Telling Porcies

I'm a late convert to Studio Ghibli films, but I'm absolutely under their spell. I recently watched Porco Rosso. As you can see.

A Man Walks Into a Shop.

A true story, up to a point.

More Moors.

Heather Burning on Feuar's Moor, oil on canvas, 90cm x 90cm.

The question of when a painting is finished is sometimes a tricky one. This landscape, Heather Burning on Feuar's Moor, I had in a gallery in Edinburgh for a couple of months, and I'm a bit uncomfortable now that it was out in the public eye for such a long time because when I got it back it was pretty obvious to me that it wasn't done.

I'm still not quite convinced it's as unrestrained as I want it, but it's getting to the stage when that may have to happen in another painting. I'm certainly a lot happier with it than before. The small squares I paint stop me getting bogged down in detail, and this is another attempt to take that uninhibited, textured spontaneity that I find easier to get in the small squares and scale it up to the much larger canvas. It's not there yet, but it's coming, I think.

This painting is actually a sort of collage of different light effects and perspectives we saw as we travelled down the valley past the hill under the smoke from the heather burning, and the intention was to try and capture something of that sense of expansive movement and colour and light across the space of the land and the sky. It was quite a wonderful experience and I may well come back to it.

Heather Burning, the unfinished one. If you saw this, I'm sorry.

Kirkwall

The Price of Fish: Kirkwall. Oil on canvas, 90cm x 90cm.

A trawler in Eyemouth harbour, a fair way from its home port.

I never set out for this to be a series when I started with a dredger in Berwick harbour, but I think this is the twentieth fishing boat portrait I've done. I don't seem to be getting tired of it, either, as I've another one on the way.

New Years Eve, Head in His Hands

And what expresses seasonal renewal better than a bloke with no head on a big green horse?

Happy New Year!

Festive

The captain and crew of HMS Ermintrude come over all festive.

Happy Christmas to you all, however you'll be spending it. 

Elliottness

"Sir" Thomas Elliott, keyboard player of The Elliott Knights, a beat group that went a bit psychedelic in about 1967.