Rippling Reflections

You may have noticed that for a while I've been working on a short series of paintings of scenes in and around the harbour at Aberdour. This is the fourth and last one, "Rippling Reflections". I aim to exhibit them at the Aberdour Art Exhibition, 28-30 July.

Shallow Moorings

I just completed another small watercolour of boats in Aberdour Harbour. These particular yachts are moored in very shallow water. I haven't included the shore, but in reality it was just a couple of feet to the right. The water there turned from bright blue to dullish green in colour, maybe because of sand or weeds under the surface. A fourth and final painting from the harbour will appear shortly (or it will when I figure out what it's going to be)!

Bright Morning

Like the last painting I posted, this painting is an Aberdour scene showing a line of yachts moored in the harbour. The wooded headland in the background is called Hawkcraig Point. There's an old hotel out there with a couple of houses, plus the rickety remains of a wooden jetty that hasn't been used for many years. On a summer morning, the sunlight was flashing off the water in a thousand places. I really enjoy this sort of scene.

Glittering Water

Living on the coast, I've got plenty of small harbours and ports locally where I can find something to paint. Just a few miles from home there's Aberdour, a village that once boasted a bustling harbour with a tourist trade from Edinburgh. Nowadays it's a quiet backwater but it does have an active sailing club with quite a few yachts moored by the pier, including this one with (unusually) a sail and canopy in a strong red. I was just as keen to get the effect of the sunlight on the water as I was to paint the boat, mind you. To be honest, I'm not a sailor myself, I just like painting boats and water!

Hot, Tired, Filthy

This isn't my usual kind of thing, but I've just spent the morning producing this little painting of an exhausted coal miner taking a breather deep underground. It's called "Hot, Tired, Filthy".

Fife, the area where I live, used to be a coal-mining area. That ended as I was growing up, but I still remember the old miners. They had hard lives, those men, and so did their wives and kids. Sometime soon, a festival is being held locally to commemorate Fife's long mining heritage and I decided to do this painting for an exhibition which I'm told will form part of the event.

The style I've used is simplified and abstracted and it owes a lot to the style of an American artist, Alex Powers. I've been studying his book "Painting People in Watercolour". I started off in watercolour and then worked into that with charcoal and white pastel. I had old black and white photo references to work from but chose to introduce some earth colours (burnt sienna and burnt ochre) to suggest the warm air of a coal mine.

Geraniums for Granada

A while back, a Spanish friend who lives in the very beautiful city of Granada asked me to do a couple of small paintings of windows for him. He let me have a free hand but I felt I really had to paint traditional Spanish windows. This is one of them, "Reja con Geranios" in Spanish. The reja is the ornate ironwork grille that you often see in Spain.

Dusk On Princes Street

I reckon this will be the last painting I'll produce for the forthcoming Moments exhibition next month at the Dundas Street Gallery in Edinburgh. It's an Edinburgh cityscape, showing people doing their shopping early one Thursday evening (Thursday being the day for late night shopping in the city). I wanted to catch the bright lights and the energy of the scene as the daylight fades, plus the female figure shown on the video advertising screen at the bus stop.

Moments will feature 60+ paintings by me and my friends Roy McGowan and Colin Joyce. It runs from Saturday 18th to Saturday 25th February 2017. The gallery is easy to find on Dundas Street, which is in the New Town area just a short walk from the city centre.

Red Door And Black Dress

How do you classify a painting like this? Is it figurative? Is it about architectural detail? In my mind, it's both these things. Your opinion would be welcome.

If you're interested, the doorway with its pillars and railings belongs to a grand house somewhere in Edinburgh's New Town. I changed the door colour and door number to anonymise the scene.

Cromwell Road SW7

Although this is being posted on New Year's Day 2017 - Happy New Year to you, by the way! - in fact it's my final painting of 2016, finished yesterday. Cromwell Road is a major road heading southwest from London City Centre through South Kensington, where some of the big museums are located. I'd just come out of a museum on a recent visit to London and I took a few photos of the traffic on the tree-lined roadway. This painting combines elements of two or three of the photos. I was drawn to the bright red buses which contrast strongly with all the background greenery. I'm a sucker for red, really.

Still Water

I saw this painting in terms of contrasts: light tones and dark tones, bright colours and dull colours, smooth texture and rough texture. From that point of view the grey, stained and dilapidated side of the harbour was just as important as the placid water reflecting evening light.

I was just thinking to myself that in years gone by, I had a tendency to overdo the darkest tones in a painting - basically, to make them all a flat, uniform black which never looked right. Now I know better, I suppose, and I make a point of getting some variety into the darks. At least I've learned something!

The scene, by the way, is the inner harbour at Dysart, on Scotland's East Coast. There's always a lot there to catch an artist's attention.