The Colours of Kerrera
“WHY is there Ff’ing seaweed in the glove box!” has been loudly exclaimed across our drive on more than one occasion. In order to justify hoarding nature in a such a manner I have had to translate it into actual colour swatches before The Scot enforces total ban on found objects. So finally, one frog down and for fear of The Scots reprisal I have started actually recording colours. And I must say, as first published colour swatches go, Kerrera’s colours are fab.
“Why is there ff’ing seawedd in the glove box?!”
After the not-remotely-arduous three-minute crossing from Oban we stepped onto a little slice of heaven. The sun was glorious, the sky a sheer sheet of the bluest blue which nestled perfectly on the rolling lumps and bumps of the land. There was pure silence. Not the silence that you can hear your own heart beat in but the pure silence that you get from being away from any form of civilisation, the kind of silence that the noise of nature fills loudly. It’s this type of still, sunlit, bright blue, crisp, clean, breath-taking, sheep filled, peaceful, calm, unspoilt, earthy-smelling place that most reminds me of childhood, stomping around Welsh countryside.
Your instant reaction once you’ve stepped onshore will be to breathe in and to do it deeply, sucking up that fresh West Coast air right to the bottom of your lungs and out again. You have to walk a little fast initially to create enough distance between you and your fellow boat companions to feel isolated; this initial flurry of energy pays off though because you get that real sense of being all alone on your own wee island. This isolation left me exclaiming “This. Is. Beautiful’ over and over and over again.
A view from Kerrera. That’s the peaks of Ben Cruachan towering in the background. It.Is.Beautiful.
After a month (not an exaggeration) of non-stop rain in Oban on Friday 21st September that illusive Indian Summer finally made a no-holds-barred appearance. The upside to the constant worry and non-escape that self-employment creates is that on those rare days on the West Coast when the sun does shine you can (if one choses too) down tools and bugger off to an island for the day. This was one of those days. After wrestling the guilt of not working for the first 1 and half minutes of the ferry crossing, I disembarked guilt free and in a positively awesome mood.
Kerrera is great for a number of reasons: it’s quiet, it’s beautiful, it feels far away whilst being super close (great if you’ve got a teeny tiny amount of time in Oban), it’s got cracking view of Oban and (best to ‘till last) it has an exceptional and much talked about - with good reason - café that it perfectly situated to time exceptionally well with a needed break on your stomp. Namely, you get to the café after about an hour’s walk, less time again if you don’t account for numerous pit stops to look at stuff. Your cake filled mirage is the Kerrera Tea Garden, head there and your wont be disappointed.
“Food was great, staff were great, music was great, the sun was great, the walk was great, everything was just great.
”
Totally indulged in that opportunity to take pictures of our food (how do we escape this need to document stuff?? I’m in a double whammy conundrum as everywhere I go my brain thinks ‘oo that would be great for inspiration later’ or “ooo I should snap this so it can accompany my writing (or more aptly, wittering)” or “oo, I should snap this just in case”. These first world problems continue to plague my day-to-day so alas the hilarious waitresses took pity and even offered help with my documentation.
Food was great, staff were great, music was great, the sun was great, the walk was great, everything was just great.
I initially started creating a colour diary about two months ago, a habit I had meant to start all eternity ago but my normal procrastination buffers supported me in not fore filling. So after vaguely reading something about “Eating That Frog” (just google it) I started by picking colours from my stomps and filling my good old trusty Barbour pockets with bits of things: flowers, rocks, glass, stones, lichen, moss, twigs, pebbles, sand, basically anything that represents the colour palette of where I’ve been. Once my pockets reach full capacity I move onto other vessels, like The Scots walking bag, our lunch box, the car door, the glove box and so on until there’s bits of things everywhere, slowly disintegrating and generally making a mess.
Hoarding Nature
“WHY is there Ff’ing seaweed in the glove box LAURA!” has been loudly exclaimed across our drive on more than one occasion. In order to justify hoarding nature in a such a manner I have had to translate it into actual colour swatches before The Scot enforces total ban on found objects. So finally, one frog down and for fear of The Scots reprisal I have started actually recording colours. And I must say, as first published colour swatches go, Kerrera’s colours are fab.
If you’ve not had the absolute pleasure of seeing the West Coast on Scotland first hand (you poor thing) I can tell you it is BREATHTAKING. In all seasons and in all weather. An absolute Mecca for artist and makers and is filled with the most exceptional pockets of artistic expression. I put this down to the insanely attractive light up here and the slow pace that forms a perfect Petri dish for creativity to flourish. Turner spent weeks touring around the islands of the West Coast and in Turner’s tow many an exceptional artist has followed creating some of the most inspiring art in Britain.
I first wanted to keep colour diaries, as I mostly work in a studio (with ambitions of doing more plein air work soon) so I wanted to be able to record colour in landscapes to inform work that was made removed from it. A camera is great for recording an image but not so great at reproduces how our eyes see colour, so to combat this I mix colour swatches out and about and from my collection of things.
Despite the glorious sun it’s not hard to feel the change in seasons as we roll gentle into Autumn. I love the seasonal colour changes in the UK, not just for the auburn reds or rust oranges that fill the countryside as the forest’s summer canopy gets dismantle by Autumn but rather what I most like about Autumn is the purples and mauves that subtly make their way into the landscape. These purples beautifully complement the warmer tones, in a magical but totally underrated way. These little accents of contrast create a splendid harmony across our landscapes, they’re a painter’s delight. I can’t wait to return back to the little slice of paradise in a different season!
So, if you’re out an about I highly recommend being that weird kid and start collecting colour, it’ll really help later when you’re back home wrestling with creating colour harmonies and translating pigment into art.
Record it quickly though, as The Scot does have a good point: rotting seaweed in a glove box smells pretty unpleasant! Admittedly maybe not as unpleasant as the taste of a frog but that’s not entirely the point…
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New Year, New Inspiration: Three Days in Paris
2018 was a year of change. Great change. New experiences, new travels and new perspectives on art and life. So, after negotiating through the gauntlet of December, the social gatherings, the family visits, the hangovers, the laughs, the stress, the moderate mince pie weight gain and going to more Christmas parties than you could shake a stick at we headed out to Paris for New Year’s Eve. Just me and The Scot for reprieve against the chaos, a blissful 3 days to laze, wander through Parisian galleries and to reflect on the year gone by.
2018 was a year of change. Great change. New experiences, new travels and new perspectives on art and life. So, after negotiating through the gauntlet of December, the social gatherings, the family visits, the hangovers, the laughs, the stress, the moderate mince pie weight gain and going to more Christmas parties than you could shake a stick at we headed out to Paris for New Year’s Eve. Just me and The Scot for reprieve against the chaos, a blissful 3 days to laze, wander through Parisian galleries and to reflect on the year gone by.
New year, New Me? Not quite, but it did get me thinking about how December tends to throw you into that strange emotional space of reflecting on the year gone past whilst also committing to change; a new you, a better you, a more organised you while spending 75% of the time in a heady, boozed filled interim. A boozy December sanctuary, that’s what it is. A sanctuary that protects you from the guilt of not actually fully committing to your newly resolved changes because there’s no point starting just yet, after all, you’ve already committed those 45 dinner parties and catching up with quite literally every man and woman you’ve ever met. January the 3rd, that’s the date, the Date of Great Change. Enough time to recover from the final hurrah of New Year’s Eve but still early enough to feel like you’ve hit 2019 running, at pace, with the gumption of one of those horrendously successful people.
We landed slightly fuzzy-eyed (thank you Mr Red Eye) with very minimal luggage and jumped on the train into Gare Du Nord. After seeking out espresso and those warm, flakey baked goods that the country is famous we jumped back on the metro. Our destination? Mama’s Shelter, a perfectly kooky hotel with a cool vibe and all the idiosyncrasies that you’d expect from a hotel designed by Philippe Starck, nestled in the super arty 20th arrondissement. The Scot warned me profusely about pickpockets (something about my basic inability to look after those ‘fundamental’ things like keys, purses and phones in the normal day-to-day, ‘just be extra, extra, safe, yeah...’) and then immediately had his brand new shiny iPhone nicked on the tube. 45 minutes in, properly pickpocket at rocket speed. I’d be lying if I wasn’t a teeny, tiny bit smug at my still-on-my-person Samsung secured extra securely in the inside pocket of my good old trusty Barbour. Bravo Barbour, bravo.
A quick turn around at Mama’s, which consisted of throwing the bags in the room, a phone call to Apple, a beer and a high five at just how successful we’d been at escaping it all and we were off. No maps, no sense of getting anywhere (part enforced by The Scot’s loss of device coupled with my aversion to Google maps) just a perfectly lazy stroll through the incredible back streets of Paris. We ducked into cafe’s, pressed our noses up to the windows of frustratingly-so closed shops filled with antiques, candles, chocolates, books, bric-a-brac, the lot. Craned our necks up at the eclectic mix of Parisian apartments and had plenty of conversations about giving it all up and relocating. We laughed. We drank. We ate.
I took so many photos of walls, of shop fronts, of street art and spent an unusual amount of time admiring all the textures. Textured of walls, of doors, of the moss on the pavement, of old paint, smokey black textures created by the layers of pollution built up on street-level buildings and from the scuff marks left by a thousand footsteps of commuters on the stairs to the Metro. It got me thinking about layers in my artwork, how the first layers of a paint influence the ultimate appearance of a piece of work. Each layer before changes the one above, as an artist you’re mindful of this, you have to foresee and consider carefully how a touch of Potter’s Pink committed to the canvass in hour 5 of a work will affect that splash of Ultramarine Blue at hour 45 down the line. It’s quite the task really. Layers of paint, like layers in textures, creates a chronology, a lineage back from the beginning to end, the first seemingly innocuous splatters of paint bear on the final outcome. I mused over this in our ambling, a little like how our experiences before shape our being now, the way we think, how we sound, what we’re interested in. We’re shaped by our experience, maybe not quite as profoundly Butterfly effect-esq but still, it’s still kinda’ intriguing to think about.
Anyway, back to our ambling. Bolstered by caffeine and a pre-dinner pastel-coloured cocktail, we headed out for supper and stumbled upon the wonderful Café Le Papillon . A stone's throw from Mama’s, filled with locals (always a good sign) and suitably stereotypically French bistro-esq i.e. oozing charm, too many tables for floor space and great house wine. We crammed into the corner, and after some minor adjustments to the table which was off quilter (queue mocking from The Scot about my apparent OCD and three apologies for the three times I knocked into the elderly gentleman next to me while I straightened the table, plus an extra one for good measure to the waiter who was frowning at me) we were set for a culinary feast. Duck and veal prepared exquisitely simply, no-fuss-French-food. It was delicious. We left, satiated and mildly inebriated after 2 carafes of wine (well, it was 4 really but who’s counting? Plus we were in the December sanctuary, remember! ) and rolled into bed at a very respectable 11pm. Full bellies and Happy hearts, a good start for sure. I wasn’t even upset about spilling wine on my new trews, there was a reason that table was off quilter after all, something about the uneven floor...
The next day we were surprisingly fresh and still smugly fancy-free so headed out to be horrendously touristy. We headed to Notre-Dame and admired the iconic Cathedral from the bridge (couldn’t face the queue, we conceded later that we should have stuck it out) then onto the Eiffel Tower. The lack of a map meant we had the most haphazard, convoluted journey through Paris to get there. It was great. We strolled down streets we would have never crossed if Google had anything to do with getting us there. We stumbled across street art, stuffed stags with floral headbands (which has inspired a painting I have in the pipeline), the best Dim Sum’s we ever did eat and loads of awesome artisan pop-ups.
I’m a socially antisocial creature at heart, an introverted extrovert if you will. By this I mean, I love people, love a good knee's up and love spending time with all the crazy humans in my life but I also love time alone. Quiet time, downtime, lets-just-watch-Netflix time. For the last 15 years, I’ve spent New Year’s Eve with masses of my nearest and dearest, at house parties, bar parties, street parties, dinner parties every type of party you could imagine but this year was different. Just me and The Scot, cooried under the cascade of mauve-pink flowers that impose on the facade of Le Vrai Paris in Montmartre, G&T’s in hand ready to welcome in the New Year. In true French fashion - perfectly understated - the midnight chimes were greeted with a simultaneous up seating of everyone in the restaurant to exchange that famous double kiss (for all those fun fact collectors reading this it’s called 'Faire La Bise’, by the way) and one of those extra squeezy, embracing hugs than finish off with a firm grasp of your huggers arms and a thoroughly meant ‘Bonne année’, promptly followed by a return to the table. Upon our reseating, as I nestled next to The Scot and listened to that soft, mellifluous accent that our Northern Celtic counterparts are famous for I thought about all the great things 2019 will bring and, if I’m perfectly honest, felt unashamedly content. Absolute Bliss, for sure.
We greeted New Years Day with heavy heads, two double espressos and a frustrating quest for a galette, found eventually in a little bistro some walking away. Having regained a modicum of human feeling, we continued our wanderings and stumbled upon one of those street stalls selling antiquated books and those beautiful vintage flora and fauna illustrations. I’ve a particular interest in these at the moment and they’re a huge influence behind the wildlife ICONS series I’m building upon this year (watch this space…). What I love is that awesome melding of art and science, that stripping back to a single subject drawn with accuracy but still retaining the artist’s hand and style. Artwork where the subject dominates, suspended in negative space, no need for unnecessary context in the form of scenery to distract the eye. There’s a purity to those old illustrations, one thing done well, and it’s this purity that I want to emulate in my work. I snapped some pics of them for reference (a new habit I’ve been working on) and also bought a delightful print for my niece’s bedroom. The hot air balloon made me imagine being blown away to some far away adventure, I hope it inspires similar dreams in her. The rest of the day was a hazy amble punctuated with plenty of pit stops for carbs and sugar, the best find being L’ Atelier du Chocolate which makes insanely good chocolate. Go there if you’re near, just do it, you can thank me after.
Head to 109 Rue Saint-Anotoin for L’Atelier du Chocolat extremely excellent chocolate.
Day 3 was where the real art action happened. I’d been unusually organised and pre-booked tickets to Atelier des Lumières ABSOLUTELY AWESOME opening show on Klimt. As if this wasn’t enough, we then headed over to the Louvre in the afternoon. A double whammy of arty delights rolled into 8 hours of total cultural indulgence, an eight-hour visual feast if you will all topped off with a sighting of a skateboarding English bulldog, which was arguably the highlight of the trip for The Scot.
For fear of boring you to death, coupled with the fact that apparently, the average reader loses all attention after 15 seconds. Which sounds like some sort of millennial affliction that has spread to the wider populous to me, I’ll save the juicy art bits for Part Two ('ooo a cliff hanger ' I hear you think). What I will leave you with is that seeing tiny details blown up on 18 ft walls is pretty epic and that three days in Paris was three days well spent. Go do it, but watch the pickpockets.
Au revoir for now!
