“good to be immersed in a kind of painting where not only the imagery but the very process required long uninterrupted weeks of painting.”

That’s it - what is important is immersion in the process. For you there is the discipline of a physical journey. I’m searching for another kind of immersion as well, Have spent our time since Orkney and Skye trying to pare away the unnecessary stuff as much as I can. Not easy because I relish studio complications so much. Trying to graft the painting and printmaking directly onto drawing rootstock. Here’s the trigger words from my journal : Gather. Concentrate. Simplify. Trust first marks. Speak directly and completely. I’m now on an 6 week run up to a show in Brighton. Time will tell.

Great experience with school kids - my aunt went to school there. I had a similar experince in Kyle of Lochalsh primary school.

She has such a fierce pride in her place. Somewhat like that poem by George Mackay Brown - a seemingly trivial list of events joined at the end by a keen and passionate sense of place and presence. He made a day like any other, into a memorial for his father. These are entirely quiet and private activities, and even though Stromness had many visitors when I was there it was still entirely concerned with it’s own quiet and private activities. I liked that place and would like to go back for longer (with a warmer sleeping bag).

This is from Hamnavoe by Geroge Mackay Brown

And because under equalities sun,
All things wear now to a common soiling,
In the fire of images
Gladly I put my hand
To save that day for him.

I guess I assumed that landscape would be a good subject because the model is cheap, sits still and doesn’t criticize after a bad days work. That turned out to be especially wrong in Alaska where the hard landscape is also an earthquake zone. I couldn’t believe a landscape so big could be so fluid. The more I worked there the more I remembered that it’s all in flux : boulders, clouds, grass. mountains .. That fluidity is it, really. The landscape’s timeline is no less violent and unpredictable than ours, it just takes longer. Somebody told me that the Cuillins are among the oldest surface rocks in the world - meeting the volatile weather from the second biggest ocean in the world. Alchemy !

I can’t wait to see/draw clouds streaming/boiling/roiling through the Cullins…

Drawing is your communication medium: maybe it’s your form of writing. You were the one who opened my eyes to how a drawing reveals its own timeline.

There’s also a connection in the way Japanese calligraphy flows down a column or panel, much as your marks flow in a narrative way across a similarly proportioned space. And the calligraphy masters do that thing of practising their marks so as to internalise them, acquiring a skill so that they can forget it and focus on the work itself.

When making calligraphy with a brush, the classic technique is t keep the wrist rigid and the brush vertical, making all the movement from the elbow and shoulder, much as certain southpawed people I know write.

Anyway, just an observation…

I really will sort out how to put everybody’s links onto my page but for now it’s head down in the studio to finish a portrait I’m putting in for the Threadneedle prize. So that’s my day planned then - staring onto the middle distance and talking to myself.

Exactly. I find linear drawing both satisfying and frustrating - I love the decisiveness of a hard line. But I feel that lines are meant to be bent, squished and merged. Just as you can hear Charlie Parker running away with a simple block chord tune like Body and Soul and giving it back transformed and magical. Whenever I make a line drawing I wish for the tonal fields that only a brush can give you. Give me a brush and I want to sharpen it all the time .. might try drawing and painting at the same time.