Kingoodie Bay Study
December 28th, 2009 Doug
Working study of Kingoodie Bay for
Walking The Coast
Notes for Walking The Coast
December 25th, 2009 DougAs part of the next exhibition, I have been developing a sequence of works
based on the experiences I have had walking, collecting and researching
my work along the shores of the many and varied coastlines of Scotland.
Ardneil Bay and Arran, on the Firth of Clyde.
Working studies for Walking The Coast
When out collecting and researching for new work, my travels take me to a wide variety different places. I am lucky enough through the years to have had the opportunity to experience the incredible beauty, colour and diversity of landscape, people and folklore of my native Scotland.
During the course of a typical journey my studies will, inevitably, lead me back on to one of those thin strips of land which we call the shore. The edge has a curious and magnetic fascination that has been with me since boyhood, growing up on the shores of the Firth of Tay, and the coasts of Angus and North East Fife.
A snowy Clyde coast and Arran.
Working from my sketchbook notes, I have chosen to create a series of eight coasts which have made a significant contribution to my art. Each piece consists of a painted panel representing the colour and mood of the area (based on the working studies above) with a recessed box containing a small collection of objects, or votive offering to the shore.
The coastline experiences being used in this sequence are from Ardneil Bay, Ayrshire; Abertay Sands, Fife; Uig Bay, Skye; Traigh Mor, Lewis; The Tan, Argyll and Bute; Loch na Keal, Mull; Kingoodie Bay, Tayside; and Stenness, Shetland.
Notebook pages for votive offerings
The following are working notes from my Moleskines for Walking The Coast. They are my ‘memoria technica’ so therefore may seem disjointed, but they should help to get the basic ideas behind each piece. (There are a few references to the working title of Walking The Coast (with Joe’s ghost), and during the development of this idea I was carrying around a copy of Joseph Cornell’s Vision of Spiritual Order in my work bag. Good company on any journey!)
(more text to follow)
At Work In The Studio
December 2nd, 2009 DougAs always with an exhibition approaching, the studio becomes a busy hive of activity.
Preparing carved whales for ‘Endeavour’.
Whenever I’m working towards an exhibition, my studio space becomes both very busy and very cluttered!
One bad practice I have at this time is having several (up to a dozen!) different pieces of work, at various stages of completion/construction, on the go at the same. There is method in this madness. Many of the processes and methods I use for creating the works are both time consuming, and due to the nature of the materials, painstaking.
A perfect example of this is in the assemblage ‘Endeavour’ (pictured above) where I have created fifteen whales, shaping and carving each one, carefully sanding and finishing each one ready to be painted. They are arranged to look like a string of charms or a necklace, tied to what appears to be the side of a ship. This piece was influenced by a Native American artifact, made of bone and leather, which is part of the collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
Sketchbook notes for ‘Endeavour’
So, on the workbench at the moment are works ranging from the initial building up of surfaces and making objects, such as with the eight boxes for ‘Walking The Coast’, to the final finishing and painting stage, which includes several works influenced by Kenneth White’s ‘Western Gateway’, to a triptych entitled ‘Cille’, based on my exeriences and the history of the Kilninian area of the Isle of Mull.
Over the next two months, the work will all pull together to form the March 2010 exhibition at the Bedales Gallery, in my home county of Hampshire. When it is all hanging in a calm and orderly manner in the gallery, it is often easy to forget all the time consuming and manic working that has gone on in the studio.
