Another Walk With Cosmo

If I’m honest I was a little disappointed with my paints. Actually more specifically I was disappointed with my paintings not the paints, they were never going to handle like paints bought in a shop. The pigment quality was inferior but that was not the point at all. It was local colour about local landscape and I should have been able to make things work better. I did have some very good results, but this is the rub: I tried to paint like the last time I painted, probably something like 25-30 years ago, where I never really had a plan, just push things around until I was pleased…… I can’t really do that now, firstly for home made paint reasons like covering power and techniques I used to employ just seem better suited to oils. I have been using acrylic and water based varnishes as they dry so much quicker which I like. I just find myself wanting to organise the picture so much more than when I was a student. I guess after all these years I design things in one medium for execution in another. The act of painting just seems a little week all on its own now?
Anyway…I am sure I will return to the paints at some point when I have the right approach. I want to try making them in oil to see how they work in comparison to acrylics. I think a second visit I will approach the whole thing differently.
I have realised my heart is not in it and I have been drawing maps of dog walks with Cosmo instead. This feels much more comfortable as I am enjoying laying out the whole picture and working out how to organise the information within the page….very much a design task, which I am enjoying.
I have set myself a small project:
6 artist benches are now all installed along the stretch of coastline where I live, each bench has been made by a different artist, my one is called ‘The Groyne Wood Bench’. So I have decided to draw a map of a dog walk to visit each one in turn.

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Two walks to the same place. The first walk turned out to be before the bench was installed. The second walk is exactly the same route only it had been installed the second time.

Can you remember what you did on the day Scotland didn’t vote YES?
I can.

‘Remembering a dog walk on the day Scotland didn’t vote YES’

It was foggy on our walk and notably quieter somehow, the birds seemed louder and the sound of the sea seemed to penetrate into my mind more than usual.

But what was really weird was a noise I was utterly unable to explain..and I had no visual clues to go by whatsoever. All I could say to myself was it might be made by a violin and must be someone filming a video out in the fog, by the waters edge?

So me and Cosmo set off in search of the source of this noise…
It turned out to be two guys with a metal detector combing the beach as the tide was out. They found a 9mm bullet while we spoke together and said how eerie it was out here in the fog with very poor visibility. They also told me hundreds of years ago a church was build on a sand bar 5 miles out to sea and they hoped to find some evidence to support that story. I had read something similar in a local history book which said that rapid coastal erosion had taken almost the entire village of Reculver off the map. The remains of the church are still there and form a well known landmark today. So I doubt that there were two churches in Reculver, but a spooky story on a foggy day.

The other thing I was going to say which has nothing to do with Cosmo, was we had just returned from a holiday on the Isle of Skye a few days before the vote and took quite a collection of various ‘YES’ photos as we travelled around (here is one)

We spent an entire week using the artist open houses catalogue to plan our days and drive round and see/talk to so many artists, makers, printers, calligraphers, weavers and so many more great things. An arts tour of the Highlands and Islands. Truly fab and great to see people documenting the place where they live in so many ways.

I have decided to tell the same story again!
This time without photos or words.
A picture of the dog walk!
probably should describe it as a map of the dog walk.

A drawing to describe the events that day!