A project about the coastline of Deerness, Orkney – ‘almost an island’ – and my journeys around it by land and sea.

Deer Sound

I continued developing half of the large canvas diptych of Deer Sound which was eventually included in the collection of paintings I sent to the spring show ‘Emergence’ at The Watermill Gallery in Aberfeldy. The starting point for the palette was a handful of red clay collected from the eroding cliff.

The final piece measured 160 x 116 cm and had real impact once stretched and hung in the gallery space.

On to canvas

After a significant break I have cleared space and time to resume my coastlines project, the floor newly painted and ready to receive the roll of canvas cut into two 120 cm x 180cm pieces. Beginning with graphite and water on the primed canvas and then a first pass with extended paint and water, each taking 24 hours to dry.

Without the discipline and methodical approach of working from maps to memory in sketchbooks then large roll of paper, I was disappointed but unsurprised to see a view from the land emerging fairly quickly. At the end of a long winter of walking, rather than a summer of kayaking, it was probably inevitable. I’ll continue and let these pieces ‘paint themselves’ before returning to last year’s sketchbooks to re-orientate myself. The process of painting on canvas rather than paper on the floor, then moving to the wall at a large scale is plenty to begin with.

Changing scale is meant to be challenging and difficult. But, apart from the practicalities of not having a huge space to work in, I find it much more comfortable and much less constricting. The paint and ink and water does what it does, claims the space and there is room for it all to remain.

Sketchroll Sketchbook

After working with a few parts of the original continuous roll it became clear that the idea of these becoming finished pieces was problematic. The sense of being in the threatening heave of ominous swell at Point of Ayre or rock hopping around Marka Ber was already on the paper. The known landscape beyond the viewshed and projected in my minds eye was there, or not – if attention had to be focussed on the reflected swell off the cliff.

For now these will remain loose leaves of a gigantic sketchbook.

The drama in the gentle landscape of bays and shallow sands is more atmospheric.

In these places haar and mist deceives and distorts time and distance.

Floor to wall

To move the roll of paper to the wall it had to be cut into lengths of no more than 3.5 metres. This started the process of selecting and editing, and making decisions about what can be discarded – always much easier to do at the beginning of a new day’s session when old attachments have been forgotten and fresh ones have not yet formed… details here and there can become precious and demanding at the expense of the larger whole.

Moving the work on to the wall allows for viewing from a greater distance when work is in progress, taking photos at the end of the session can crop and shrink sections into potential individual pieces.

A personal perspective

Working on the second roll of sketches I am allowing the places that I know best and have the most significance to expand and take up more space. In my head I go back to the swimming beaches and bays I know well, the cliff paths and kayaking routes between them. Swimming looking back at the land, sky above bringing weather in, paddling below cliffs around headlands.

Painting with peat

One of the lines around the coast of Deerness is the path which follows the clifftop around the perimeter of Mull Head nature reserve. Like the cliffs below the path human activity is directly and indirectly accelerating the speed of erosion. After footsteps have made their impact the weather washes out the layers of peat, clay and sand.

Heather roots in the top layer break and collect in piles of debris in puddles. From these washed out materials I can collect clay and sand, mud and peat to incorporate into paint mixtures.

I dried heather roots picked up from the eroded path at Mull Head and made charcoal with them. The sticks can be used for drawing themselves or ground down to make powder that can be added to paint mixtures or rubbed into surfaces.

The project progresses at a pace dictated by the time each length of paper roll requires to dry before it can be worked on again, or one end can be rolled up and the other unrolled to reveal fresh surface. Working on the floor means I can unroll about 4m of paper at a time and use improvised long handled implements to apply charcoal, graphite and liquid acrylic paint with plenty of movement and gesture. The almost black mixture of blue and brown liquid acrylic can separate and go its own way, a bit like rock and water.

New Marks

This new project about the coastline of Deerness has been maturing for a long time and now it is ready to land on paper. Beginning on a 5m concertina sketchbook and 10m length of Arches paper it charts the coastline of Deerness in a circumnavigation from Dingieshowe to St Peter’s Pool. It is a continuous journey with drama in the cliffscapes and rock formations at their base, sweeping bays with rolling surf and headlands where the swell breaks and tide races form.

Deerness is the easternmost parish of the Mainland in Orkney, quite often having different weather conditions – steeped in freezing haar while the rest of the parishes are baked in sunshine, or poking out of the clouds like the prow of a ship setting off for Norway. It is ‘almost an island’ connected to the rest of Mainland Orkney by a natural sandy ayre, the site of an ancient parliament or Ting at Dingieshowe.