Midsummer Highlands

Hello and welcome to everyone new who has signed up to my mailing list this month, that is very much appreciated thank you. June is a month of long days stretching almost through the night in the Highlands. This year it was filled with the usual sun, rain, wind and cuckoos but also daily swimming in the loch, walks and cycles on empty roads through an incredible landscape and it has been extraordinary. Now we are into July and working towards safely welcoming visitors back to the Highlands as of next week. I'm still thinking this through but I have set up an appointment system for people to book visits to the studio as well as virtual studio visits at the moment. The advantage of this being you can book them from any where in the world! You can find more information on them on the website.

I’ve spent time this month working on commissions and have loved getting back to working on a large scale with ink, charcoal and watercolour. I found this beautiful heavy watercolour paper that measures 4 feet by 3 feet per sheet. This piece is based on a series of sketches I began last year on a trip to Handa Island and it has been really liberating to work on this large scale. As I’ve mentioned before the sound and sheer number of birds living on the cliffs and on the water at Handa was incredible and having larger paper to capturing the enormity of the coastline of Handa Island was really inspiring. I’m now working on a second piece representing a different section of that coastline and this will be available to buy. If you’re interested to see it do get in touch. Smaller pieces of work from this series are also available on the website .Smaller Handa Island Work.

I’ve taken a photo of Loch Shieldaig most days this last month when swimming and finally swam around Shieldaig Island with a friend last week. Here are some of the photos. So much inspiration there, incredible yellow lines of bright yellow lichen along the rocks at the tip of the island and two seals joined us for the stretch along the back of the island, which I admit did distract me from looking in depth at anything else! I also continued running the online art classes throughout June. They ran 3 times a week for 10 weeks and I met so many lovely people, it was a real pleasure. I'm just looking at ways I can continue these in some form that works alongside me having enough time to continue my own practice. I'll update on this in the near future. I hope to be able to share some of the really beautiful work that people produced too.