Sunday hiking with Bill in Quirang NE Skye. Coast all churned and sliced, the track slipping away from a scarp that overhangs the sound of Sound of Raasay. Glimpsing Rona and Wester Ross on the mainland through the weather. Not much drawing but lots of looking and “Oy vey ! will you look at that”. Reassuring to see what a strong impression this place I love is making on Bill, who is used to 40 mile long glaciers and 20,000′ high mountains. There is something happening here, even thought we don’t quite know what it is yet.

Monday, proper hiking and painting with Bill and Susi along the S edge of Loch Brittle. Working on the cut edge of a waterfall, all roar and rumble with more fluidity than fixed things to look at. Similar feeling to a freight train roaring past when you are standing three feet away on the platform. Susi made a beautiful mark study of the big sweep in front of us and then, being a jeweller, went in for a close up study of a sedge clump. This was the first time I saw Bill working out in the open. He was perched on the edge of the biggest drop, pinging up and down and working on a horizontal panorama in rapid brush marks. He somehow has the capacity to claim the whole picture, whereas I chewed away at segments and had a lovely time working the charcoal into the paint and vice-versa.

Tuesday we visited Elgol, SE Skye, on the recommendation of my mate John Dyvig. Elgol is at the end of the road at 135517, overlooking Loch Scavaig. A wild SE severe gale with spindrift flashing over the breakwater, Soay Island looming in and out of the grey wall of cloud and spray. We could barely speak in the open but now have a plan to get a boat into Loch Coruisk as soon as the weather calms down.

Wednesday Last day with Shug and Susi, wisely spent visiting the Tallisker distillery.  Now all packed up and ready to set off tomorrow from on Elgol for up to a week camping around Loch Coruisk We are sailing on Misty Isle with Seumas macKinnon.

Thursday I’ve only just got time to post this before in an hour’s time, and will be off the grid for around a week, will post proper pictures of the place and the work when I get back.Here’s some really links I’ve picked up along this really wonderful journey :I was pointed at an interesting blog of artists who work with water, called Watermarks :We got a really friendly reception from Ian Chard in Broadford Books and Gallery. When Bill went in to buy a piece of plastic to repair his broken pallette.Got a lovely mail from Nigel and Kathy, a couple of kayakers I met in in Orkney. Working the tides and dodging the winds in that magical island.

Looks like Bill Brody has started something with his blog about foveal vision.It’s really got me thinking because it’s counter-intuitive.  Most of what we call looking actually takes place after we have looked.  

The brain joins together all of those quick glances, those foveal spot-scans into a composite idea of what is there. Forget rectangular frames and bits of paper -  our field of view is broadly circular. Forget trying to make a drawing from a single look or photograph. Also, because foveal sounds like a soya based meat substitute I’m going to call foveal looking spot vision and peripheral looking edge vision.

The edge is much more interesting than the spot. 

I dropped this whole confusing thing into a studio session at Colchester yesterday and the students came up with some really interesting work ! Teaching is truly amazing when you see ideas get up on their own legs because they’ve been invited in by a group of students. I asked them to do a life drawing where they only look with the edge of their eyes. The model moved across their field of view but their spot vision stayed in the same place. The drawings were wonderful. I only realised how difficult it was when I tried to do one of my own - I noted two spots on an easel a metre and a half from the model and marked them on the paper, then kept my spot vision only on them to both look and draw. It’s virtually impossible ! I had to keep wrestling my spot vision away from the model and even more difficult away from the drawing of the model when I looked at the paper. Also it was impossible to respect the rectangle of paper or board, which is why I started drawing on the floor. 

It’s quite good for teachers to be occasionally subjected to their own daft ideas.  

I like the idea of a third kind of looking.  I like the idea of thinking with the edges of our minds and finding treasure. So much more interesting than counting out the coins we already have. 

Peripheries have always drawn me so it’s inevitable I should start drawing them too. I’m sure that’s why I went to Alaska, why Bill and I are going to the Western Isles, and why I want to go to Orkney. Peripheries don’t have to be far away either, I am always moved by the subtle tipping point where my own human made world crumbles and rots back into it’s earthy source. There is also something so poignant about those myriad unhomely places in the corners of the city where we pass by but cannot rest. Places on the edge of human comfort. As a kid I got in to trouble for writing “This is the outside world. Enter at your own risk” on our side gate. Our back fence had hole in it so I could see the ‘allotments’ - little cultivated strips left over from the war where people grew their own food because the submarines stopped us importing it. Somebody out there kept pigs and we had a pig swill bucket outside the kitchen. One day big diggers and lorries turned up and built a strange square concrete place with no windows and a big fence. I found out later it was a Regional Seat of Government, where the selected few would sit out the nuclear winter. Scared the crap out of me even before I knew what it was. That must be where my thing about concrete started. Making this blog is really helping me at the moment because my studio is  full of building materials and I’m not getting any time to work in a sustained way. Scanning in bits from the sketchbook and thinking is a way of keeping in touch. 

Bill Brody said something really interesting about making a landscape painting. He described two kinds of looking : with the edges of our eyes (peripheral vision), and with the centre of our gaze, which is called foveal vision.

I had to look that up too. But it’s self evident to anybody who spends time looking or drawing. The centre of your gaze is sharp and log-jammed with detail while the edges are only interested in big differences of form or light or movement. Centre vision evolved for hunting, edge vision is for detecting predators. I like to use both when I am drawing, screwing up my eyes so my centre vision goes fuzzy. My friend Nigel said something wonderful about assessing a painting when you go into the studio in the morning .. “You sneak up on it and look at it out of the corner of your eye”. Bill Brody was talking about how painting lets you direct the viewer’s gaze by modulating descriptive detail, colour and tonality. This connects with the Italian word caminare, walking. You can be walked through a picture by colour cues - brown = foreground, through green to blue = distance. Can do this with tonality as well.

To me this is exactly what the drawn gesture is, it’s a visual invitation to pay attention. I have the most trouble with the opposite though, with flat areas of tone. They often end up as just that, flat, laying over and obscuring the bones of the drawing. I REALLY want to get back into the studio .. I just need to get all the builders stuff out first :-((

Been thinking more about different ways of looking at a landscape, as part of the preparation for the Alaska job. The traditional concerns are about rendering volume and distance. Completely explained in the fabulous  Father Ted Series 2 Part 1 : Hell written by Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan. Ted tries to explain the difference between a real cow and a toy one :

Ted : (Holding a toy cow in front of Dougal) ”Dougal, this cow is small. (points out of the window) Those ones are far away. Small … Far away.”             

 Genius. And everything you ever needed to know about linear perspective. Rendering distance by modulating tones (lighter = far away) and bending contours (converging on the horizon = far away). These are the obvious problems but not the most interesting ones. Let’s see if we can find drawn marks or descriptors for the moving, fluid and unstable bits of the landscape :

• Change (multiple alterations through time)
• Flow (soft through soft or soft around hard)
• Abrasion (hard into soft)

It’s lucky that change, flow and abrasion are also built into the uncertain process of drawing itself,  whether you want them to be or not. 

• Change by erasing and moving a mark but leaving the trace, pentimenti
• Flow by changes in direction and weighting of mark
• Abrasion by attacking the actual drawn surface, giving it a history

I’m rather uncomfortable with this kind of theoretical stuff, but I so often have no idea what I’m doing till I hear myself telling somebody about it. It’s also been partly provoked by a really interesting book about painting that I read and re read just now :  ”What painting is” by James Elkins. A lot of it confused me, which is no bad thing, but it did a wonderful job of trying to talk in the language of paint. I’m trying to ask similar questions here about drawing I suppose. Drawing is the most accurate and sensitive way of recording look-decisions. Often it’s too accurate when the looks aren’t careful and the drawing is going badly. The limitation is that these decisions can only be recorded a a sequence, basically because I can’t think and draw more than one thing at a time. I want to know if I can wire up the drawing process differently - wire it up in parallel instead of in series.  

Numbers can do that. Can a drawing ?   

I’ve got a rather scary commission coming up in four weeks time: to make a panorama of the Cook Inlet in Alaska, two and a half weeks to complete and show the work. 

My basic idea is to do another paper based panorama, with a lot of quick studies of dynamic components in the landscape like wind, light, cloud, tide, moon, snow/rain etc. But, while I love the working qualities of paper, charcoal and paint, work on paper is static and the landscape never is. This time I’d really like to make a drawing that tries to describe the changes,  the dynamic agents in the landscape itself. 

I have no idea how we are going to achieve this which is why I’m lucky to be collaborating with someone who works in Anchorage. He has a science background, but we seem to have the trick of listening to each other carefully, so our differences of viewpoint don’t seem to matter at all. His idea is that we make up a layered view across Fire Island which can eventually be web based and somehow related to live shots. One of his jobs was to develop ways of displaying complex underground geology that could only ever be measured indirectly. We both realised that these surfaces were just like a landscape drawing except I use eye/hand instead of a seismograph. His language is mathematics and mine definitely isn’t. The only maths that ever made sense to me were pictures and patterns (tesselations, platonic solids, magic squares).  Numbers have never had an abstract life for me and neither have words - I can only write this stuff if I believe I’m talking to somebody. My dear friend and collaborator can use mathematics as a speculative and descriptive tool that I can only understand by telling myself it’s “like drawing”. He’d call that that activity “visualising data”. 

So this commission will try to find out how much “like drawing” visualising data actually is. Time for some lists :

Drawing on paper : Good for simply and quickly recording subtle and emotional responses to the felt and the seen moment. Bad for accurate description of changes in observer and observed, unless you do an animation. 

Numerical arrays (values for light direction and intensity, wind speed and direction ) THese columns of figures are good, as all lists are, for recording change, for accurately spotting trends and cyclical changes. They are bad for getting any complete picture unless you are trained to read numbers. Any list of numbers, however accurate, struggles to convey a sense of place or moment, which is very bad if you are trying to visualise a landscape.  

I’m on approaches to a two person show next week in a really interesting artist run space called Peppermint SHED in Suffolk UK.

I’m really excited about this show, I committed early on to making new work specially for it (why don’t I keep my mouth shut?). It has turned out to be a lot of new painting, most of which is mostly ready.

I’m also showing new prints, hopefully in a new way. I’m getting tired of is putting my printmaking behind glass. Glass is too polite and too aloofing. It detaches the viewers - they window shop rather than really look. The process of making this feckin stuff is physical, messy, surprising, uncertain, tactile. Glass stops all that from getting to the viewer. It stops the work from carrying to them a record of a moment and a discovery. It just becomes a displayed product, a static object just like any other in the visual slurry we wade through every day. Working titles for this new work are : bookworks, boxworks, folders.

I’ll report back if you can’t make it to the show.