Across the Bay
I was absolutely delighted to discover that one of my works “Across the Bay” has been awarded the Birdwatch and Swarovski Optik Artist of the Year Award in the 2021 Society of Wildlife Artists annual exhibition “The Natural Eye” at Mall Galleries, London.
The bay I’ve been drawing at is a wonderful place, it’s on a narrow spit of land that I’ve loved ever since I was old enough to toddle along it as a child, intent on grubbing around in the seaweed and rocks to see what lurked beneath. It lies at the north end of the Isle of Skye where a sheltered sea loch opens out onto the deep, rich waters of the Minch. Looking one way a sheltered bay gently sweeps around while in the other direction lie cliffs, crags and steeply banked shingle which create an altogether more rugged landscape in which to hunker down. It is a place I’ve returned to many, many times to draw over the past couple of years.
Late Afternoon at the Arches
This spring was cold, even at the start of May an occasional shower would transform the landscape for a few brief moments with a dusting of snow or torrential hail before watery sunshine returned and it vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Early one morning in the pre-dawn a group of roe deer with frost still lying on their backs, breath steaming in the cold air picked their way along the beach unaware of my presence. A large bull seal regularly mooched around just offshore, seemingly content to just enjoy the calm water while one memorable afternoon an otter bounded along the rocks before slipping into the sea and bobbed up and down bringing up crabs and fish then chewing them noisily.
The drawings and paintings are the result of many moments of observation but even so there is so much more of the experience of place that doesn’t make it onto the paper - nature is abundant and all I can hope to do is capture a fragment as memory. This is what the experience of working on location is all about for me, just being in a place, not necessarily even drawing…. just being. These are places I love dearly, even more so the more I come to know them.
