Graham Byron and his team at Model X Media and as Graham is the sound engineer at the Harbour Arts Centre, Nita suggested to me that I ask him for advice about how I might create outdoor sound recordings.  I spent some time explaining what I was thinking of trying to do and he very kindly offered to lend me some recording equipment and show me how to use it.

So then, the purpose of yesterday’s leisurely stroll around Brodick Bay to the castle and back was for me to tryout the small recorder Graham lent me.  I’d already tried it out a couple of times along the harbour side here in Irvine and so had, I thought, a rough idea of which buttons to press.  Well, it wasn’t quite that easy. When you can’t read the screen and are basically a bit of a technology dork…. even four buttons can be a bit confusing when you’re out there in the field!!  My first attempt at recording some sound, (at the point where the path crosses a wee bridge very close to the sea shore) was a bit of an epic.  Needless to say I couldn’t get the recorder to work!  Nita came to the rescue and pointed out that the batteries were flat.  After that, with a new set of batteries, I was off and running …or stumbling.  I thought it would be nice to record the twin sounds of the waves breaking on the shore to my right and the water slopping around in the stream to my left.  Simple…..only I’d forgotten that the path over the bridge was a popular one and after just a few seconds of recording, a small school party on bicycles trundled by. Not too bad you’d have thought, only that one of the children fell off their bike, (luckily no damage done) but there was much kafuffle.  It was amazing ….the wee microphone caught it all!

We continued along the shore with me stopping regularly to record some more sounds.  After two or three attempts I was fairly confident that I was pushing the right buttons and I started to think more about the sounds around me and how I might use them with my work.  The microphone was really quite sensitive and picked up a very broad range of sounds ….giving great depth to the recordings.  Of course, I found that there was a huge amount of “noise pollution”, (not all of it made by me I hasten to add).  However, at one point in the grounds of Brodick castle I thought I’d try record the sound of a very small stream of water that was trickling over some rocks.  No sooner had I started the recording than a fishing boat out in the bay, fired up its marine diesel, a vehicle came along the road behind us and a plane flew overhead on its way to Prestwick airport …..and I started swearing! We humans are very noisy!   Of course though, it didn’t matter.  I was just out to see what the machine would do and what kind of problems I might encounter ….it was all good fun.

A fuzzy Beinn Nuis ....I think!

A fuzzy Beinn Nuis ….I think!

On our return to the ferry, I’d made about 20 short recordings and the whole process had started to make me think about my work in a slightly different way.  I still haven’t a clue how I might use sound in my work, but I’m very excited after this first day out with the recorder.  I think there are a lot of possibilities.  I now have to ask Graham to show me the next step, of downloading the recordings onto my PC and how to edit them.  This blog is therefore; very silent ….but watch out, future blogs could get very noisy!

An invitation . . .

An invitation to see the Glen Rosa drawing, Harbour Arts Centre, Irvine

Exhibition “End view”, 8th January 2015, 7pm – 9pm

An invitation…

This large graphite drawing is now just about finished.  I plan to leave it for the next couple of weeks before returning to it at the start of January.  I’ll then have four or five days in which to do any final work needed.  I started the piece just over three weeks ago on November 25th and so it’s taken me a lot less time than I’d originally thought.

As you’ve seen, the drawing has been built up in a series of layered marks.  The early stages being pretty time consuming as I gradually covered the paper in a series of scribbled marks.  As each layer went in though, the structure of the piece started to become more apparent and once this was completed, I started changing the nature of the marks I was making.  I used a much softer (9B) graphite pencil to generate darker and much bolder marks, especially in the foreground.

The drawing however was always meant to be based on a day back in January 2012 when I walked Glen Rosa with Nita and our friend Guy.  It was a very cold day and at the head of the glen the snow came right down to the banks of the river.  It was a wild scene of snow and rock and mist.  So then, in order to try and create the feel of this winter morning, I started to use a soft rubber to cut back through the graphite, creating negative marks that give the impression of snow and cloud.  This was actually quite hard work as the rubber quickly gets covered with graphite and I constantly had to clean it so that I did not get dirty looking smudges all over the piece..

At the moment, I’m quite pleased with the way it’s looking.  It certainly captures the scale of the place and I think conveys quite well what it can be like in amongst the Scottish hills in winter.  That said, I also like the fact that when you get close to it you are just left with a complex series of lines and marks……it’s quite abstract

The drawing will be in the gallery until the end of the exhibition on January 9th.  If you haven’t already seen it, do call in some time or accept this invitation to the exhibition “End view” on the evening of 8th January,  7pm – 9pm …..It should be a good event and it would be great to see as many of you there as possible.

The First Week: Glen Rosa Drawing Project – Harbour Arts Centre, Irvine

“Glen Rosa Drawing Project – Harbour Arts Centre, Irvine – 27th November 2014 – 9th January 2015”

The first week!

Well then, yesterday saw me reach the end of day 7 on this huge drawing. As you can see, we didn’t get video of the first 3 days but in all honesty, it was pretty tedious! I have, as you know, been working on a whole series of test drawings in which I’ve tried to experiment with both the way I use the graphite and the overall composition. I have then a reasonable idea of the very basic composition and the type of image I want the finished piece to be, but of course, as soon as you increase the scale…everything is different. As such the first day was spent tediously measuring out the drawing area into rough blocks 0.75m x 0.75m and then very vaguely marking in a few of the main elements of the drawing.

Days 2 and 3 were pretty daunting as I wanted to cover the entire area of the drawing with finely scribbled line. The purpose of this is to give me something to start working in to and on to. This entire drawing is going to be created using different types of scribbled line; some thin and feint, some broad and dark, using 9B graphite pencils. As I said, putting in the first layer of fine marks seemed never ending. I started at the right hand side and worked my way left, but just like climbing a steep hill, where the summit never seems to get any closer, here the left hand edge of the drawing always seemed out of reach!… perhaps if I hadn’t spent so much time talking, drinking coffee and going for lunch, I may have reached the end of the first layer sooner!

From this point onwards I have been trying to create the basic structure of the drawing. My viewpoint is up at the head of Glen Rosa on the Isle of Arran, where the mountains curve around in a great arc. In this drawing I have, to start with, tried to indicate the shapes of the principal peaks and ridges. As with all my work, I’m not trying to produce an accurate record of the view or skyline, but merely create something that gives the feel of the place. Interestingly, I’ve had a number of people come up to me who’ve seen the drawing at this stage and who have immediately said that it looked like Glen Rosa.

I’ve almost completed this second stage of the drawing and have about another hours’ work to do…then things start becoming more interesting. In the next few days, I’ll be starting to increase the tones and scale of marks and will be starting to use erasers to rub back through the different layers. It’s very exciting and I’m thoroughly enjoying doing this piece. The Harbour Arts Centre is a great location for such a project and it is already generating a lot of interest, as visitors to the centre find this strange artist madly scribbling away. If you live in the area, do pop in at some stage. It would be great to see you. If I’m running out of time to get the drawing completed, I may just give you a pencil and tell you to get scribbling!

‘Breaking mists, Isle of Arran’

289 'Breaking mists, Isle of Arran', Acrylic & Pastel, 2013, 30 x 30 cm

‘Breaking mists, Isle of Arran’

‘Breaking mists, Isle of Arran’, Acrylic & Pastel, 2013, 30 x 30 cm

This little painting, based on a day we spent up in the fabulous Arran Hills is to be reproduced as one of my new gift cards.  These should be ready in time for our Open Studios Weekend on Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th October.

High quality reproductions of this painting can also be obtained through the “Prints for sale” section on my website or directly from my studio.

‘The Saddle from Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran, March’

277 'The Saddle from Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran, March', Acrylic & Pastel, 2013, 76 x 23 cm

‘The Saddle from Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran, March’

 

‘The Saddle from Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran, March’, Acrylic & Pastel, 2013, 76 x 23 cm

This is one of the three paintings I have on display at Tour House in Kilmaurs as part of the group exhibition, “6 Artists”.

I created the painting last year after one of our winter walks in Glen Rosa on the Isle of Arran.  It was a  particularly cold day …..a far cry from my last visit a couple of months ago when we sat in warm sunshine at the same location for a couple of hours.  What a difference a few months make!

‘Below Goat Fell, winter’

3 'Below Goat Fell, winter', Graphite pencil on paper, 2013, 125 x  80 cm

‘Below Goat Fell, winter’

 ‘Below Goat Fell, winter’, Graphite pencil on paper, 2013, 125 x 80 cm

We’re heading over to the Isle of Arran and Glen Rosa again tomorrow.  I need to walk up to the head of the glen to do some more sketching and to take some more photos as preparation for my big drawing project in November and December this year.  I am starting to get quite a good idea now as to how to go about this big piece of work and tomorrows visit to the glen will hopefully give me all the information I need.   That said, the forecast is a little ‘iffy’ so if the cloud is right down we may have to make another visit later in the summer.

Anyway, this got me thinking about the work I’d already done on Glen Rosa and I thought I’d use this drawing as my ‘artwork of the week’.  This is one of several I’ve created as trial pieces for the big drawing ….this is approximately 125 x 80 cm and is currently at the studio …rolled up.  Should you like to see it up close however …do pop into the studio.

‘Towards the Isle of Arran, winter’

316  'Towards the Isle of Arran, winter', Acrylic & Pastel, 2014, 76 x 23 cm

‘Towards the Isle of Arran, winter’

‘Towards the Isle of Arran, winter’, Acrylic & Pastel, 2014, 76 x 23 cm

I finished this painting about a month ago and yesterday my partner Anita put it into a frame.  It’s always good seeing something finally framed and up on the wall and I’m quite pleased with this piece.

I’ve been asked so many times over the years whether I’d painted the view across the water to Arran, but in the past had always been interested in view points that were up in the hills.  I finally gave in to demand and this is what I came up with.  It’s the kind of view I get when I look towards the Isle of Arran from the mouth of the River Irvine near to my studio ….but looking through my monocular.

As I say, the painting is now up on my studio wall and can be viewed any time I’m working there.  As it’s the 2014 Open Studio Ayrshire event this weekend (Sat / Sun 26 / 27th April) why not call in to see it as part of your studio trail this weekend?  There are 47 venues open throughout Ayrshire ….more details: www.openstudiosayrshire.com