Hanging in the Concert Hall

Setting off to Glasgow tomorrow for the first weekend of workshops at Celtic Connections, Scotland's mighty music festival in Glasgow. I've also got a small selection of paintings in the Island Bar in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall hanging for the duration of the festival (until Feb 3rd). If you see them, let me know what you think. They're based on playgrounds of one sort or another. Some contemporary and some positively Neolithic. 

A Musical Soup

This last chunk of time has been really overwhelming with so much activity going on. I've also had the privilege of working with some really top class people in their field- mostly music but there are so many crossovers within music and art. At the end of October, at Hallowe'en in fact I spent a really lovely joyous and challenging weekend with Liane Carroll, Sophie Bancroft and Sara Coleman who were running a jazz vocal workshop in Cromarty on the Black Isle. It was attended by 12 people who were at various stages in their singing lives. Me - I'm just an enthusiast who loves singing. We all got such a lot out of the weekend and I woke up on Monday morning with Bye, Bye Blackbird, Come Fly With Me, Willow Weep for Me, Jordu and all sorts of other songs rumbling around in my head in a big jazz soup. Despite having 3 different community choirs that week, each doing very different songs and harmonies, the jazz soup persisted. The thing is when I'm singing these songs in my head, the harmonies are spot on! So we come to Friday and someone has talked me into going along to a conducting masterclass with Alasdair Nicholson, another giant in his field. Now this was really challenging. I don't read music and classical isn't really my thing and I've still got Fly Me to the Moon in my head, so despite bringing along the music he had suggested, I was totally floundering.But after a while we all decided to dump the notes, remove the lectern and just go for it with a gorgeous rendition of All Through the Night which I do with the Rosemarkie singers called Village Voices. I learned such a lot but then you can't fail to learn if you've got an amazing teacher. So confidence restored, I joined the scratch choir for a whole weekend of rehearsals for Mozart's Requiem.  Did I mention challenging? Holy Moly! Good Gordon Highlanders! It was absolutely fabulous - such very hard work, listening really carefully to the great singers around me and trying to catch their notes. It really was the best thing ever and if anyone reading this ever gets a chance to do a scratch piece like this, don't give it a second thought. Just do it! Jump out of your comfort zone and go for it. You definitely won't regret it. So who's in my head now? Mr Mozart of course! I hope he hangs around for a while. It's crazy, mad, over the top, deeply moving and smiley too. He wrote some great tunes!

Thanks Mr Thoms

This weekend I've been working really hard at producing some new work for an exhibition coming up in August. It's brilliant and a real luxury to have 3 whole days to work on some new pieces and I have been very productive  but yet not entirely happy with any of them. However, I'm not giving up. This is probably just one of those times when you've tried really hard and worked long hours and produced a lot of inane and inoffensive tripe. How inoffensive can tripe really be? Quite inoffensive? Downright polite? In fact quite well mannered really in a mild kind of way...
However, the fat lady's not singing yet so I'll give it another shot.
I was reminded recently about early days at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen. I met an artist who had been there at the same time as I had - when the school moved from the beautiful old building in Schoolhill to the pristine surroundings of Garthdee. It was a source of real disappointment to me because the building was so new. Everything was white, spotless with not a scrap of old paint anywhere.
The old place was intensely artsy. Scuffs on the wall, the smell of turps, the tiny staircase in the middle of the building which must have led to everywhere because there was always a constant blockage of students trying to go up and down it. And they were usually carrying enormous canvases or huge armatures or bags of materials. The new build at Garthdee was a lot more sensible - mostly on the flat with long straight corridors. It was actually a really beautiful spot and it didn't take long to grow to love it.
Strangely enough, today I met another old crony from Gray's and we were reminiscing a bit. I remembered Colin Thoms who seemed to slide around the studios on castors, he suddenly just appeared towering over you. A long thin gloomy kind of guy 'All colour and no form Miss Macdonald' he boomed. And he was absolutely right.  But there were great characters - Leo Clegg in the fabulous sculpture department who left me with a lifetime passion for sculpture. Many years later I trained with his wife, the delightful Thora Brown from Orkney in figure casting. She left me with an even bigger passion for sculpture and an intense curiosity about Orkney.
So anyway, enough of this procrastination -  it's back to the studio and I might have a look at these highly coloured formless paintings. They can still be adjusted.  Thanks Mr Thoms.

painting in the rain

I've recently been out and about with paints, pencils, charcoal and all the rest of the gubbings and easel - actually not an easel but a big board that usually gets propped up on a wall or rock. I decided to work with some watercolours just for speed and to try and capture the incredible sky, land and relics of old walls at the Rosehaugh Estate. There's an amazing terrace there designed in the Italian fashion and you can just imagine the life and glamour that used to be before nature reclaimed it. Some of the carvings still remain but most are buried in the undergrowth. There is also the biggest Cyprus tree that I have ever seen- a real cracker.
So anyway, just as the piece is coming together, the heavens open, the thunder rumbles and within a few seconds, everything is soaked. Watercolour pans full of water, both bags I brought with me to hold all the paraphenalia with a couple of inches of water and me utterly drenched.
As fast as possible, I quickly gathered up everything because by this time the sky was completely black and there was no sign of anything clear on the horizon and anyway, the thunder was beginning to be a bit scary.
Back in the car, driving home, steaming gently, thinking what a great evening it had been and when I looked at the painting the next day I realised that it had really captured the moment. There were dead midgies and paint splatters made with rain.
Title of piece: Rosehaugh Thursday
Medium: Paint and rain and small creatures
Price: Priceless
And if I could remember how to insert an image into this blog, I would do it now.

this is my brand new blog

it's a new blog, it's new day

You won't see this painting at the Big Art Sale in Cromarty because it's just been sold but you can see lots more at the Stables Gallery.