The Artistic Curmudgeon or The Grumpy Old Painter

THE "HARVEST HOPE"

2012-02-12T12:07:00.000-08:00

My family moved to Sandwick, in Shetland's south Mainland, from Baltasound in the north isles, around Christmas-time in 1954, when I was 6 years old. Our nearest neighbour was George John Stove, one of the crewmen on the "Harvest Hope", depicted above. The painting was commissioned by Colin, the son of George John, and my earliest memories of life in the new parish were what seemed to be endless sunny days of fun with Colin and the other children of the district. Colin is now an eminent physicist, his particular area of expertise being the use of sonar in geological exploration, and he was part of the hanging party which helped with the setting up of my recent exhibition in the Creel Inn, Catterline (of which more later).

The "Harvest Hope" was built in 1949 by Stephens of Banff for Alex and Robert Duthie of Lerwick. She was 57ft long and 27 tons gross and net. She is pictured approaching the north mouth of Lerwick harbour in strong north-westerly winds, with the Green Holm and the Brethren skerries to port in the background.

WOOF!

2012-01-29T12:47:00.000-08:00

Now and then I get a different kind of project to work on, and this is one of these. At various stages of a long, varied (and mostly mis-spent!) career, I've done cats, dogs, horses (for the window of Lerwick bookies'), children and even the odd reclining female nude human figure. Being an artist, one is expected to take on whatever genre prospective patrons might shove one's way, and be grateful for their confidence and the challenge to one's skills. It makes a change from the usual seascape and landscape themes, for which I'm better known. Hence the portrait of the brown labrador dog shown above, commissioned by a customer in the Aberdeen area.

I copied it fairly slavishly from the little snapshot given me by the client, as my knowledge of the anatomy and bearing of dogs is limited. I don't even like the brutes - I've stood once too often in their produce, deposited, as it normally is, on street corners and outside peoples' gates. I would not care to encounter, on a dark night, the hound of hell which regularly drops its considerable bundle outside the Burgh Road gate of the Gilbertson Park here in Lerwick. I would, however, very much like to identify its owner, as the mutt is in flagrante delicto, so to speak. The satisfaction I would derive from his/her wallet depletion, on having his/her collar felt by the authorities, would be immense.

Someone offered me a dog once - probably in the pub, which is the place where I've had most of my interesting offers. I replied that I was more than capable of doing all my own fouling, howling, slavering and whining, as most of my friends will testify. The offerer seemed somewhat put out by this reply, although as to which part of it perplexed her, I'm not absolutely certain.

I can get quite curmudgeonly about dog owners, who confuse slavish obedience with intelligence in their pets. They'll demonstrate how "clever" their shitsus are, as they artlessly respond to commands to roll over, do somersaults, jump over obstacles or whatever the whim of the dictatorial poochmaster might be.

Give me a haughty, supercilious and indifferent pussy-cat any day. You can shout, point, whistle and gesticulate at a cat all you like, and it will merely regard you coolly, as if you have gone completely mad, give a disdainful tail-flick and carry on with whatever it was doing before it was so rudely interrupted. Now that's intelligence - coupled with style - for you!

I wish all you cool cats (and your pets!) a happy and successful week.

THE TEMPEST

2012-01-11T13:03:00.000-08:00

A happy new year! If I made a resolution (which I haven't for at least a decade - they're a waste of time for weak-willed people like me!) it should have been to post more regularly to this blog. I'll do my best, but my good intentions are too often thwarted by events happening around me.

While most of Britain was mopping up and compiling statistics for insurance claims after the new year storms, Shetland was basking in a relatively quiet spell of weather, with winds not reaching much more than gale force. We, in the Northern Isles, took our pounding on Christmas Day, and we had it more or less all to ourselves. From the Met office figures for the day, I gathered that there had been a mean wind speed of ovber 60mph from 2pm until 7pm, with gusts in excess of 90mph in Lerwick, and over 100mph in other locations in the islands.

We had our usual gathering at my mother's house, where her son, daughter, grand-daughter, grandson-in-law and two great-grandchildren (excellent entertainment, as always!) had assembled to attempt a demolition job, in true traditional style, on a turkey and trimmings, followed by sticky toffee pudding. Fortunately, the cooking had been done, and we were in the process of washing up, before problems with the mains electricity supply began to manifest themselves. Most of the west side of the island was plunged into darkness at around 5 o'clock.

By this time, we'd had the foresight to get the gas heater going in the kitchen, as the oil-fired central heating system (which is becoming rather elderly) had lost its pilot ignition due to the high winds. Most of the other family members had left to get home around 4pm, leaving me with mother. I found candles and an oil lamp, which provided enough light to guide us from room to room. Just as I was about to see if I could get the gas ring in the scullery going to make us a cuppa, the mains power came back on long enough for me to get a pot of tea "trackit" on the electric cooker. Then off went the power again! It came on again at about 8pm, and this time it stayed on. By then the wind had moderated to a mere storm force, and it abated quite rapidly from then on. Around 9pm, I was able to coax the central heating back on to stay.

My sister Mary, whose power was still off at Strand, Tingwall, came back to give me a lift back to Lerwick, as she had friends she wanted to visit there. Coming over the top of Wormadale, it was rather eerie to see the areas, which still had mains power, glowing brightly, while other places were intensely blacked out. We came upon a "Hydro" landrover, orange lights flashing, moving slowly down the hill, very close to the verge, obviously using detection equipment to locate mains ruptures.

It was a different kind of Christmas Day from the previous two (both white!), and I was glad I'd been there to help out at mother's. I had a look around the place in quieter weather last Friday and, as far as I can make out, there was no structural damage, which surprised me a little, as a lesser storm, a few weeks ago, had caused quite a bit of minor mayhem. All in all, I think I prefer the fierce winds to the snow of the 2009 and 2010 yuletides - the white stuff causes more problems in getting around. The heroic "hydro" workers, who were spending their holiday out in the tempest, repairing faults, might not agree!

STEAM DRIFTER "STEPHENS" FROM INVERALLOCHY

2012-01-08T13:05:00.000-08:00

This painting was commissioned by the great-grandson of the owner of the steam drifter "Stephens". She is depicted leaving Fraserburgh harbour on a summer's evening, for another night's drift-net fishing for herring, during the boom years of this fishery in the 1930s.

At 87 feet in length, the steel-built vessel was built in 1911 by A Hall & Co., Aberdeen, as the Inverness-registered "Vale o' Moray". A long and varied career followed, which saw her requisitioned for Admiralty service in two world wars, as well as having at least six different owners and three changes of name in "civilian" life, finally being scrapped in Norway in 1955. The painting shows her in mid-career, when she was registered in Inverallochy.

WINTER BLUES

2011-12-18T12:56:00.000-08:00

It's hard to explain, to you faithful few followers of this blog, why I haven't posted to it in a month. I suppose the reason is that I had nothing I wanted to tell anyone about. How can I explain how I feel, after all the elation and hopeful anticipation of a month ago, about the fact that not a single painting has been sold from the Catterline exhibition? It's difficult to satisfactorily explain, even to myself, how, after eighteen months of producing my best work, and about £2000 of expenditure, my paintings have attracted not a single buyer at a venue where I sold nearly half of the artworks just four years ago. I can't really explain it, but its's a fact I have to accept, get used to, live with and get over.

That fact, coupled with the seasonal lack of daylight hours to work with, means that my output is at almost as low a level as my general morale, and it's difficult to write creatively in my current situation too. On several occasions during the past four weeks, I have sat down with a blank sheet of paper in front of me, waiting in vain for the clouds to lift and reveal the welcome apparition of some kindly muse to inspire a decent piece of prose. The page remained obstinately blank.

A wintry gloom has thus descended over the Tait Gallery, and I've been doing my best to fight it. I have a full order book, and the first of these commissions, of the motor boat Njördr, is shown above. The second, of a steam drifter leaving Fraserburgh harbour, is nearing completion, and there are two or three more in the pipeline. I just wish there were more hours of daylight to help speed up the process, but that, along with the weather, which has been quite fierce at times lately, is something else I just have to live with.

Domestic duties have been major consumers of time, of course, and my mother is giving me the usual anxious moments. At 95, she's getting a bit worn out, and won't be able to stay on her own much longer. Strange how we've never really thought of her as old until this last year or so! Her home, at Whiteness, has withstood all of the winter storms so far, although the front gate has suffered quite a bit of damage, and I found the glass pane from one of the lean-to greenhouse skylights lying, apparently intact, on the floor. This has happened very recently, and the resultant hole has been boarded up to await a more permanent repair in the new year. Bits of the ornamental garden blockwork, carried out over many creative hours by my late father in the 1970s and 1980s, have been falling off, and I found what would have made a substantial potful of rabbit stew (had I been as good a shot with a two-two as my late brother-in-law Rob) playing chase-me-catch-me around the borders, which have been woefully neglected over the past few years anyway. As soon as I appeared in the garden, the bunnies bolted over or through the ramshackle drystone dykes and under gates, only to return, no doubt, within an hour of my departure. I found myself missing my beloved old grey cat - no rabbit dared come near the garden when she was around!

I held the last of my four pre-Christmas Saturday stalls at the Toll Clock centre yesterday, and I sold a few items as usual, although my takings were down on the previous three Saturdays. The fact that there's always been a few quid heading bankwards over the last month has taken the sting out of the complete financial failure of the Catterline exhibition so far.

It's back to the easel tomorrow for me, hopefully to complete the Fraserburgh painting by Friday, when I head for Whiteness to do my duty as kitchen flunkie for the Christmas dinner at mother's. My sister has promised me some sticky toffee pudding for afters - now that'll be worth doing a bit of hard labour for! Have a happy and peacerful Christmas!

CATTERLINE HANGING PARTY AND REUNION!

2011-11-13T14:24:00.000-08:00

The last time I hung an exhibition in the Creel Inn at Catterline, it was in the new year of 2008. I held out no high hopes for sales success, as this was the "graveyard shift", a term I use to describe that time of year when people's spare cash balance is at its lowest after the festive season. Nevertheless the event sold well, and I was anxious to see how another show at the back end of a year would fare (although we are now in an economic recession). In 2011 I received my opportunity to do just that, and this year's display was duly hung last Monday (7th November). I await developments with eagerly bated breath.

One thing that was certainly different this year was the hanging party. In 2008 this consisted of my nephew Kenneth Halcrow and myself, and I am glad that he was there again this year to lend his considerable skills and enthusiasm to the process. But this time, some of my childhood friends had decided to make a reunion of it too!

Back in the 1960s, I stayed in the Shetland community of Sandwick, and I travelled daily to and from the Anderson Educational Institute (now the Anderson High) in Lerwick, on the school bus, accompanied by Colin Stove, Robin Barclay and Kenny Bull, who all lived in the same part of the same parish as I did. Now renowned in their chosen professional fields of physics, haematology and architecture, all married with grown-up families and on the point of retirement, they had decided to combine a reunion with making up a hanging party for my exhibition at the Creel Inn. I'm very glad they did. Along with my sister, who had provided the transport for the artworks from Shetland, and her friend Joe Irvine, we all took up residence at the Ship Inn, Stonehaven, last Sunday afternoon. The weather was unbelievably fine for early November, and there followed two evenings and an intervening day that I won't forget - ever.

The evenings were largely of reminiscence of the Shetland of half-a-century ago, over drinks and meals at the Ship Inn. Just before 9 o'clock on Monday morning, I mustered the troops and off we set, in a little convoy of cars, to Catterline, to find that my nephew had arrived from Aberdeen before us. Two of the paintings had been slightly damaged, one in transit and the other during the framing process, but hasty repairs were made to one and an arrangement made about repairs to the other (for which I will shoulder the repair and delivery costs, should anyone wish to buy it). The hanging process was finished by midday, and we all gravitated down to the area around the tiny harbour to enjoy the sights and sounds of this spectacular scene on a beautiful day, before meeting up again at the Salutation Hotel at Inverbervie for some lunch.

In the afternoon, we went our separate ways. Mary and Joe took the most energetic option of a walk from our Stonehaven hotel to Dunnottar Castle. Robin Barclay and I took a trip down to Tod Head lighthouse in his 4x4 - I'd always fancied going there (what is it about lighthouses that seems to draw people towards them?). My nephew Kenneth went back to Aberdeen, while Colin and Kenny had other work to attend to. We all met up at the Ship Inn again in the evening for more laughter and libation, although this was no wild drinking party. It was all a bit reminiscent of "Last of the Summer Wine" (who of us fits which of Roy Clarke's characters I'll leave to your speculation!).

The next morning, the weather had changed from brilliant sunshine to dull, damp and windy, which it remained for the rest of my mainland excursion. My plans had had to be changed as, unbeknown to me, the Creel Inn is now closed to business on Mondays and Tuesdays during the winter, with effect from this year. This meant that I could no longer meet anyone there on Tuesday, either press or public, and I suddenly found myself with nothing to do that day. With the rest of the party having gone that morning after breakfast, either home or to attend to business elsewhere, Mary and I took a run over to Banchory, which has changed beyond recognition in the forty years or so since I was there last. It is a massive private housing estate now, and the old town centre was unapproachable that day due to roadworks. We found a big garden centre on the edge of town, and had a plate of cock-a-leekie soup and a roll in the cafeteria there, before heading back to drop me at Stonehaven, as Mary had to catch the boat back to Shetland that night.

So there I was, on my own, in a grey, damp and miserable-looking Stonehaven. I popped over to the Marine Hotel to give them a couple of posters, and had a pint of amber nectar while I was there - it would have been frightfully bad manners to come out without buying anything! My brother and nephew joined me for a couple of beers in the evening, back at the Ship Inn. The fun and sunshine of the previous day were now mere memories, but who knows what significance I'll attach to them over the coming years? I already know that days like Monday 7th November 2011 don't come by that often. Treasure the memory, Jim!

On Wednesday, feeling slightly hung over, I checked out of the Ship Inn and took a taxi down to Catterline for the only "opening hours" of the exhibition which I will be able to be present for. The weather was cloudy, chilly and windy, and only one family trurned up for lunch that day. Then Joe Irvine, who had been visiting his son in Oban, picked me up from the Creel Inn and drove me up to Aberdeen, where the boat back to Lerwick and home awaited me. My trip had ended in something of an anti-climax, but the exhibition has been left, like a stake-net, to attract (and hopefully entrap) buyers over the next two months. I won't know the extent of the harvest until after Christmas.

In the meantime, I have a full order book to attend to.....

THE LION, THE SWAN AND THE GIFT OF YOUTH

2011-10-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

The title of this post might sound a bit C S Lewis-ish, but it stems from a rough English translation of the names of the three ships featured in this week's featured painting. This is the last of the new works I've managed to complete for this year's Catterline exhibition (I hope it's completed!). I still have a bit to do on tarting up one of my old tall ship paintings, and I hope to get this done tomorrow. If I don't manage it, this one will probably not be making the journey south, as I would like to get a new frame on it for the occasion, and it'll have to dry before going to the framer.

My able assistant-cum-driver and I will be hitting the high seas next Saturday evening, and I hope the seas are not high enough to cause similar problems to those encountered by the ferries earlier this past week.

The ships featured in the painting above are, on the left, the Dutch topsail schooner "Wylde Swan", the 3-masted Dutch topsail schooner "Gulden Leeuw" (Golden Lion) on the right, and, in between, the Polish full-rigger "Dar Mlodziezy" (Gift of Youth") receding into the gloom which attended the departure of these ships from Lerwick in late July.

Dutch ships dominated the 'A' class of vessels in this year's Tall Ships Race, and the "Wylde Swan" was one of the most interesting of these. She is owned by the same organisation which brought the brigantine "Swan van Makkum" to these islands for the 1999 event, and subsequently sold that vessel to Italian owners. The "new" boat was actually built as a steamship in Germany in 1920, and she has also operated under the Norwegian flag, before being acquired by her present owners, who have converted her into the impressive two-masted topsail schooner which graced Lerwick harbour in July.

Equally interesting, and also originally a steamship, is the "Gulden Leeuw", which was built as the Danish oceanographic research ship "Dana" in 1937. I remember admiring the sleek lines of this grey-painted ship when she called at Lerwick in this capacity during the 1960s. However, I would never then have dreamt of seeing her return in 2011, rigged as a three-masted topsail schooner, with a fully-square-rigged foremast.

This will probably be my last post before my trip to the mainland. My thanks must go to Cecil Hughson, who has been framing all the paintings, and to my sister Mary, who has the onerous duty of transporting them and me safely to the Creel Inn, Catterline, for next Monday's hanging. Thanks to these old friends who have volunteered to help with the hanging of paintings and distribution of posters. Finally, thanks to all those who have emailed me their good wishes - it is very much appreciated, I assure you.

Have a great fortnight!

FAIR STOOD THE WIND FOR......CATTERLINE?

2011-10-16T03:59:00.000-07:00

The last two paintings for the Catterline exhibition are of sailing vessels, and this is the first of these. It features three of the windjammers which took part in this year's Tall Ships Race. From left to right, these are the Dutch brig "Morgenster", the barque "Europa" (also Netherlands-registered) and the Norwegian gaff-rigged ketch "Liv". The painting, on canvas, measures 30" x 20" (as you see, I've never been decimalised!).

Now ALL I have to do is finish the final painting (a 24" x 24" canvas), get these two framed, do the packing of paintings, hanging materials and personal effects, and we're off! According to the Met Office website, the long-term weather forecast is for unsettled conditions, with gales at times and near-normal temperatures, for early November. The near-normal temperatures should mean reasonable road conditions for driving on the mainland, but the gales I'm not so keen on, as they can disrupt ferry journeys. Let's hope that Guy Fawkes night falls on a "day atween wadders", as that's when we're booked to catch the blue canoe for the mainland!

People say I worry too much - maybe they're right! Have a good week - whatever the weather.

THE "RANDOM HARVEST II"

2011-10-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

I finished work on this painting last week. It is of the Arbroath-registered seiner/trawler "Random Harvest II" rolling along in a freshening south-easterly as she approaches the lee of Lerwick harbour. She was built by Gerrard Bros. of Arbroath in 1958, was 68 feet long and 50 tons gross and net. She was owned by a partnership headed by skipper David Teviotdale of Arbroath.

I hope to complete two more paintings, both of tall ships, for the Catterline exhibition, which opens on 8th November at the Creel Inn. I hope you like the poster at the top of this column.

CHOPPY SEAS

2011-10-02T03:22:00.000-07:00

I know I promised to display this painting here three weeks ago, and this only serves to demonstrate the fragile nature of such undertakings. My excuses seem feeble in the extreme now, as I reflect on what has happened over the period - family matters, a "chest cold" which has been doing the rounds of my native islands and made my life a misery for a fortnight, and, at the same time, trying to keep some kind of painting workrate going, as the Catterline exhibition is being hung five weeks tomorrow. I still have so much to do in connection with this that it's scaring me practically witless.

I have seen the sample of the exhibition poster which Tay-CAD are producing for me, and it is excellent. These will be going up in shops, hotels, pubs and eateries around the north-east of Scotland prior to the event. My framer is busy with my paintings at the moment, fares and accommodation have been booked, and my first grant claim form has been submitted to the SIC's economic development unit for payment. All extraneous factors seem to be going well, and only the artwork remains to be completed!

While I am struggling to get the last three new artworks finished (and alterations done to some older ones) in time for the Catterline display, the orders are building up too. I have been promising these potential clients that I'll start work on their artworks before the end of October, and I hope that they keep faith with me meantime. As someone pointed out to me recently, it's better than having an empty order book, and I suppose there are many artists who would dearly love to have my "problem"!

The painting which illustrates this post is of the Aberdeen trawler "Leswood" heading south-east from Lerwick in choppy weather conditions, with the Bressay lighthouse bearing silent witness to her departure. I hope to have my portrayal of the Arbroath-registered seiner/trawler "Random Harvest II" ready to illustrate another blog posting this time next week, but, given the broken promises of my last post, I am reluctant to make such a rash definite undertaking! The last two new works for the Catterline exhibition are of tall ship compositions, and I just hope to have them both ready for the event. This is dependent on metaphorical fair winds between now and then. May only gentle zephyrs fill your sails this week!

"GIRL PAT"

2011-09-11T05:30:00.000-07:00

This is just to let you know that I am still in the land of the of the living and painting production. Shown above is my version of the Fraserburgh dual purpose fishing vessel "Girl Pat", rigged for drift-net fishing, approaching Lerwick harbour, with the Bressay Lighthouse coming up to starboard. This is sheer nostalgia for me, evoking a summer's morning in the 1950s and early 1960s, when scores of these vessels took part in the herring fishery. Although I was never actually off at the drift-net fishing, I can remember the sights, sounds, and in particular the smell of a busy morning at Lerwick fishmarket, with boats tightly crammed into the pier, landing the silver darlings in baskets onto trucks and bogeys for the short journey to the fishmerchants and curers' stations.

I received good news on Friday, from the Economic Development Unit of Shetland Islands Council, that my exhibition grant application was successful. This means that my wallet is now going to develop a serious leak, as I make the purchases which I have been putting off until I received the news about the grant.

I've almost finished a painting of another fishing vessel from the same period as the "Girl Pat". This is the Aberdeen trawler "Leswood", heading out of lerwick in less summery conditions. More of that later in the week. Have a nice one!

PROSAIC, PEDANTIC AND PATHETIC!

2011-08-28T07:14:00.000-07:00

The Northern Isles of the UK are being buffetted by bad weather again. This morning I happened to be listening to Radio 4's Broadcasting House programme, to which an Orkney resident had phoned indignantly, protesting at the coverage given to the American hurricane, while Orkney was being blasted by 80mph winds (which were not even being mentioned!) on this side of the pond. It's not quite as bad as that in Shetland, but it's still a lively envoi to what has been a dismal summer up here. The Tall Ships Shetland visit, the Walls Show, the Scalloway Gala and several cruise ship visits are just some of the events which were either wiped out or badly affected by adverse weather conditions this summer.

As yet not weather-affected has been the artistic output from the Tait Gallery. This week, I've been working on two fishing boat pictures destined for the Catterline exhibition. Both pictures feature the Bressay Lighthouse, but from completely different angles. One is an aerial view of the Aberdeen trawler "Leswood" heading for sea in heavy weather, the other is from a more lowly viewpoint, of the Fraserburgh motor drifter "Girl Pat" coming in to land her night's catch. I'll be doing more in a similar vein over the next 6 weeks or so, and I may be recycling a few older works to make up numbers for this event.

I've put the Stonehaven painting (featured on last week's post) in for scanning, with a view to featuring it on the posters for the Catterline exhibition. I'm starting to make lists of things which will come with me (and it's still more than two months away!) - picture wire, cutters, split rings and blue-tack will be vital. I've begun to think about gallery labels for the paintings, and I've bought sheets of coloured card for use in their manufacture. My sister Mary (in charge of transport) and I were discussing the trip over lunch last Wednesday. As a direct response to last week's post, I now have another volunteer to help with the hanging - that's a full lynch mob now! The power of social media, eh?

For a few months now, I've ben racking my poor befuddled brains for a suitable exhibition title. All that I could come up with is "The North Sea, The Mearns and Other Scenes". I know that this is prosaic in the extreme - exactly what it says on the tin, so to speak. But it's the best I can come up with, and it is typical of me - prosaic, pedantic and pathetic!

On Friday I was delighted by the smiling face of my niece Elanor Gunn beaming out from a page of the Shetland Times. She had graduated from the RSAMD with a first class honours degree in violin performance, and my mother was so pleased and proud to see her grand-daughter's photograph in the paper she has read and supported for nearly a century. We're still somewhat mystified by the same paper's non-publication of Elanor's earlier, and equally remarkable, achievement of being appointed leader of the National Youth Orchestra of Wales. Her tenure of this position came to an end earlier this year, but the distinction is none the less.

On a much sadder note, my first cousin Don Leslie lost a long battle with illness earlier this week and, on Tuesday, I'll be going to what will undoubtedly be one of the biggest funerals Lerwick has known during my lifetime. My deepest sympathy goes to Marion, Richard, John and all the other family members.

At times like these, the words from "Maunsie's Crö", by Basil R J Anderson, come to my mind:

Da years geed by as aye dir geen
Da winter white, da simmer green
Da voar aye saan, da hairst aye shoarn
Aye someen deed, aye someen boarn

PEDICURE, PEDANTRY AND PROGRESS

2011-08-21T05:07:00.000-07:00

As I reflect on a week in which the sun has shone often and long on my beloved islands (a pity it didn't do so earlier in the summer!), I do so with a degree of satisfaction for a number of reasons. My mother received her long-awaited and much needed visit from the chiropodist before returning home from her fortnight's respite care at the Wastview Care Centre at Walls. I was at Whiteness to greet her and help her settle in again, and if we can get another long-term issue, that of her footwear, resolved, then things might not be too bad for her. Of course there are still problems with her ears, her eyes and what she believes to be an inoperable (due mainly to the fact that she's 95 with severe mobility problems) hernia, but, for now, we'll accept getting her feet comfortable at least.

Since my last posting, I lost another friend with the passing of John Gray at Lerwick. His funeral took place in the driving rain (which also practically wiped out the Walls agricultural show!) of Saturday 13th August, and I was unable to attend because of a previous arrangement I'd made with my sister Thelma to do a little work at Brugarth, Whiteness, in preparation for our mother's homecoming. John, who was a year or two older than me, pursued a career, as many Shetlanders did, "deep sea" as an able seaman in the merchant navy, until ill health forced him to come ashore in the 1980s. He was a big man, with a forthright nature and manner, who detested bovine ordure in all its forms. I always enjoyed his company whenever we met in the "Lower Lounge" at Lerwick, and I shared his pedantic take on the pitiful output of today's educationally-deprived and electronically-misinformed society. Even though I rarely go to the pub these days, I, along with many others, will miss his larger-than-life presence around town.

I hope you like my painting of Stonehaven (above). Two of the rooms in the Ship Inn (the white building on the right) will be occupied by my sister Mary and myself on the nights of 6th and 7th November, while we attend to the hanging of my exhibition at the Creel Inn, Catterline (a few miles south of there), which will be opening, if all goes well, on Tuesday 8th.

I've spent a lot of time these last two weeks organising and collating accurate quotations from various suppliers (of framing, ferry passages, posters and such essentials) in order to get a grant application, for some of the exhibition's costs, prepared. This went off in the post on Thursday morning, and I was very glad to see the back of it! The funding body is the Shetland Islands Council's Economic Development Unit, and I'm very grateful to them for their help with this project and several others in the past. Unfortuantely the Unit does not help with mainland accommodation costs, but, when I think of the alternatives with regard to transporting an exhibition of paintings to an off-island venue, I do not consider a couple of nights' hotel residency an extravagance.

Now all I have to do is produce ten more paintings over the next two months (I've started work on four of them already) to make up the display numbers. And no-one can help me with that! Have a nice week!

BIRTHDAYS AND OTHER DATES

2011-08-07T06:44:00.000-07:00

I reached the almost invisible milestone of 63 years of age on 16th July, and, with the inevitability which attends man's attempts to administer the unmanageable, my mother turned 95 exactly a fortnight later, on Saturday 30th. It was a good day for a party, if nothing else. This summer is going down as one of the gloomiest on record!

Two afternoons before this momentous day dawned, I was walking along Lerwick's Hillhead, thinking of my mother and her forthcoming birthday, when the notion struck me - quite suddenly and violently - to nip into George Robertson's electrical goods shop to take a look at their selection of TVs. (I should explain here that Mum's current TV screen, at that time, was 22", which was really too small for the size of her living room. She was having difficulty distinguishing the Gs from the Qs on Countdown.) In the shop, I was pleasantly surprised to see a 32" job, with all the channels and technostuff which Mum would be capable or desirous of using, for less than £300. I checked its availability with one of the shop staff, went home in a state of breathless excitement and contacted all of my siblings regarding their views on a birthday present from the five of us jointly. They were all enthusiastic about the idea.

My sister Mary and I visited the same shop next day, bought the set, and off it went in the boot of Mary's Urban Cruiser (it just fitted!). The following day, all of us who were within a car journey's distance gathered at Whiteness to celebrate Mum's special occasion. My niece Caroline's husband David did the installation of the new set, while the rest of us kept Mum's attention diverted in the kitchen. She is delighted with her present, and we all wish her many happy days to enjoy it.

As pleased as she is with her new telly, a visit from the chiropodist would have delighted her even more. The NHS has been letting her down badly in the foot-repair department, a representative of which last paid her a call in February. Her severe mobility problems are not improved by this neglect, and I have witnessed her practically pleading with a telephone answering service for some much-needed attention to her feet. It breaks my heart to see her suffering this way, and, if I try to intervene on her behalf, I run up against the bollard of patient confidentially, which the NHS use both as a blunt weapon and a shield against any inconvenient treading on of their own bunions. My mother is 95, for heaven's sake, and not as well-equipped for bureaucracy-battling as she once was. All she wants and deserves now is a chance to live out her remaining days on this earth in as pain-free a peace as possible. However - as my late Dad used to say, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and most of these methods involve constructive letter-writing. Let's see, who can I write to about this?.........

I heard of another significant date (aside from birthdays) last week, namely that of my my exhibition at the Creel Inn, Catterline. I have now had the long-awaited confirmation that my paintings will be on display there during the months of November and December, and the space will be available sometime in the first week of November. I hope to hang on either Sunday 6th or Monday 7th. My sister Mary, who is doing the driving, is hoping for the former date, and my nephew Kenneth, whose help was invaluable during the last Creel Inn hanging in early 2008. will be off work that day to assist. Everyone loves a good hanging!

Now, I have to get Tay-CAD to do some quality posters for me, and I need to get some decent framing from the mainland. An advert in the Press & Journal wouldn't hurt (except for my bank balance) and I have fares and accommodation to sort out. There's a grant aid form to fill in. Oh, and there's the small matter of getting a dozen more paintings done over the next three months!

Have a nice week!

THE TALL SHIPS AND ME

2011-07-31T14:19:00.000-07:00

I caught my first glimpse of one of the participating vessels in this year's Tall Ships Race on the gloomy, damp morning of Tuesday 19th June. The ship was the Dutch gaff-rigged ketch "Urania", and she was at anchor in Gulberwick bay as my brother Peter and I were on our way, through the Black Gaet, to Scalloway. At our village of destination, we found another participant, the Bremen-registered "Esprit" (another ketch, of more recent build), and a very smart little ship she was. When we returned in the afternoon, she had been joined by the Dutch three-masted schooner "Eendracht". Meanwhile, in Lerwick, the Norwegian ketches "Auno" and "Wyvern av Aalesund" had arrived, and another couple of small ships had arrived at Cullivoe, Yell. Shetland's role in the 2011 Tall Ships race had begun to be played, and people were looking anxiously skyward, as well as seaward, to see if the weather was going to be kind.....

It was - briefly. Next morning dawned bright and fair, with light winds, although there was a bit of cloud cover coming and going. I sat at my window, enjoying a cup of tea with my sister Mary, who was one of the liaison officers for the Colombian barque "Gloria", watching her ship picking up the pilot off the Bressay Light and making her elegant way in towards the harbour. Mary went off to perform her diplomatic duties, and I was left to try concentrating on doing a day's work. Some hope! I kept stopping to look seaward, as more and more of these beautiful ships approached. The almost indefinably-rigged "Pelican of London", the Polish barquentine "Pogoria" and the Dutch topsail schooner "Gulden Leeuw" arrived during the morning, followed by the "Lord Nelson", "Dar Mlodziezy" and "Alexander von Humboldt" in the afternoon. Other smaller, less easily identifiable, ships were also making their appearance. That was a happy day for me, with my greedy eyes almost getting their fill from what was before them.

The next day, Thursday, was the first of three consecutive ones for which I'd booked a stall to sell my arty wares. My brother Peter had agreed to help me transport my goods and display units down to the Toll Clock Centre in a car he had hired for his holiday here. I am very grateful to him for his help, which speeded this process up, as well as saving me a taxi fare. The wind was freshening from the north, although otherwise the weather was still quite pleasant, dry and bright. Most of the participating tall ships had arrived by midday, although it was early evening before the Norwegian barque "Statsraad Lehmkuhl" arrived at her allocated berth at Shearer's Pier. The sound of rock and roll music could be heard from the stage at Holmsgarth. Shetland had started to boogie, and my brother caught the ferry south that evening with the sounds of the party ringing in his ears. The view of the harbour from the ferry would have been spectacular too.

I had arranged to leave my display units at the centre for the next couple of nights (at my own risk, of course), so that I only had my bags of cards and prints to transport back and forth each day. I was glad of this facility as, with my brother gone, lugging all that stuff up and down my stairs each day would have been a pain - literally. I had also arranged for my friends Lynne and Malcolm to look after the stall for a few hours on Friday, while I went out to Whiteness to pay my usual visit to my mother and see that she was OK for the weekend. By evening the wind had risen to near gale force, from a northerly direction, although it was still dry and quite bright, and it bore the sound of the Levellers all over town, from the Holmsgarth stage, that evening.

Saturday dawned dry, and still reasonably bright, but the strong winds were becoming an issue. With no improvement forecast for Sunday, the decision was made to postpone the departure of the ships (which had been previously scheduled for Sunday) until the following day when winds were expected to ease. My last day at the Toll Clock Centre was a busy one, and by close of business, I had far exceeded my notional target figure for the three days takings - it had certainly been a worthwhile venture for me. I had met many old friends, including one with whom I'd done business only online, and made many new ones. I had added Slovenia to the list of European countries in which my artwork is owned. As Captian Gabriel Perez of the Colobian barque "Gloria" was presented with one of my prints as a souvenir of his Lerwick visit, my artwork is now in every continent of the world!

I am grateful for the help of Jim Wilson of Allied Taxis in getting my display units and remaining stock of cards and prints back upstairs to my flat after my successful three days at the Toll Clock Centre. There, on the news, on Saturday evening, I first heard of a shocking event which had taken place near Oslo, Norway, in which a gunman had gone on a killing spree of youngsters at an island camp......

That evening, lying in bed, I was listening to the gale-borne sound of Bjorn Again on the Holmsgarth stage. This was interrupted, at midnight, by the explosions of the firework display, after which there was a brief pause before the ships' sirens began a symphony of their own. Lerwick was still in party mode.

I had hoped to go for a walk around the harbour with my camera next day, but this notion was soon eliminated from my plans by the weather - driving rain borne on a north-westerly gale. There would be no point in taking a camera out of its case in such conditions, which only eased late in the day. Sounds of music, presumably hastily-arranged gigs by local artistes (of whom there are many!) were still to be heard on the wind, as my sister Thelma and I went out to see our mother at Whiteness in the afternoon. She was well, although missing her summer visitors (first my sister Angela and her husband Nigel, then my brother) terribly.

I hate goodbyes too, and multiple departures are hard for me to take. In the gloom of a leaden-skied Lerwick last Monday, I watched from my window as the first of the tall ships left the harbour, led out by our own "Swan", followed by the Dutch brig "Morgenster". Over the next few hours, these beautiful vessels put me through the torture of the Parade of Sail. Some of the ships won't be back - ever. I understand that the green sails of the "Alexander von Humboldt" have graced their last Tall Ships event, as shortage of funds means that an essential refurbishment cannot take place, and she will have to be either sold or scrapped.

The last farewell was to my friends Lynne and Malcolm, to whom must go my last and most deeply-felt expression of gratitude. I had a few lagers with them on Monday evening, and they departed on the Tuesday night ferry on the first leg of their journey back to Tyneside. They had three of my paintings with them, and they had given up some of their own holiday time to look after my stall on the Friday while I attended to other essential matters elsewhere.

Now I look at the empty Lerwick quaysides, and wonder if they will be graced by such lovely ships again in my lifetime. Who knows? We Shetlanders certainly know how to organise and enjoy a good party, regardless of prevailing weather conditions. It must surely happen again.

THE "PARAMOUNT"

2011-07-13T13:44:00.000-07:00

Here is my portrayal of the Aberdeen trawler "Paramount" (A309) ploughing through a moderate North Sea swell in fine weather as she searches for the white fish shoals. She was one of a pair of sister ships, built for Peter & J Johnstone Ltd by the Mitchison yard at Gateshead on the Tyne, in 1959. The other boat was the "Partisan" (A310). They fished out of Aberdeen until the mid-1970s, when most of this class of side-trawler had become obsolete. I don't know the fate of the "Paramount" - whether she was scrapped at this time, or sold abroad, as some were. Perhaps someone will be good enough to enlighten me.

This painting represents my strategy to turn out some simpler and less detailed seascapes, which are less time-consuming to complete than the more complicated landscape scenes I had been doing up to then. Time is a very finite resource for me, as I try to get a reasonable-sized body of work together for the Catterline exhibition at the end of this year. However, being something of a martyr to my own cause, I've now embarked on another complicated work of Stonehaven harbour. The only way I'm going to keep the momentum going is to do a couple more seascapes concurrently with this. Work, work, work!

Talking of seascapes, the Tall Ships are making their way towards Shetland as I write this post. This evening, I was amazed to discover, from my Ship AIS, that our own "Swan" has taken less than 36 hours to make North Uist from Greenock. Now that's going some - and this stage of the event (the Cruise in Company) isn't even a race!

THE ABERDEEN TRAWLER "VIGILANCE"

2011-07-03T13:35:00.000-07:00

The latest oil painting from my curmudgeonly artistic brush is this portrayal of the Aberdeen trawler "Vigilance" (reg. no. A204) approaching her home port in choppy weather. Part of the long stretch of sandy beach, which extends northwards from the harbour, is visible in the background.

The "Vigilance" was one of several Aberdeen trawlers built of wood at various shipyards in the north-east of Scotland in the late 1950s, in this case at Peterhead in 1958. She was 90-odd feet long and 149 grt. She appears with the Aberdeen registration in Olsen's Almanack until the early 1980s, and I don't really know her fate thereafter. Maybe someone will enlighten me.

I'm currently working on another Aberdeen trawler, the steel Tyne-built "Paramount", which I hope to have completed this incoming week. I've also started a painting of the inner harbour at Stonehaven. This will take longer, and I plan to do other seascapes concurrently. All this work is intended for the Catterline exhibition which I am still hoping to hang in early November of this year.

Wish me luck, and have a nice week!

TALL SHIPS CARDS AND GICLEES!

2011-07-03T04:51:00.000-07:00

Take a look at www.tait-gallery.co.uk/Product-Page-1.aspx and you will find there is a new range of four A6 greeting cards featuring my oil paintings of tall ships. These, and many other products, will be on sale at my stall at the Toll Clock Centre during the Tall Ships visit from 21st July. There are also a couple of new giclee prints available.

The cards were produced, to the usual high standard, by Digital Colour Services of Crediton, Devon. I'm sure that David Cole will be grateful for the website plug http://www.dcs-print.co.uk/.

As usual, I haven't had the best of luck with my choice of subject-matter. Three of the ships featured on the cards were here for the last Tall Ships visit in 1999, but they aren't coming this year! These are the Danish full-riggers "Georg Stage" and "Danmark", and the German schooner "Johann Smidt". C'est la vie, as they say around the Esplanade of Lerwick.

If you happen to be in Lerwick for the nautically-themed fun and frolics from the 21st to the 24th July, please feel free to drop by and take a look at what's currently on offer at the Tait Gallery stall. The Toll Clock Centre is close by the Morrison Dock, where many of the ships will be berthed. Come on - you know you want to!

PARTS AND PLACES - A RANT!

2011-06-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

The comprehensive education system is now well into letting down its second generation of scholars. Amongst the better-documented failings of this regime, there lies one which has probably escaped the notice of many commentators. It appears that many adults are emerging from this woefully inadequate institution not knowing their parts from their places! Let me explain.

I listen faithfully to the BBC regional radio stations, and I have heard reports (both on Radio Shetland and Radio Aberdeen, but I have no doubt the problem is more widespread than this) of events TAKING PART and participants TAKING PLACE in them. This has become so prevalent recently that it is beginning to make my curmudgeonly, pedantic and pre-comprehensively-educated blood boil. I feel obliged to record my protests against this latest assault on good usage of the English language.

If, during my secondary schooldays, I had presented a piece of composition, containing such a piece of grammatical incorrectness, to Lollie or Johnnie Graham (the English teachers at that noble establishment), it would have returned adorned with an enthusiastic chiding in red ink. The tragic thing is that mine is probably the last generation which will even notice the error. I may as well enjoy my pedantry while I'm still around and there are still a few of my elders and contemporaries who have a clue as to what I'm talking about.

It makes me sad to think that grammatical refinement will soon be an obsolete irrelevance to most people. The standards which my generation regarded as commonplace, at school and beyond, will soon be considered unnecessarily esoteric, and have no place in the digital age. After all, some may argue, what are spell-checkers for?

Spell-checkers will give the correct (probably American) spelling for any word considered by the compilers to be in common usage, and this should explain its inadequacies and limitations quite well. It takes no account of context, English idioms, figures of speech or other phraseological idiosyncrasies which make this language so much larger and richer than the sum and spelling of its words.

The same applies to the dialect of my dearly-beloved Shetland, which once contained thousands of words which were entirely unique to this part of the world. They do not appear in any spell-checker, and each subsequent generation is losing thousands of these words and phrases - for ever. There are many reasons for this, chief of which is that the way of life which was defined by these words and phrases, and to which they pertained, no longer exists. What is left is being corrupted, mostly (but not entirely!) unintentionally by those using it, and by racial, cultural and socio-political influences.

There are probably few who will mourn the passing of grammatical correctness (which has been largely replaced by the hilariously ultra-pedantic political sort). However, written prose and general social conversation are much the poorer for its absence, and I wish I could feel smug about being one of the last generation to know its parts from its places.

IT'S AN ILL WIND......

2011-06-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

Wednesday June 1st dawned wet and windy, and it got wetter and windier as the day went on. At morning coffe-break time, I looked out through the gloom over Breiwick Bay, and I could just make out the massive receding form of the 93,000 grt cruise ship "MSC Poesia". I don't think she ever got her anchor dropped - they'd seen enough of this awful place, and I can't blame them for heading off to a place where the weather might be kinder.

What a pity she hadn't been here the day before, when the sunshine was almost unbroken, and the south-westerly breeze was gentle and balmy. I spent that morning clearing the border at my mother's house, in preparation for setting a few plug plants (of a species as yet undetermined!), while my sister Thelma attended to a few other tasks around the building, as well as using the garden hose to wash some of the Icelandic volcanic residue from her car. Mother was into the second week of her respite fortnight at Wastview Care Centre - she comes home tomorrow, and I'll be there to help her settle in again.

Now, one of the strange side-effects of the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud, which caused such chaos among airports and airlines in the spring of last year, appears to have been on people's gardens in these islands, and in those of our neighbouring archipelago of Orkney (according to one of the contributors to Radio Orkney's Postbag last Wednesday). Last summer, the honeysuckle bush which, for decades, had been sprawling over the back garden wall at Brugarth, Whiteness, and throwing out a few reluctant flowers each summer, suddenly burst into a peach-coloured cascade of blossom. This year the daffodil blooms seemed to be twice the size and number they usually are, and that all over the islands.

Can it be that what has been causing grief to car-owners (and joy to purveyors of car-cleaning equipment), and costing the airline industry millions of pounds, is having a beneficial effect on our flora? Or not? Does anybody care? Or not?

Whether you care or not, have a nice week!

FETTERCAIRN

2011-06-05T07:05:00.000-07:00

Well, here it is - my version, in oils, of the village of Fettercairn. It is one of the results of many trips around the Mearns area of north-east Scotland, with my brother in his car. I've portrayed the scene as it would be in March, with a newly-ploughed field in the foreground, behind which are the trees and red-brick houses of Burnside Road. Although there are many picturesque views in the north-east, this was one of three which I knew I'd have to paint as soon as I saw it, the others being St. Cyrus from the north, and Boyndie Bay, viewed from Scotstown, Banff, with the headland of Whitehills on the other side of the bay.

For many listeners of radio Scotland winter traffic reports, the name of Fettercairn will be familar, as the road between here and Banchory, over the Cairn o' Mount, is frequently closed by snow.

I've turned my eyes seaward again for the next paintings, which will be seascapes featuring Aberdeen trawlers. I've begun work on two of these, with intent to build up my stocks for the Catterline exhibition at the end of the year. I'm still proceeding under the assumption that I have a display booked at that time and venue, as I haven't heard anything to the contrary!

EARLY FLOWERINGS AND LATE PAINTINGS

2011-05-29T11:35:00.000-07:00

While most of nature seems to be ahead of schedule here, I am far behind where I ought to be in terms of finished works for the forthcoming Catterline exhibition. As far as I know, I am still due to exhibit at the Creel Inn in November and December, but I am going to have to put my foot firmly on the accelerator pedal for the next few months if I'm going to meet my own set target of 25 new works to take down on the ferry with me.

The trouble is, I'm getting far too fussy nowadays. I pick complicated scenes, I hate to be lacking in any minute detail, and it takes far too long to finish. Tomorrow I hope to have finished my ultra-fussy painting of the back of Burnside, Fettercairn, and after that I am going to embark on a series of seascapes, which are less complicated and consequently less time-consuming.

Other things make demands on my time too. On Thursday afternoon I took two tall ship paintings to my local printing firm Tay-CAD for scanning, with a view to extending my stock range of giclee prints to offer at my stall at the Toll Clock Centre during the visit of the Tall Ships racers in late July. I'm looking forward with some excitement to this event, and I hope the weather conditions are more favourable to the participating windjammers than they were on their last call here in 1999.

On that occasion the wind was dead against them on all three races, and they were forced to tack and gybe from St. Malo to Greenock, Greenock to Lerwick and Lerwick to Aalborg. In the event-filled second stage, a Polish crew mutinied in Greenock, a Russian vessel was dismasted in the Moray Firth, and another boat went aground in the Summer Isles. Two days after it had all finished, as far as Lerwick was concerned, the Mallaig-based converted fishing vessel "Eda Frantsen" arrived back in, having tacked for 36 hours in the south-easterly gale, and only made 30 miles. Our own tall ship, the "Swan", had to put in to Egersund in south Norway, unable to make the necessary southerly miles to get to Aalborg in Denmark.

This year, I hope the winds are fairer. Certainly the party at Lerwick won't let anybody down!

MORE ON DRIP STRIP!

2011-05-29T08:18:00.000-07:00

Further to my posting of Wednesday 16th February, I feel I must extol further the excellent practical properties of drip strip from an artist's point of view. This spongy stuff, which people used to soak up water caused by condensation in internal window-sills, in the good days before double-glazing salesmen, has other applications than those for which it was designed.

Kept damp (not soaking wet), and placed in between the canvas and the inner edge of the stretcher frames, it prevents ridges appearing where brush pressure has been applied to the canvas surface. I apply my paint straight from the tube, with no thinners of any kind, so I tend to scrub my undercoats in vigorously to keep down on the little pinprick "holidays" left due to the canvas grain.

But there's more - can you stand it? I decided to see if the same stuff would work with earlier artworks which had been spoilt by the unsightly ridges. I took one such previously completed painting, applied the drip strip (once again damp, not soaking wet!) in a similar place, to cover the frame-edges, placed the painting rightway up, and put a few reference books (dictionary size!) on top of the ridges. I then left it for a day or so, and, when I took the books off, the ridges had all but completely disappeared.

I wish to make clear that I am not getting a penny from the manufacturers of drip strip for this post, neither were any animals hurt in the process outlined above. This is just another handy hint from the pen of your friendly handyman artist - a kind of cross between Van Gogh, Tommy Walsh and Anneka Rice. Remember where you heard it first.

OCEAN-GOING TALL SHIPS

2011-05-15T04:23:00.000-07:00

When I held my last exhibition at the Creel Inn, Catterline, in early 2008, the success of it was due, in no small measure, to the efforts of my nephew Kenneth Halcrow. He provided the transport, he devised and executed the system for hanging the paintings, he drove all over the Mearns and beyond, distributing the posters which I'd had designed for the event, and he sought out and searched through DIY shops in Inverbervie and Montrose for more picture wire, a large amount of which turned out to be an integral part of the hanging arrangement.

He also chided and corrected me if my customer service came short of the mark. On the first afternoon, while we were in the process of the hanging operation, a couple of local men of senior years arrived to see what was on display. They were heard to lament the lack of sailing ships among the subject matter, and Kenneth made sure that I had taken note of this deficiency for future displays. He also saw that I handed out business cards liberally to anyone was showing even the slightest interest in the artworks. In short, if he had not been there supporting me (and I was still recovering from a serious knee complaint which had only been operated on a couple of months previously), I think I would have broken down and wept when I saw the magnitude of the task before me when I arrived at the exhibition venue that Monday morning!

So, mindful of the lack of sail-power evident in my last Catterline show, I have been doing a few tall ship paintings over the past year or so, and this is the latest. It depicts the 32.9m schooner "Johann Smidt" in fresh weather and an ocean swell, with one of the large 1980s-Polish-built flush-deckers in a trough behind her, and other sailing vessels visible in the distance. I'm quite pleased with my sea, and I hope it attracts some favourable comment (perhaps even a buyer ultimately!). It is available, along with many other goodies, from the Gallery Shop on my website http://www.tait-gallery.co.uk/Product-Page-1.aspx

The schooner "Johann Smidt" was built for Dutch owners in 1974 as the "Eendracht", but was sold to her current German owners when the new larger three-masted schooner "Eendracht" was built in 1989. Both these ships were in Lerwick in 1999 for the Tall Ships Race, and I hope to see them here again this year. I'm sure it will be a splendid spectacle and party, and I've booked my stall at the Toll Clock Centre for the occasion. Arr, Jim lad! See you there!

THEY'RE BACK!

2011-05-08T02:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning, I went for my quarterly (roughly!) appointment at the hairdresser's in Mounthooly Street, Lerwick. Duly shorn of my "mooskit" locks, I took my predetermined walk home by the "scenic route", calling along the Spar shop in Thorfinn Street before walking down Breiwick Road. For part of its length, this follows the line of the lower "Battery Banks" and the Waari Geo, where Lerwick Swimming Club members used to meet in the days of my youth, when men were men and women were a bunch of hard cases. (I hasten to add that I never swam myself, being an asthmatic wimp, with miatonia congenita and a wonderful sense of self-preservation, coupled with a tendency towards cowardice). Nowadays most of the swimming is done in the more benign climate of the Clickimin Centre pool, although, given a warm summer day, the beach at the Sands of Sound, and others throughout the islands, will still ring out with the shrieks and laughter of people "gyaain in for a dip" in the sea.

I digress, however (a filthy habit - I know!). I walked down the road named after Breiwick Bay, which I was now surveying (for what I couldn't tell), when suddenly I heard the unmistakable rasping calls of the arctic tern. Sure enough, two of the graceful "sea-swallows" were diving, swerving and ducking over the shallow water at "Da Sletts", and shrieking as if engaged in a heated domestic argument with each other. This sound of the "tirrick" is definitive of the Shetland summer, and it's nice to see them back. A pity the fine weather of the past week seems to have left us, but maybe that will return too!

THE END OF A LONG AND WINDING ROAD

2011-05-02T13:53:00.000-07:00

Calm down, dear! This is not a painting (yet!). This house stands at the end of a long, winding and bumpy road, and I took this photograph yesterday, after my sister Mary and I had navigated this vergeless, barrier-less, and mostly tarred highway to the hamlet of Nibon, in Shetland's north mainland, in unbroken sunshine yesterday. There are only three dwelling houses, along with two holiday chalets, in this isolated and beautiful spot and, as far as I can remember, I have never been here before.

On the way to Nibon, we passed the end of the side-road which leads downhill to the isolated croft of Gunnister, which stands near the head of the voe of the same name, while on the other side of the valley is the other hamlet of Ennisfirth, access to which is by another side-road leading from a more northerly turn-off from the main road north. Perhaps the most remarkable thing I noticed about this area is the complete lack of new buildings (apart from the holiday chalets), which have been springing up aplenty in other parts of the islands over the last few decades. And another thing - that road must be the devil's own to negotiate in wintry conditions!

The trip north was the result of my contract to supply the St Magnus Bay Hotel with a series of paintings on the theme of the North of Scotland, Orkney and Shetland Steam Navigation Company's relationship with this area (and former ownership of the hotel). I had consulted my OS map and, according to that, the best vantage point for getting a photograph of the Ness of Hillswick (which the ships would have had to pass on their way to and from the anchorage in the bay opposite the hotel) would be the end of the Nibon road. I bribed my sister with the promise of a meal in the hotel's restaurant (which does an excellent carvery on Sundays), booked our table, and off we set yesterday. The photographic part of the mission was reasonably successful, the meal was excellent, and we delivered the five paintings which represent the first completed works in a series of many for this impressive establishment. We took the paintings to the first-floor drawing room, which is a spacious and grand affair, and I feel good about having an association with this splendid and historically significant building. I wish the new owners every success in their venture.

The commission is also a long and winding road, of which the end is yet nowhere near in sight, and I have somehow to fulfil this along with my Catterline exhibition. As far as I know, I still have to produce the latter for sometime around the beginning of November, although I have yet to hear anything from them about actual dates. I hope to get these soon. More on the St. Magnus Bay Hotel commission, and the two historical incidents which are connected to this place, and which I have been asked to portray on canvas, in the near future. Enjoy your week!

WHERE WAS ONE WHEN......?

2011-04-28T14:07:00.000-07:00

People can usually remember where they were at certain defining moments in history. On November 22nd, 1963, aged 15, I was in a classroom at Sandwick J S School when someone (I forget who - it may have been my father, who was headmaster at that time) brought us the news that President John F Kennedy of the USA had been assassinated. I'm not sure just what significance I attached to this at the time, apart from it being a nasty thing for someone to go and do to such an important person. After all, killing was a capital offence, and condemned under the Ten Commandments, which was just as bad.

On the fine sunny lunchtime of 29 July 1981, I was in Canteen 15 at the yet incompleted Sullom Voe Oil Terminal, when I watched part of the wedding, of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer, on a TV set which someone (I know not who) had brought in for the occasion. In fact, this was the only time I can remember watching a TV set at the site, and I did so with some indifference on this occasion. I'd only gone in there to get fed!

On the 11th September, 2001, I was at my mother's house at Whiteness on that fateful afternoon when we were first aware that something awful had happened in New York. I seem to remember that it was on a Tuesday. My mother had left me in the kitchen to clear up after lunch, and had gone through to the living room to watch Countdown or something. When I arrived through with cups of tea for us both, all that seemed to be on any of the four available TV channels was images of two burning skyscrapers. This was my first awareness of the Twin Towers terrorist atrocity.

Tomorrow, when Prince William ties the fateful knot with his darling Kate, I plan to be at Whiteness again. I don't plan to watch the wedding, although my mother probably will. I'm no anti-monarchist, but other peoples' weddings just aren't my bag. I've got plug plants to pot in the greenhouse, in addition to my other duties, and I don't have time for this anyway.

I just hope that the marriage ceremony will take place without disruption from some idiot who wants to become a hero for whatever cause he or she has adopted, and who feels that this would be furthered in some way by spoiling the day for countless others. Unlike the marriage, such a cause is doomed to failure, and nothing deserves it more. There are people dying daily around the world for what they believe are worthy causes, and it begs the question - are any of them worth killing and dying for?

I always cry at weddings anyway!

THOUGHTS ON INSPIRATION

2011-04-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

The lofty word "inspiration" is sometimes coined to define the process by which we visual artists arrive at our creations. I have never used this word to describe the sources, whether mental, spiritual, physical or digital, for my artistic outpourings. In reply to anyone who (mostly in jest) inquires solicitously of my "inspiration", I counter that, if I was ever truly inspired, the last thing I'd want to do was paint! "Motive force" would be a more apt description of the impetus behind my creative impetus, and it has been seriously lacking since my last posting to this blog. It's not that I have been doing nothing, but there has been little enthusiasm for my work. I have wasted far too much time worrying about family matters, administrative issues and other things which have taken on a far greater significance in the scheme of things than they should have.

And then I watched the London Marathon today, and all of a sudden my little worries took on a perfect insignificance when compared to the issues faced by some of the fund-raising competitors in the race. There were people running 26-odd unforgiving miles with missing limbs, eyes and other vital bits. The pain and anguish some of these folk have endured just to get to the start-line should be inspiration to me, and it is.

That's all the inspiration I need for this week, thanks. I'll just get on with the job, and feel grateful for the faculties I am able to use in its accomplishment, such as it is. This week, I intend to spend more time with a brush in my hand, and less in contemplation of life's unanswerable questions, most of which remain unanswered even after prolonged contemplation. Have a good week!

BULLERS O' BUCHAN

2011-04-03T06:29:00.000-07:00

Early last Sunday morning, having remembered to adjust my watch to BST, and having established that it was now 6am, I went to the bathroom of room 57 at the Premier Inn (West Central, Aberdeen) and eyed the facilities suspiciously. As I thought, the shower was in the bath, and this was no good to me. I am slightly disabled with miatonia congenita (a hereditary muscular condition) and the lingering effects of a knee condition (which was successfully operated on in late 2007, but the previous 18 months of serious disability had left their mark on my back and leg muscles, not to mention my confidence!). I'd sooner use a purpose-built self-contained shower unit, such as one finds in most ensuite guesthouse bathrooms, and on the Northlink Ferries. I would rather shower on a ship in a force 8 than climb into and out of a slippery bath before and after showering . So I had a sink "swittle" of most of my bits before getting dressed for breakfast at 8am.

My nephew Kenneth had offered to take me for a run north of Aberdeen last Sunday, an offer I had accepted eagerly. The morning was bright and sunny, as were my spirits as we left the city just before midday. To my shame, I had never been to Peterhead before, and I was surprised by what I saw when we arrived there. I had previously known that there was an oil harbour and a fishing harbour on the south and north sides of the Bay respectively, but the sandy beach and recreational facilities at the head of the Bay took me by surprise, for some reason. We pulled in to a car park there, joining a few bikers and other motorists to survey the scene. Sandford Bay, on the south side of Peterhead, is dominated by a huge power station which dwarfs all other buildings in the area with the exception of the massive sports complex nearby. The town itself is nicknamed the "Blue Toon", and I couldn't make out why, as most of the buildings there are of a pinkish granite. We went to the fishing harbour, which was empty of all but about a dozen whitefish boats and the three locally-registered large pelagic ships. The Fraserburgh trawler "Ryanwood", now apparently working on her own, arrived with what appeared to be a good catch (she was noticeably down in the water forward), and tied up at the fishmarket. We had a look at the succession of little docks and piers in the inner harbour, and I felt sad thinking of how different this place would have looked even fifteen years ago, before decommissioning started the process of fleet reduction, which had been declared necessary by the unelected and incompetent tyrants of Brussels.

We started south again, sticking closer to the coast for our return trip, and our next stop was at the Bullers o' Buchan (between Buchan Ness and Cruden Bay) which is a spectacular cliff formation similar to, but much larger than, comparable geological features in Shetland. Simply put, what seems to have happened is that a sea-cave has forced itself inwards and upwards, finally dislodging the ground above it, leaving a massive hole in the land adjacent to the coast. Down in the bottom of the chasm, no sign of the dislodged ground remains - only a little beach remains, the water coming through the cave on the sea-side of the feature. I would estimate the size of the oval-shaped hole to be around 50 metres long by 20 metres wide, and around a hundred feet deep. These amounts may be on the conservative side.

Onwards we went to Cruden Bay, which consists, to a large degree, of several hamlets joined into a corporate and natural entity, around a sandy beach, a golf course and a burn. A large church, which I've previously noticed from the "north boat", stands imposingly on a rise to the south of the town. I found this place attractive, and took some photographs of it. There are also some modern housing schemes and several licensed premises here, which leads me to believe that no-one need go thirsty in Cruden Bay!

Bypassing the hamlet of Whinnyfold (which may have been a mistake, but time was a finite resource for us), our next stop was the picturesque village of Collieston, built around a steep little cove, which has changed little since my last visit here around 35 years ago, although a new housing scheme has appeared on the landward side, I suspect much to the displeasure of the established residents at the time of building. We watched from the head of the pier as a young lass scrambled up the precipitous grassy slope on the south side of the village. My camera came into service again here, before it was time to head southwards again.

By now, the sky had clouded over a little, and a short sharp shower fell as we approached Newburgh. Situated at the mouth of the Ythan estuary (which is much more extensive than I remember it), this place has changed almost beyond recognition. Blocks of executive flats have sprung up to define its new role as a dormitory town for the oil industry, and must have swelled its population at least tenfold. I recall this as an attractive village, where the approach road from the south once led to a scene where an old mill jutted out into its own reflection in the water. We looked for this, but couldn't find it. We had afternoon tea in the cafe bar of the Udny Arms, where a few well-heeled-looking locals were watching the early stages of the Scotland/Brazil football match. Near the door, a border collie eyed me balefully from its nose-on-the-floor position as we left. I was tempted to wind the beast up, but thought better of it!

A trip down Aberdeen beach from Bridge of Don to Footdee brought our afternoon journey to an end. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people and cars at the amusement area around the Beach Ballroom, and the scene brought no tears of nostalgia to my eyes whatsoever. I'd had a wonderful weekend away, and it was now time to to finish it with the trip north on the ferry "Hrossey". My thanks to my brother and nephew for giving me such an inspiring tour of the north-east of Scotland.

I had the shower, which I had been looking forward to for the past twenty four hours, as the ship went through practically calm seas off Fair Isle at 5am next morning. I had breakfast on board as we passed Mousa, and joined the many schoolchildren and adults who made up the throng of foot-passengers going ashore through the covered walkway just after 7.30am. My next intended trip to the mainland will be in late October or early November when I hang my second exhibition at the Creel Inn, Catterline. The actual dates are yet to be advised, and I emailed the proprietor yesterday for these, as there are passages and accommodation to be booked, and grants to be applied for in the meantime. Oh, and a lot of painting to be done too!

HOWE O' THE MEARNS

2011-04-03T02:15:00.000-07:00

I hope you like my landscape painting of a springtime scene in Howe o' the Mearns. This area has some of Scotland's richest farmland, where newly-ploughed fields are defined by others yellow with daffodil crops, bordered by rows of hawthorn bushes. Farmhouses, barns and clumps of trees add to the attractiveness of this part of what used to be south Kincardineshire and north Angus before boundary commissions made their arbitrary and senseless decisions about which new region should contain what. The hills of Glenesk and Cairn o' Mount are in the misty distance.

I was down in this area last Saturday, the main reason for my trip "south" being to use up my remaining two concessionary vouchers, for Northlink Ferries, (of which we 60-plus people get issued with four a year), before they became invalid on the 1st April. It's rather a good scheme, and I hope it survives the "austerity" measures through which the poor citizens of this country are going to pay for the extravagances of the rich. It was ever thus - why should it be different now?

The weather was disappointing for much of last Saturday. It rained on and off for much of the day, precluding any photography while it was in "on" mode. My brother and I first visited Stonehaven, then Catterline, the venue for my next Scottish mainland exhibition. The latter has been affected by landslides over the winter, although not as much as the former to the north. We next had a wander round Johnshaven harbour, which was much emptier of boats than last time we were here, and the tide was even lower. On to St. Cyrus we travelled, hoping to have a pot of tea and bacon-buttie at the Old Baker's Shop Cafe (which my brother can remember as a functioning bakery), but the place was closed. Over tea and scones at the St. Cyrus Hotel, the proprietrix told us that the cafe owners had emigrated to Dubai.

We headed inland from here, pausing for a few minutes to admire the splendid view west from the summit of the Hill of Garvock, where the whole of the Howe o' the Mearns stretches out from Laurencekirk to the crouching animal shape of the Hill of Wirren beyond Fettercairn. Last Saturday, however, the hill was obscured by mist. One of my favourite scenes is the red brick houses which lie to the left, as one approaches Fettercairn from the east on the B9120. The rain was holding off at this time, so I made my brother stop the car (in a massive pothole!) here while I got some digi-pictures of this. I intend to paint this scene soon.

On to Edzell, and lunch, as it always seems to be, was taken at the Panmure Arms Hotel there. It was excellent, as always. I had the beef olives, while my brother went for the haddock. Our next stop was Brechin, and I have not set foot in this attractive place since I once hitch-hiked from Aberdeen to Edinburgh on the inland route (big mistake - the jouney took nine hours!) in 1968. Instead of passing through the city, we parked the car and went for a walk through some of its streets, visiting the ancient cathedral, which was scaffolded inside and out, so there is obviously some extensive restoration taking place here. Under leaden skies, we walked for a while by the river South Esk, before setting off in the rain to Auchmithie, near Arbroath, where a welcome cup of tea awaited us at the home of our old friend from schooldays at Sandwick, Shetland, by the name of Kenneth Bull.

Kenneth, an architect by trade, and now in semi-retirement, has lived, with his wife, son and supercilious tabby-cat, in an old coastguard station atop a cliff at Auchmithie for many years. (The government wants all coastguard stations to be converted into private dwellings soon, and we are in the process of persuading them what a bad idea this is!). Kenneth gave us the sad news of the demise of the aforementioned cat during the winter. Although cats take a more realistic view of their own mortality than we humans do, I well know how distressing the loss of a pet cat can be, having witnessed the passing, some more suddenly than others, of some well-beloved ones of my own.

And then it was back up the coast road to Aberdeen, where we arrived at the Premier Inn next to the Cocket Hat just before 6pm. I checked in, had a rest, then had an evening meal and a pre-arranged pint with my old friend Alan Johnson later that evening. No sign of Lenny Henry anywhere, but I did see another couple of Shetlanders, who were obviously also overnight guests, occupying another table in the bar of the Cocket Hat. Wherever you go in this world, you'll find that a Shetlander is somewhere in the neighbourhood!

CATCHING COLDS

2011-03-20T07:25:00.000-07:00

When I catch a cold, it normally runs the same course - four days of shivering sneezing misery followed by four weeks of getting rid of the gunk which clogged up my tubes (sorry to those of a sensitive disposition!). So it has been with me this last fortnight, and I've been catching a cold financially too.

I took out an ad in the Independent on Sunday on 13th March, and wished I hadn't bothered. The ad agency had contacted me with the offer of a panel, which had become available due to cancellation by someone else, at the bargain rate of £185 + VAT, as opposed to the "normal" rate of £600 + VAT. Their circulation figures were around 700,000, which is certainly a lot more than that of the special interest mags in which I've advertised up to now. I went for it, as I've been considering advertising in one of the "big" papers for some time (just to see what would happen!), and I probably wouldn't get a better deal than the one which was being offered. They designed a beautiful panel for me, and it duly appeared in the magazine section of the paper (at the foot of a page of similar-sized ads). My website viewing log showed the poorest figures for a month that day, so I now KNOW this doesn't work!

In anticipation of the increase in sales which the advert would produce, I had invested another £200+ in new stocks of greeting cards and giclee prints. I have sold a few of these lately, but not in a quantity which would justify the expense I've incurred over it. Then, on Saturday 12th March, my computer desktop monitor packed up, and I had no option but to replace it , at a further cost of £150. Ouch! For a self-employed artist on a very modest income, an outlay of £600 over the course of a single week, before I'd even bought myself something to eat, is a fairly serious matter.

Thank goodness it hasn't been all bad news. My client loved the painting of the ill-fated fishing boat "Kildonan" (see posting 28/02/2011), and I've received a commission to do a number of "Nort Boat" paintings for the St. Magnus Bay Hotel in Hillswick. I've now started this, with the "Sovereign", a paddle steamer which was one of the earliest in the fleet, having been acquired in 1836 and running on the Aberdeen - Shetland route until 1867, when she was wrecked near Aberdeen.

I've been working steadily on the stock/exhibition works too. I've nearly finished a Howe o' the Mearns landscape, and have begun another seascape with an "under sail" theme, which has a dual purpose in that the 2012 Tall Ships race is visiting these islands in July. I expect I'll be getting some themed greeting cards and giclee prints for that event too.

Aaaachoo!

HAZARDS OF SEAFARING

2011-03-07T12:28:00.001-08:00

This is my version, in oils on canvas, of the Shetland fishing boat "Kildonan", passing the Bressay lighthouse as she approached Lerwick harbour. She would have done this many times in her short career. She was a 50-odd foot "zulu", built originally as a sailing vessel, and had been fitted with a wheelhouse and a diesel engine, as many of this class of boat were, in the years just following the first world war. One early summer morning in 1932, her crew had just finished hauling a good shot of herring, and one of the two brothers who owned the boat went down to start the engine for the short voyage back to the market at Lerwick. Instead of starting in the usual manner, it went on fire, the blaze spread quickly, and the crew had no option but to abandon ship and take to the small boat to watch their livelihoods go up in flames before their eyes. The skipper, whose daughter (now aged 80) commissioned the work from me, once said that the saddest sound he had ever heard was that of the drift-net buoys bursting in the intense heat.

No doubt fire-fighting equipment was much less sophisticated in those days than that carried as standard and by regulation now. In addition, there are the many other modern safety devices, without which no present-day skipper would ever even consider putting to sea. Some of this is electronic, some connected with advances in other fields of technology and communication, such as the EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon), whose prosaic title bears similarities to the "does exactly what it says on the tin" advertising slogan, all of it designed to improve the safety of mariners at sea.

And then there is, but not for much longer in its present form apparently, the Coastguard, a worthy organisation of people dedicated to keeping seafarers healthily afloat. They, being local to their station, know the coastline and the inshore waters in their local areas intimately, and have representatives on call at all times to deal with any emergency which may arise (and frequently does). Their radios and other points of contact are constantly manned to pick up signals from any vessel which might be in trouble, and they normally take control of any rescue operations which may have to be mounted in their areas, be it a ship in distress, a cliff fall or stranding (man or beast!), or a missing shore walker. In short, if anyone's safety is compromised, either at sea or near the shoreline, the coastguard is there to use its local knowledge and skills to put an effective rescue plan into motion.

Until now, that is. In order to save a few million quid, the coalition government wants to shut the local coastguard stations (the few that are left) down. Hapless beleaguered-looking representatives have been despatched to the various locations where the doomed stations are situated, with the remit to persuade the turkeys that voting for Christmas IS a good idea, that closing the stations is a wonderful scheme which will make the system SO much more efficient, and is NOTHING AT ALL to do with the fact that our rulers need to recoup the huge sums dished out to senior bankers as a reward for practically bankrupting the country, and putting seafarers' lives at risk is a price worth paying for this. They are having difficulty selling this to the natives, however. The deal is this - there will be one fully manned technology-driven unit in Aberdeen, and one other part-time 9 to 5-opening one at either Stornoway or Lerwick (fight amongst yourselves for that one, folks!). Tough if your job takes you to sea outwith these hours, as most seafarers' jobs do! Are there really people in Regulationville who think that seamen finish their eight-hour shift, change into their casuals and have a pint in the pub on the way home to the wife and kids?

Then there were the coastguard tugs (now off contract, I believe, and in the process of getting repainted for their new jobs), which were introduced in the aftermath of the "Braer" oil spill. They were to cover the sea areas around the Western and Northern Isles, to take broken-down ships (of which there have been many) in tow, thus guarding our coastlines against pollution, and crews' lives from being lost at sea in these busy areas. I almost laughed out loud when I heard about the Royal Navy nuclear submarine HMS "Astute" grounding off the Gairloch last year, and having to be towed off by one of the very ships they want to get rid of!

Of course, closing Coastguard stations is nothing new. The last government got rid of the Orkney station, amongst others, and in England, the National Coastwatch Institution, http://www.nci.org.uk/ was set up in 1994 as a kind of substitute for defunct Coastguard units. It is entirely staffed by unpaid volunteers and supported entirely by voluntary contributions (rather like the RNLI, it seems), but this body has no representation north of the border as yet, as far as I know. I hate the idea of this really, as it appears to let a Government of knaves and charlatans get away with their incompetence, mismanagement of resources, and callous indifference to the wellbeing of sailors and others who rely on them for a degree of protection. Once again, an essential service is being sacrificed on the altar of capitalism and consumerism. This is what David Cameron calls the "big society", after all - people who will work for nothing and let him "off the hook", to use a fishing expression.

Comparing the summer of 1932 with the present day in terms of safety at sea is not easy, and there are few similarities. Marine diesel engines were at an early stage of development back then. Rescue equipment was limited to a wooden lifeboat, a few lifebelts, the strong arms of the fishermen themselves and anything else that came to hand at the time! Nowadays there are advances in technology and safety devices too numerous to list here. This is just as well, for this government has made it clear that, as far as it is concerned, we could be back to the 1930s. The sea is still as dangerous a workplace as it ever was, and I hope that every time a life and/or a livelihood is lost with this evil coalition's tacit approval, they are left in no doubt of the fact. I am sure that the media, in its various forms, will be delighted to assist!

THE FIFTH AMENDMENT!

2011-02-27T12:18:00.001-08:00

I reckon that's the number of times that I've made alterations to this painting over the six years since I first produced what I thought was a good representation of the MV "St. Clair".

She was completed in 1960 by the long-since-closed Hall Russell's shipyard in Aberdeen. She was the third ship to bear the name for the North of Scotland, Orkney and Shetland Steam Navigation Co. Ltd., and she turned out to be the last before this firm was taken over by Coast Lines Ltd in the mid-1960s, and this company was absorbed into P & O Ferries early in the 1970s. She was also the last side-loader on the route (the next "St. Clair" being the first ro-ro ferry), and consequently she was the last ship to use Victoria Pier for loading and discharging of passengers and cargo. I took my first trips to the mainland as a student on this ship, and I have many happy memories of wild nights on board.

The painting has spent most of the time since 2004 on the wall of the Lounge in Lerwick, and every time I looked at it, I knew that it needed more work done on it. The fifth, and, I hope, the last, changes were made to it about a week ago. I altered the sky, the angle of the horizon, the distant Sumburgh Head, and the sea behind and in front of the ship this time. I've been looking at the work off and on for the last week, and, for the first time, I have a sense of satisfaction about it. I hope and believe there will be no sixth amendment to this particular painting.

MORE TERMINOLOGICAL INEXACTITUDES!

2011-02-16T00:27:00.000-08:00

Yet more obsequious hand-wringing after the manner of Charles Dickens' character Uriah Heep (as illustrated by my drawing of my impersonation of the revolting chap!) is required. I just keep making mistakes and, unlike most of today's politicians, I'd prefer to admit to them! They usually end up costing me money too.

After telling you about my brilliant scheme to prevent ridging to my canvases being caused by the edges of the stetcher frames, using draught excluder strip, I invested in a couple of rolls of this product, only to discover that it was far too narrow for this purpose, and it was also self-adhesive, which is not a desirable property for my purpose either. So, another £7-odd wasted, unless I need a draught excluded at some point in the future.

Back to the drawing board, to coin the popular cliched phrase! I googled condensation sponge strip, and up came (amongst other things!) Drip Strip! Eureka! I bought some, I've tried it, and it works! It'll work even better when I refine the technique of applying it a bit.

More apologies for late posting, but I had to prioritize tasks, such as hanging my Lounge Bar mini-exhibition, which had been removed so that the pub owners could redecorate the place. I also had to update the website with recent works (http://www.tait-gallery.co.uk/), which is now done - I think! Uploading the images, creating thumbnails, using the Image Manager and doing all the necessary hyperlinking is tricky for an internet comparative newbie like me.

As to current artworks, progress is much as usual - slow but steady! I've begun modifying one of the Lounge mini-exhibition items. It was of the third ship to bear the name "St. Clair" on the Aberdeen to Shetland cargo/passenger route. I'd depicted her with Sumburgh Head in the background, but I'd made the land too close up, and this had been irritating me for years, so at last I'm doing something about it. I plan to work at this today. I'm working on another historical Shetland fishing boat commission, and I've begun a largish (40" x 20") painting of the Mearns, near Luthermuir, in April, when fields of daffodils can be seen giving the landscape striking bands of yellow against the dominant dull browns and greens. My next exhibition at the Creel Inn, Catterline, later this year, is the intended destination for this

work.

The days are visibly lengthening now, which is good for artwork production, although the weather is certainly not improving. We had storm force winds bearing rain across the islands for most of Monday, although yesterday was bright and mostly dry, if a little windy. The Met Office are forecasting snow for today. It's all part of the rich tapestry of life on my native islands, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Have a good week (what's left of it!) and I'll try to do better with my posting schedule in future!

GOURDON HARBOUR, DRAUGHT EXCLUDER AND MR MUSCLE

2011-02-08T13:33:00.000-08:00

Here's the latest work to become part of the "stock" at the Tait Gallery. It depicts workboats and pleasure craft at their moorings in the inner harbour at Gourdon, on the east coast of Scotland just south of Inverbervie. This painting took a long time to complete, as it was always competing for time with concurrent commissioned works.

I've devised a cunning plan to solve a ticklish problem I've been confronted with of late. It concerns the cheaper range of ready-made stretched canvases which are obtainable from all the best art materials suppliers. Ridges keep appearing in the canvas at the edges of the stretcher frames, caused by the tension in the material easing when brushwork is applied vigourously to the surface. The solution is so simple that only a numpty like me could have taken as long to fathom it out - draught excluder strip! You know, the kind of old inch-wide spongy stuff which used to be sold in rolls, and which my Dad used to lay on the sills of the old single-glazed windows to collect water caused by condensation, and which could be wrung out and replaced as necessary (the strip, that is!). The technique, as I envisage it, will be to place the strip along the back of the stretcher frame, close to the offending edge, with perhaps a little light adhesive to secure it, and tuck in the loose edge underneath, thereby cushioning the edge which causes the ridging. It sounds wonderful in theory. I expect to make my appearance on one of these awful DIY TV programmes soon. People have often suggested that I take art classes, but with much Uriah-Heep-like hand-wringing, I have explained that I have no teaching qualification and that I have learned all my skills in the school of hard knocks and split ends.

Of course, in these modern days of double-glazed windows, such products as I've described above are now largely redundant, but there are still a few online retail outlets which sell it online. (Mind you, when you google "sponge strip", you get some interesting results!) There you go, Petal! - yet another exciting piece of improvisation from the brilliant but tortured mind of your friendly artistic curmudgeon! Another thing - if I spent a bit more money on better-grade heavier canvas, the ridging problem would not be so acute. As my old Aberdeen mill foreman used to say; "Aye, Jimmy - if ye buy cheap, ye buy dear!" (I seem to recall he was referring to footwear at the time, but never mind).

My apologies for not posting on Sunday as usual. That day I had decided to spend a day of frantic effort to get some cleaning done in the flat/studio (conditions must have been bad before even I had noticed them!). By the time I had hoovered, wiped, dusted, sprayed, scrubbed, washed and dried my way through most of Sunday, I was mentally, physically and emotionally drained, not to mention reeking of Mr Muscle. I was incapable of composing a half-decent blog post, but my cooker, bath and sinks were gleaming!

All the best from a pristine (I wish!) Tait Gallery.

SITTING AND WAITING

2011-01-30T08:10:00.000-08:00

I'll have to get out more. Up-Helly-A' and the coincidental Burns Night passed by last Tuesday without any participation by me whatsoever, although the Tait Gallery is now on the collecting sheet for the former. My sister Angela, who is normally resident at Bethesda, North Wales, informs me that the 25th January is also the date of Diwrnod Santes Dwynwen, a kind of Valentine's day for the Welsh. Whatever the occasion, I can't be bothered to attend it nowadays. Sad, isn't it?

Sitting has always been one of my favourite pastimes. I just park myself, preferably near a window with a view, and switch off, allowing myself to be transported to wherever my flights of fancy might take me. And there I remain until the unwelcome intrusion of a phone call, a knock at the door or a work deadline encroaches upon my reverie. To tell the truth, terra firma is not such a fearful place for me as it used to be (would that it was the same for everyone). A year into my self-employment, around the end of 2005, I reckon I was over £10,000 in debt, and with no real idea how I was going to get this paid off. Now I've managed to work myself clear of three-quarters of that sum, and I hope to be rid of it completely by the close of 2011.

During the 1990s and into the "noughties", a recurring nightmare used to invade my hours of slumber. It varied as to its "geographical" location, but the theme was always the same. I was always among a crowd of people, I was always trying to accomplish some task or other, and I was always failing miserably. Frequently the location was a grotesquely enlarged version of the Vadill Compounds during the construction phase of the Sullom Voe Terminal, among the mud, sheds, workshops and portakabin offices of this period and area. It was dark, and I was trying to find someone, which I never did, of course. Sometimes it was a flat, which may have started as a similar one to that in which I now type these lines, but in my dream it took on much larger proportions, with loads of interconnecting rooms. I was the official tenant, I was trying to rid myself of the crowds of people who seemed to have taken up residence in it, and no-one was taking a blind bit of notice of me! Walking up B Avenue, again at the oil terminal, towards the flares, with crowds of people walking down, was another theme. I think I was looking for a lift somewhere (it made sense in the dream!). Those and many others were disturbing, and they made little sense to me at the time. I was always glad when blessed consciousness returned, and, grim though reality may have been, it was not as bad as the dream from which I had just awoken.

Something has changed - I haven't had these dreams for years now. The strange scenes which now play themselves out in my unconscious hours and mind, while equally grotesque, are not at all unpleasant. Have sweet dreams this week!

EYEMOUTH

2011-01-30T02:04:00.000-08:00

Last week I promised that I'd have two more completed paintings to show you today. I almost succeeded, but the second one still has a couple of details to complete, so I've had to hold it over until I've done those.

Meantime, here is the "Dougals", a seine-netter which worked out of Eyemouth in the 1950s, approaching her home port after another trip. This work was a commission, and if anyone out there in the blogosphere would like a painting of a favourite boat or scene, I would be delighted to do the work. My contact details are on my website www.tait-gallery.co.uk, which also features many of my previous artworks, as well as a Gallery Shop, where original paintings, giclee prints and greeting cards are available to purchase.

"THULE ROCK" AND "REAPER"

2011-01-23T05:15:00.000-08:00

A bit later than promised, here is the latest commissioned painting. It features two historical Shetland fishing boats, the steam drifter "Thule Rock" and the motorised (and substantially rebuilt) fifie lugger "Reaper".

The "Thule Rock" was built at Stromness, Orkney in 1917, the only steam drifter to have been built there. At some point, probably in the 1930s, she was sold from Shetland to Lowestoft, being renamed "Lord Howard" (LT212). She was requisitioned by the Admiralty on the outbreak of the second world war, and was lost at Dunkirk in 1940. I have no record as to loss of life.

The "Reaper" is still afloat today as a completely restored fifie sailing lugger, which is how she began her career in 1901. Built at Sandhaven , she sailed out of nearby Fraserburgh until 1908, when she was bought by Shetland owners. At some point, she was converted into a motor vessel, as many of this type of boat were, and in the late 1930s, she underwent an even more extensive refit. Her stem was lengthened, an extra board was fitted around the gunwale, a new wheelhouse casing added, and there may have been other alterations too, for instance in the engine room (I'm not sure about this). She fished successfully until the 1950s, when she was bought by the islands council and used as a cargo vessel until around 1970. Eventually she was bought by the Anstruther Fisheries Museum, and restored to her original hull and rig, under which she sails as a training vessel.

I am at an advanced stage with two more paintings, and I hope to have one or both of these ready for next week's post. Enjoy your week!

SHOKKIN' APO A SPITTLE!

2011-01-23T02:57:00.000-08:00

It's not often I find myself drawn to proceedings on the Review Show, which is the slot on BBC2 which follows Newsnight, round about 11pm on a Friday. Indeed the only reason it was on in my studio was that I had been working on my computer and had neglected to switch over or off when Newsnight had finished. This programme normally takes the form of a discussion between four critics on some of the week's events in the arts world, and it is normally chaired by a TV broadcasting luminary such as Kirsty Wark or Martha Carney.

The voluble but largely inconsequential effervescence of this noble gathering of blabbermouths, along with the apparently unlimited funds available to certain "art" collectors, forms a large tract of the territory in which the chancers and charlatans among "art" producers live, move and have their being. However, on this occasion, the panel consisted of three comedians including Rhona Cameron and another (male) from the Glasgow region, the third being English (I didn't notice from which area). The fourth member of the panel was a professor, who looked completely bemused by the company and situation in which he found himself.

Under discussion were Peter Hall's production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which had opened I know not where, as I hadn't been paying attention at the stage at which this had been announced, and the latest offering of offal (in one case literally!) at some gallery or other, possibly the Tate Modern. Now, as the male Glasgow comic hadn't either seen the production of Twelfth Night or read the bard's tragicomedy, and the other comedians' understanding of the production was limited, this had all the makings of an excellent impromptu modern comedy programme, and it didn't disappoint. The male Glasgow comedian's comment on the gallery exhibition, which included a glass case containing fly-infested offal (sic!), was "I just like looking at things!" How refreshingly honest!

Shortly after the start of the programme, poor Martha Carney suffered a temporary blockage of her respiritory system ("she shokkit' on a spittle!", as we say in Shetland!), and spent some time coughing and trying to restore order to her oesophagus and the programme. The professor was clearly wishing he was somewhere else, and I had lost all interest in what I had been doing on the computer. I hope Martha has since recovered.

Bravo, BBC! I have seldom enjoyed a programme more than this fine spontaneous example of live television, which was much better than the pathetic rubbish which passes as comedy nowadays. I want more soon!

GOOD FOR HUGH!

2011-01-16T03:57:00.000-08:00

Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's series about the price of fish was excellent - at least the only programme I managed to watch was. He told it as he saw it, from the point of view of someone who knows his food, and added some pretty clever stuff to his presentation. The idea about carrying out the discarding of species of fish (which the lunatic regulation imposed by the EU has declared to be necessary), close to the windward coast near Hastings, and giving it away for nowt to anyone who wanted some, was superb in its audacity, concept and execution.

His trip aboard the demersal trawler "Seagull" also showed very clearly the injustice and idiocy of just what British skippers are are required to do to conform to the rules imposed by Brussels. I hope that many people saw the tragic dumping of more than 20 boxes of prime cod for every haul the boat took on board, just because some ill-informed body of scientists have declared that these fish are a figment of fishermens' imaginations.

The ball is now firmly in the court of the EU. Any betting on what the response of this august body will be? Will they take the advice of ill-informed "scientists" and one-track minded "conservationists" who care not a whit about the survival of a fishing industry and the communities who depend on them? Will they believe the evidence of their own eyes, as presented by Hugh F W, and grant fishermen the leeway they need to end the silly discard system? This will mean that fishermen will need to spend less time at sea to make a trip profitable, this in turn relieveing pressure on stocks. Or will they come up with more insanity, like another vessel decommissioning scheme, thereby needlessly further threatening the viability of another traditional industry? Judging by the past record of the EU, I'm not holding my breath.

However, if the EU comes up with more negativity towards our fishermen, I hope that the three elements of the industry (catchers, processors and enforcers) get together to dump the EU regulations over the side, and start operating their own system. Time for a sensible and effective approach to the fish stocks conservation issue.

And thank you, Hugh, for bringing the issue to the notice of a wider public, who, for donkey's years, have been fed a potent diet of the misleading propaganda from the conservation pressure groups. I bet the good burghers of Hastings (and/or their cats!) enjoyed their fish too!

APPOINTMENTS AND ARTWORK

2011-01-09T05:22:00.000-08:00

Last week, things got gradually back to normal after the festive season. Even the weather seemed to return to its damp dull usual for a Shetland winter, at least until Thursday, when the snow returned to plague us once more.

My work is not greatly affected by either festivities or weather, except in so far as light is concerned. Progress has been slow and steady on both my commissions, and I hope to have at least one of these ready to illustrate next week's contribution to this blog. I even got a little done on the Gourdon Harbour stock work which, however, is still a long way from completion.

I attended an appointment with the optician on Wednesday afternoon. My eyesight is very important to me, as you may well imagine, and I was alarmed, one evening just before Christmas, when my eyes refused to refocus straight away when I averted them from the Radio Times crossword, on which I had been concentrating, to a more distant object. This gave me a fright, and precipitated the making of the appointment. Meanwhile, I mentioned the problem to my sister Thelma, who is a church organist. Apparently she suffers the same condition, which can make things awkward when she has to play off sheet music and keep an eye on other things happening around her at the same time. The optician was reassuring, giving me a good eye test and finding nothing wrong with my deadlights that can't be attributable to the march of time.

My next appointment will have to be with a hairdresser, but I am reluctant to have my scalp denuded in this cold weather. Many of my fellow-Shetlanders are currently cultivating fine sets of long hair and whiskers for the forthcoming fire festivals. However, I'm not involved in any of them so, devoid of that excuse for hirsuteness, I'll just have to bite the cliched bullet, get shorn and buy a beanie! Yuk! Have a nice week!

CAPTAIN'S LOG, STAR DATE WHATEVER......!

2011-01-09T02:58:00.000-08:00

I try to keep a record, in the hastily scribbled pages of my diary, of the weather in Shetland each day. It's not a detailed scholarly affair, such as might be kept by an amateur meteorologist, with temperatures, rainfall amounts, wind strengths and hours of sunshine. It's just a rough sketch (to put it in artist's terms) of the conditions prevalent at the time of writing. A typical entry might read:

"Mostly cloudy, fresh NW wind, showers, drier in afternoon with wind decreasing."

However, I really struggled with Friday, when my weather report took up half a page, thus:

"Fresh NW wind with snow showers, after fairly heavy overnight snow with drifting. The wind dropped by daylight, and snow started falling gently, laying down another few inches. Around late morning, the wind was light to moderate E, veering round to SW by midday, with heavy snow turning to sleet and rain, wind near gale force. Wind gradually decreasing during afternoon, with sleet showers turning back into snow after dark. Wind light, then, around mid-evening, the wind picked up strong from the S and the snow turned back to rain."

As the snow fell on Friday morning, I set off with Ertie Burgess in his 4x4 fanbuster to collect a prescription at Scalloway surgery for my mother, and from thence to Whiteness, travelling on the main roads only (gave the Tingwall valley route a miss), in conditions best described as "passable with care". Of course, some of the drivers were overdoing the "care" bit, causing following motorists to brake and skid in the deep slushy mess. We arrived at Whiteness safely, and took the Brugarth brae, which had a foot covering of snow for most of its length, at the second attempt. We were obviously the first vehicle to attempt the feat that day.

Now, as I write this in Lerwick, the snow has been thawing slowly for two days, but I can see the white stuff is still lying deep in places in the hills. I won't be sorry to see the last of it, but I fear it will not be for a couple of months yet - at least.

Ugh!

Oh, and today's entry? "Bright at times, strong NW wind with sleet showers."

......AND IN WITH THE NEW!

2011-01-02T07:47:00.000-08:00

I have heard tell of a custom, which used to be practised in some parts of these islands, by which people did a little, on New Year's Day, of everything which they intended to do more extensively during the coming year. What this was supposed to achieve is unclear, except perhaps as a statement of intent, but I like to subscribe to this idea, partly because it's good to see traditions upheld, and partly because it gets a bit of work done anyway.

So yesterday I did a bit of work on one of my commissioned paintings, and a little writing, as well as some work on the computer. I cooked (chicken), did a (very) little cleaning, and a bit of admin, in that I took down the 2010 calendar and year planner, replacing them with the new versions with all the necessary carry-forwards of symbols (sad, eh?). It also had the first appointment of the new year - with the optician on Wednesday. A certain well-known credit card company had sent me a calendar which has a rather useful-looking system of admin contained therein. These systems are only as useful as the person operating them, though, so it remains to be seen just how effective this one turns out to be.

There were some omissions from from my a-little-bit-of-everything routine of yesterday. I didn't pick up my guitar, which spends month after month gathering dust on my sofa. There seemed to be so little time for practice during 2010, and an awful lot of this is necessary in order to achieve any proficiency as a musician. A damaged left-hand pinkie, broken in an accident at work in 1978 and never re-set, is a handicap! I have reams of classical guitar music manuscript lying unplayed in a cupboard, a situation which I recognise as unsatisfactory, and I would like to do something about this in 2011. The trouble is that I have to spend so much time on the various elements of being self-employed as a visual artist, that at the end of a day's work at the easel and the computer (where I have to strive to keep my website http://www.tait-gallery.co.uk/ reasonably attractive to surfers and search engines), all my desire to become a Segovia, Williams or Bream has strangely dissipated. In this, as with many other things, I must do better!

All the best, to you and yours, for 2011. May all your plans come to fruition!

OUT WITH THE OLD.....

2011-01-02T06:32:00.000-08:00

The snow, which was beginning to thaw at the time of my last post to this blog last Sunday afternoon, had virtually disappeared by Tuesday. The ground, which had been under a foot of the white stuff, displayed not a trace of it after 36 hours of wind and rain. However I see, from the Met Office website, that winter is set to return to the islands by Thursday. Let's hope that it's only a temporary reappearance.

I've been working, when light conditions allowed, on the two presently easeled (I work flat on the smaller paintings, so the easel is figurative) commissioned works, and I have even managed a couple of hours on the "stock" work of Gourdon harbour. I received encouragement in the post, in the form of a Christmas card from previous customers in Canada, who exhorted me to "keep up the blog!". It's good to know that people read these posts, even when I feel I have little of interest to relate in them. My grateful thanks to Kim and John from Toronto - for everything!

My brother made one of his flying visits to the islands of his birth last week. In accordance with what seems to have become a tradition, we honoured him by laying on a tattie soup event at Brugarth, Whiteness, for Wednesday tea-time. In the afternoon I took up my usual station at the sink, peeling and dicing copious quantities of carrots, swede and potatoes for the soup, which was to have been made on "reestit mutton". Sadly, what had been supplied to us had seen none of the cure ingredients which would have distinguished it as "reestit" from the "piece o' saat mutton", which is how my mother described it. These ingredients, which many curers keep a close secret and vary according to the manufacturer's tradition, go into the saline solution in which the meat spends a day or two prior to being hung up to dry until it is as hard as rock. Accordingly, Wednesday's soup was a little disappointing flavour-wise. We made a better-tasting potful with two bits of fresh boiling beef last year.

My brother arrived on Tuesday morning's ferry and left with the same vessel on Thursday evening. On Friday I paid my last visit of 2010 to Brugarth, where I found my mother well, having enjoyed her festive season so far, with lots of visits from her burgeoning family. In addition to the usual cooking, washing-up, shopping and multifarious small jobs I help her with, I took the bulbs (which I had planted back in October, and which have all responded to the treatment from my horticulturally inept hands by miraculously sprouting shoots) from the dark place underneath the workshop bench to the front porch. As my mother says; "hit's aye somethin' growwin'!". Even the tulips, which I had planted outside in the front border, are showing signs of life.

I returned to Lerwick in the late afternoon, unpacked my provisions from the Whiteness shop, filled my meter with cards from the same source, checked postal and electronic mail, and settled down for an evening in front of the box. I didn't intend to go out again until Monday afternoon at least, and I had resolved to be in bed by the time the chimes sounded at midnight (changed days for me!) and I was just dropping off when the fireworks gave me a rude awakening. Bye-bye, 2010!

NOT BOXING DAY!

2010-12-26T11:40:00.000-08:00

I learnt this startling news from my diary today, namely that the 26th December is not Boxing Day when it falls on a Sunday. Even more startling is the fact that I've gone through 63 Christmastides without being aware of this.

Well, I've just had my first warm-up of my share in the turkey "carry-out" from the family meal at Whiteness yesterday. There's still enough left for me to make a rice concoction with for tomorrow's lunch too. Even better was my sister Mary's sticky toffee pudding, the second (and sadly the last!) helping of which I warmed under the grill today. Megayum!

In anticipation of the jollification ahead, I got my artwork as up-to-date as I could, before setting off to Brugarth on Friday morning to spend Christmas Eve and Day with mother. The two commissions which I have scheduled for completion before the end of January are now well under way, with skies completed and the other features outlined. I hope to get more work done on one of these tomorrow. My advertising bills have now been paid, and the bank accounts are still in the black (just), despite the disaster of the Thursday Toll Clock stalls, which yielded only half of what I'd hoped for, mostly due to adverse weather conditions. Better luck next year, I hope! With things as nearly under control as they ever get chez the Tait Gallery, I set off to take up my duties as general assistant and kitchen porter at Brugarth, which, like the rest of Shetland, is under a foot of snow.

Mother had a late night on Christmas Eve. We had heard that my niece Elanor was playing in a recording by the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, which was being shown on BBC1 Scotland around midnight, so the home help was excused duty at Mum's that evening, and Mary was on hand to perform the bedtime routine instead. Mary's daughter Caroline was taping the programme in case Mum DIDN'T fancy staying up, so the gaps were covered. In the end she did stay up, and the three of us watched an excellent concert of classical-based Christmas music, just the kind which we have enjoyed singing together in choirs over the years, only this time accompanied by an orchestra!

The BBC have provided us with a feast of good Christmas choral music over the past week or so. I've enjoyed all of it, whether presented as a historical documentary, a service or a recital. Simon Russell Beale and Howard Goodall have both done excellent programmes and, together with the traditional Nine Lessons and Carols from Kings on Christmas Eve, and another wonderful programme from Winchester yesterday, I know that my mother has really felt a seasonal atmosphere these last few days, something she has felt was lacking in previous years. Beeb, take a bow! I know that there are probably pressures from the secular, anti-religious and other lobbies (God help us!) to cut down on the Christian output, but there are at least three people who are very happy with what they have seen and heard this festive season.

Christmas was about the coldest morning I have ever experienced. I was up at 7.30am, before the central heating had started to thaw the kitchen out, and I despaired of it being warm enough to allow mother to occupy it. I felt like starting a fire in the place - sadly it's supposed to be centrally heated! It did warm up a bit before mother got up, fortunately, and Mary and I set about preparing a feast for the same company which sat around the same table at the same time last year. And we had another jolly good time too!

By the time we had finished clearing up afterwards, darkness had fallen over the snow, and I took the opportunity of a lift back to Lerwick with Mary's son-in-law David Thomson. He was at the wheel of his father's Range Rover, which he had borrowed for its Arctic terrain capabilities. On the way in to town, the snow was sparkling in the headlight beams, as if some mighty hand had scattered multi-coloured glitter over it, a phenomenon which I can't recall seeing before - perhaps my eyes have never previously been tuned to the spectacle! Thus ended a kind of magical Christmas Day. Even though my back was sore, and I felt knackered at the end of it, I could still appreciate that it had been a special occasion, and I hope the others felt it too - I know mother did!

Now the thaw has set in - the wind has picked up to a fresh south-easterly, and it has clouded over. No doubt it will rain tonight, and, by tomorrow morning, a lot of the snow will have gone - for now! My brother arrives in Shetland for a very short break on Tuesday morning's boat. There are rumours of another feast, this time of reestit mutton soup, on Wednesday evening, and no doubt I'll be on sink duty for that too. I wouldn't have it otherwise!

For those of you who are having them, I hope your Hogmanay celebrations go well next Friday night into Saturday! A guid new year tae ane and a' - when it comes!

STILL WHITE!

2010-12-19T07:20:00.000-08:00

As I intimated as a possibility in my last post (sound the bugles!), my final pre-Christmas stall of 2010 at the Toll Clock Centre was snowed off on Thursday, which was also, with predictably immaculate timing, the day the blizzards struck. I spent a slightly more productive day in the comparative warmth of my studio, working on commissioned works mostly. I now have three of these to occupy me, with another possibly in the offing, and, while none of these will make my fortune, they are interesting jobs to do.

Two of the new commissions are of historic Shetland fishing boats, one of the paintings featuring two of these, the other only one. Both pictures have been ordered by descendants of the owners of the vessels to be depicted. One of these boats was lost at sea as a result of an engine-room fire, another going to her watery grave, some years after being sold by her Shetland owners, while on admiralty duties during the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940. I'm not sure what happened to the third boat. She probably ended her days aground, as many of her contemporaries did, in one of the many Shetland inlets or "voes", being left to rot, having become obsolete with the advancement of fishing boat design and propulsion. I will do my best, as always, to bring them to colourful life again on canvas - they still make nice subjects for seascape paintings!

The third commission, which I may have mentioned in a previous post, is of a slightly later fishing vessel which was completed at Macduff in 1940, and which spent the 1950s fishing out of Eyemouth. I'll be painting her coming into her home port from the fishing grounds.

While the commissions pay the bills, I'm very conscious of the passage of time, as it careers towards my next scheduled exhibition at Catterline in November/December of 2011. Many things will have to be organised before then, such as Northlink ferry journeys, accommodation for myself and my driver, publicity material and grants to cover part of the cost of the above. I just hope I can muster at least one willing (and fit!) helper to assist with the hanging when that time comes. Oh, and somewhere along the line I'll need to do some paintings for it too!

I plan to go out to my mother's on the morning of Christmas Eve, as I usually do, and should be there until sometime late on Christmas day. I'll be trying to make myself useful, helping to deal with the turkey, and acting as kitchen porter on the day. Mother has admitted that, at 94, she doesn't feel up to making her usual butter-scotch trifle for sweet, which is disappointing, but Mary has volunteered her sticky toffee pudding, which will be a worthy substitute. I'll probably attempt some snow clearance, although the brae was under about a foot of the white stuff for most of its length on Friday, more has fallen since, and more is forecast during the coming week. Ertie's 4x4 fanbuster only made it to the top at the third attempt on Friday, the snow lying on a base of black ice.

It's all a bit grim, but beautiful in its own way. While I hate this wintry weather, it does provide some spectacular skies to admire and artistically appreciate. Since childhood, I have always noticed the intensity of the purple and orange of cumulus snow-cloud, particularly in the afternoons around sunset. Have a happy, peaceful and colourful Christmas!

ABERDEEN TRAWLER "BURWOOD"

2010-12-14T04:23:00.000-08:00

I turned 13 years of age in 1961, when the Aberdeen trawler "Burwood" was completed by Mitchison's yard at Gateshead. Here she is heading north-east out of her home port, with Girdleness lighthouse on her starboard quarter.

This is the first "stock" work I have completed for some months, and its intended destination is the next exhibition at Catterline at the end of 2011 - unless someone buys her online first, from http://www.tait-gallery.co.uk/

It's not been a great 9 days chez the Tait Gallery, since my last posting here, and the prospects for the rest of this week aren't good either. It's a beautiful sunny day in Shetland, and the snow has all but disappeared from the hillsides, where it had formed deep drifts last Wednesday evening and night. But the forecasters are all predicting a blizzard on Thursday, which is my next (and last for this year) scheduled stall day at the Toll Clock centre. If the weather is bad, I won't even bother to turn up. Last Thursday's non-event was also badly snow-affected, the roads having been blocked by snow the night before, and the thaw set in that evening, too late to do me any good. And now the snow is arriving just in time to write off my last chance to make a few bob with my cards and prints this year. One has to be philosophical about these things. I guess I was just unlucky. You win some, you lose some, and all the rest of the appropriate homespun truisms.

In view of the fact that most of you don't like to see grown men crying, I will spare you any more moans on this occasion. Have a nice week, as you prepare the bird for Christmas, and a merry festive season to all you single men too. LOL!

I hope to be in a better frame of mind (and humour) for my next post, hopefully on Sunday. Byee!

ARTWORK, OLD FRIENDS AND ERTIE'S FANBUSTER

2010-12-05T06:13:00.000-08:00

While Shetland has not suffered the same volume of snowfall which has been making people's lives a misery on the Scottish mainland, it has been a few feet deep in places, and it was enough to cause problems for the gallant SIC snow-plough/gritter crews. It was also enough to deter people from visiting the Toll Clock Centre, where I sat in my thermals at my stall on Thursday. My takings for the day did sneak into three figures, but not as much as I would have expected for the 2nd of December. There just weren't many people about, although I did meet a few old friends.

One such old chum was my fellow painter Liam O'Neill, down from Unst for a quick shopping trip. I have known him since my art college days, and I had the pleasure of his company for part of the morning. We talked about our art, our ailments and old times, and it was good to see him looking so well. My thanks must also go to Neil Robertson, who brought me a very welcome cup of coffee, and to my sister Mary, who gave up part of her lunch break to look after the stall while I took a much-needed pit-stop. She sold the first print of the day too!

I've received another commission this week, and I've been doing a bit of online research in connection with this. It is for a painting of an Eyemouth-based fishing boat, and views of the mouth of this busy harbour, to use for information on the background, would be gratefully received. My customer is furnishing me with a photograph of the boat itself, the "Dougals" (BK247). I've been working on another order too, a painting of two old Shetland fishing boats, which means that, in the limited daylight hours available to me just now, the stock/exhibition works have been taking a back seat again.

We mustered another shovel-party for the road up to mother's house on Monday. I'm ashamed to say that this time I never had a shovel in my hand, most of the spadework being done by my nephew, his wife, son and father, also joined by a neighbour and my sister Mary, while my sister Thelma and I attended to catering matters indoors. The labourers dined on bannocks filled with salt beef and tongue, washed down by copious quantities of tea. The snow had not been as deep as I had feared - nothing like as deep as when the first such party was mustered in early February. This time, Graham Robinson had no trouble ascending the Brugarth brae in his minibus, which bore my mother safely back to the warmth of her own home, after her fortnight's break at the Wastview Care Centre in Walls.

I visited her again on Friday, when I paid my "normal" call on her with her pension and shopping from the Whiteness shop, as well as her medication from the Scalloway surgery. My driver was Ertie Burgess, who recently took delivery of his formidable new 4x4 taxi which I have begun referring to as the fanbuster. "Fan" is the Shetland dialect word for a deep snowdrift, and I was surprised to see one, about two feet deep on the left-hand side, at the top of the Brugarth brae when we arrived on Friday morning. It never even slowed the vehicle down - it burst through the snow as if it wasn't there!

The worst of the snow seems to be over, for the time being at least. The Met Office are forecasting wintry showers and icy roads for the coming week, and the temperature is certainly not going to be high, but no heavy falls of the white stuff are being predicted for here. I'm very glad about that. I hope, wherever you are, you keep safe this week.

HOOFIELD FROM THE STUDIO WINDOW

2010-12-05T02:06:00.000-08:00

It's a beautiful morning in Lerwick, and I couldn't resist taking this photograph from my flat (studio) window. It depicts the snow-covered berg of Hoofield, about ten miles away, showing over the nesses of Trebister and Sound, with some of the houses of West Sletts Park, Lerwick in the foreground. The snow has thawed in the lower areas over the last couple of days, but it's still lying thick higher up.

The photo might be a little out of focus, but it demonstrates why I like my little Pentax camera, why I'm never short of inspiration (although the word is rather a lofty one) and also why I'm an artist!

SNOW AGAIN!

2010-11-28T07:17:00.000-08:00

The white stuff has arrived, as it has been threatening to do since late on Tuesday, but the real drifting, dangerous, road-blocking snow held off until Friday evening. The predicted heavy snowfall hasn't really materialised, at least here in Lerwick, where a couple of inches have settled, but it's still a nuisance, and my sister Mary, who has been out investigating the private road up to our mother's house at Whiteness, tells me that there's about six inches to a foot of it there. Mother returns from her regular fortnight's respite care tomorrow afternoon, and the road will have to be cleared, as it was on two occasions last winter, before Graham Robinson's minibus can climb the "Brugarth Brae". A shovelling squad of sisters, brother-in-law, nephews and nieces has been organised for tomorrow morning, and I'm looking forward to the event, which will be fun.

My second pre-Christmas Toll Clock Centre stall took place on Thursday, after much dithering on my part as to whether I ought to set out for there, in the freezing conditions, with my six holdalls of goodies. In the end, I was glad I did, as I had a highly successful few hours there. Prints, both A3 and A4, packs of greeting cards and postcards were all flying off my table, and there seemed to be quite a bit of interest in my work, which was most gratifying. I also bagged a commission for another painting (a seascape) which I've subsequently begun work on.

I've done a little more work on the two "stock" works, mentioned in previous posts, although bad light and other matters have interfered with my easel time on these. Why is my painting operation like a cricket test match? Because both are often stopped by bad light, of course!

The new greeting cards arrived on Thursday while I was out at the stall, and they are excellent. I look forward to having some of these on display at next Thursday's effort, and I'll have to get them up on the website too (http://www.tait-gallery.co.uk/).

Almost on the spur of the moment, my sister Mary decided to make a quick trip out to Walls early on Tuesday evening , before the onset of the forecast wintry weather. She offered me the chance to come along, which I readily accepted, and our mother was surprised and pleased to see us walking through the foyer of the Wastview Centre just as she and the other residents were finishing their tea. It was a beautiful evening, and a near-full moon was lighting up the surface of Gruting, Bixter and Weisdale voes as we made our way back to Lerwick.

There were no problems with frost that evening (there was too much wind, for a start), but the council gritting squads are now working flat out to keep the highways open. And the cold spell looks set to continue, possibly until Christmas, although I really hope it doesn't. When I was a youngster, I used to love the snow, but my sledging days on the Houlland Hill at Sandwick are more than half-a-century into the past, and now I see the white stuff only as a menacing, slippery nuisance. It can't go soon enough for me. Enjoy your winter sports this week!

COME BACK, JETSTREAM!

2010-11-21T13:38:00.000-08:00

The weather, along with its consequences, has once again been a main topic of conversation in the bars, restaurants and speakeasies of Lerwick. The south-easterly gales kept the Northlink ferries (which provide the lifeline service to and from Shetland) in port for two days, and then, just when the weather had eased a bit, the "Hrossey" took a knock from an oil supply boat in Aberdeen harbour, which caused enough hull damage to keep her in port for another two days, while repairs were effected. This meant that the first incoming passenger ferry since Wednesday arrived this morning, although the freight boat "Clare" did make it in yesterday. Shelves were getting a bit bare of foodstuffs in the shops and supermarkets (all two of them!) of Lerwick, as they tend to do when our lifeline service is disrupted - whether by wind, wave or wayward political administration trying to save a bob or two from a cash-strapping budget.

My work has also suffered from the atmospheric conditions. In particular the light, which has been my friend during the summer months, has become a glowering oppressor now that winter has arrived. My artistic output has become occasional and spasmodic, and progress on my paintings has been negligible. The sun becomes an enemy at this time of year. On the days when it makes an appearance, it is low in the sky, blinding people who find themselves at the wheel of south-bound cars, and causing me to make use of the blind in my studio window.

I had my first pre-Christmas stall at the Toll Clock Centre on Thursday, when the gale was still blowing, and few people were about. Those who did were showing little interest in my new greeting card line, although I did sell a couple of prints, which made the exercise worthwhile, and a couple of people expressed an interest in commissioning work from me - nothing definite though. I'll be there again this coming Thursday, but the long-term weather prognosis is for snow to low levels by then, so I'm not holding my breath as to the day's success as a sales drive.

As a matter of fact, the prospects for another winter like the last one are looking quite realistic, according to my reading of the Met Office's weather prognosis. What happened to that friendly jetstream, which used to drive a succession of Atlantic depressions across us during the winter months? Each low meant a day of southerly or south-easterly gales and rain, clearing to another day of north-westerly gales and showers, then a quieter colder day, by the end of which the wind was beginning to rise from the south-east again, with high cloud heralding the arrival of the next weather system. For most of last winter, this just didn't happen - we seemed to be under the influence of high pressure over and to the north of us all the time. This produced a mixture of sleet and snow, the night-time temperatures being low enough to ensure that the porridgy mess, which had formed on the roads and pavements during the day, solidified into a kind of slippery concrete, which a pick could scarcely penetrate. And the surface pressure charts, produced by the weatherpeople, are starting to look ominously similar to those of last year. Brrrrrugh!

Have a nice week!

COMPUTER PROBLEMS!

2010-11-21T03:36:00.000-08:00

Once again I find myself in apologetic mode, this time for not posting to this blog last weekend. This was due to the fact that my computer and I had spent an unscheduled five days apart, from Thursday 11th to Tuesday 16th November. I missed it dreadfully. The ready availability of my email inbox, my website, my Ship AIS, Ships Nostalgia, Met Office and suppliers sites have become a crutch on which I lean far too often, and being without them is painful, I have to admit.

The reason for our separation was my Kaspersky internet protection package. I downloaded the new version (having paid £40 for the privilege, including the back-up CD) after being prompted to do so by email from the suppliers. Having done so, I discovered that none of my USB devices were working. In effect, I had no mouse, no camera and no printer, to mention only three, and, although the computer was still responsive to instructions from the keyboard, I am not proficient enough in its use to run my system from it. So the thing needed to be repaired - urgently!

I phoned my local fixer of such things, he took the thing away, and eventually solved the problem, which was due to my anti-nasty not downloading properly (there's an irony in there somewhere!). He anticipated many more calls from Kaspersky users. I was the first, simply because I had responded promptly to the email from the providers, and didn't leave it until the last minute, as perhaps I should have done. One lives and learns, doesn't one?

Since being reunited with my computer on Tuesday, I have been enjoying the renewal of our passionate, intimate and fruitful relationship. Let's face it, it's the nearest I'm going to get to one nowadays. Come, electronic device, and get a cuddle!

A WEEK ON THE SICK!

2010-11-07T05:15:00.000-08:00

It has been occasionally (and justifiably) said that I don't know my arse from my elbow, and the association between the two metaphorically-linked body parts has been more than usually close during the last few days. A cyst, which had been quietly developing in the folds of skin covering my elbow, became infected a few weeks ago, and, my own homespun treatments having failed to solve the problem, I decided to seek the help of the experts located in the Lerwick Doctor's Practice. As a result of my consultation with the doctor and the practice nurses, I am now on a course of flucloxacillin tablets, which are having a predictable effect on my digestive system. They seem to be having the desired effects on the infection, and I am more than halfway through the course, so I'll endure the side-effects, with as good grace as I can muster, for the next few days.

It has provided me with an excuse for a week of little achievement in the artwork field, although I did send my latest commissioned painting to the West Midlands on Monday morning, and my client seems pleased with it ( painting shown above). There are now no more commissions in hand, although a couple more may be in the offing. For the next few weeks (assuming no commissions), in the failing winter light conditions, I'll be concentrating on exhibition "stock" works, and the stalls at the the Toll Clock Centre here in Lerwick, which start a week on Thursday (18th). There I hope to do a roaring trade with my new product line of greeting cards, as well as selling a few prints and postcards, which are more established items.

I'll be advertising in the Press & Journal and the Royal Yachting Association magazine in the weeks leading up to Christmas, hoping to drum up a little more interest through exposure in the mainland print media. It's still the best way, in partnership with the website www.tait-gallery.co.uk of letting people know I'm still here.

Please permit me the indulgence of using this blog post to plug my greeting cards. They are really of exceptionally high quality, and are unusually large for notelets, which, in effect, with their blank insides without any felicitation whatsoever, is what they are. They have plenty of space for a short letter. And I didn't plan them thus! I believed the cards to be A5 unfolded when I ordered them. I'll be uploading four more front page images during the coming week, so take a look and let me know what you think - I need feedback!

I hope to be back in rude health by the time I write next week's post. I have just returned from a trip out to Whiteness with my sister Thelma to visit our mother, who is also well, as is my sister's Toyota, which is now repaired after it's power-steering breakdown at the filling station this time last week. I hope you stay fit during the coming seven days - see that your body parts remain in a well-distinguishable state!

A CONTEMPLATION ON LAST WEEK'S APOLOGY

2010-10-31T13:49:00.000-07:00

Sad, isn't it? The only post I could I could manage to put together last week was an apology for the errors in the previous one! I'm studying my diary (life's book of original entry!) carefully this time, so that such factual inaccuracies can be avoided for this post. Some of these entries are quite amusing. Here's one for the afternoon of Monday 18th October:-

Clutching my urine sample, I took a taxi (heavy rain falling!) to the Lerwick Doctor's Practice for my routine periodical check-up appointment at 3pm. The practice nurse was running late with her appointments, so I waited for 40 minutes before my name came up on the screen, by which time I'd practically fallen asleep. My blood pressure is as it should be, she took a blood sample (to test for cholesterol levels, it emerged), and she accepted my urine sample (which had miraculously survived the afternoon's proceedings thus far) with what seemed to be an unnecessary degree of gratitude. She dipped cotton buds in it, and did little tests on it (for what I didn't inquire, nor was this information forthcoming, so I presumed the tests were negative). I took the opportunity to weigh myself, and I tipped the scales at 12st 7lbs (I still think in old money, and fortunately the device was able to translate for me!), which is 7lbs too much, although the nurse didn't seem to be too concerned about it. A weight-loss programme is called for - ugh!

Some of my diary entries are unpublishable, and it's just as well they are practically unreadable too (my handwriting has gone downhill over the years). I could be sued for something, in these days where unnecessary litigation is the only growth industry in Britain. Most of the scrawled jottings are just plain boring - the minutiae of a professional artist's daily routine are as repetitive and dull as those of a filing clerk (probably more so!). What I cooked for lunch, what was in the post, who visited, which places I visited during a trip out to the shops, and what I did to whichever painting, the process of the creation of which is much the same for every work. And, of course, the weather - it was blowing a hooligan yesterday! I see I've lost one of my few blog followers, which is rather disppointing, but not surprising!

I enjoy my life as a self-employed oil painter. It will never make me rich, but it just about pays the bills for a single 62-year-old chap with needs to match his modest income. I wake each morning with a feeling of pleasurable anticipation over what the day ahead might hold. When my brother was up here on holiday recently, he told me about a colleague (in a previous job) who used to throw up his Sunday lunch when he thought of the working week ahead of him. What an existence! To work long hours at a job, just to put food on the table for you and your family, while hating the work so much that you couldn't digest the food anyway - there's something seriously wrong there. And how many other people are doing the same thing?

I no longer spend a fortune on wine (or rather lager!), women and song, so I live comparatively frugally. Probably my biggest outlay is on stuff for the business itself. And since I've saved virtually nothing, my work is going to be my old age pension, for as long as I'm able to do it. I have considered taking out one of those over-50 insurance plans just to provide for my burial, but I'm a conscientious objector to that most cynical of form of business, so I guess I won't bother. A pauper's grave will fit me just as well, I'm sure. They could put me in a black bag and chuck me over a cliff somewhere, but I expect that will upset the environmentalists, bless them!

All of which jolly stuff seems to have taken me a long way from the subject on which this post began, namely the factual inaccuracies (and apologies therefor) of previous posts. I hope there won't be too many of these bloopers in future, but you never know, do you? Have a good week.

CHRONOLOGICAL ERROR!

2010-10-24T00:44:00.000-07:00

That's what comes of trying to put together a post from different scraps of disjointed prose! I have now corrected the Tardis-type chronological error in last week's posting, regarding the despatch and arrival of the large painting to Cheshire. Sorry about that - it will probably happen again.

Another senior moment from the Artistic Curmudgeon!

POSTAGE AND PACKING

2010-10-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

The best news of the past two weeks came on Monday 4th October, when my client rang to tell me that he was pleased with the large seascape (at my second presentation) and that his cheque would be in the post later that week. I told him, when I had come down to earth again, that I would let the work dry for a few days, then get it in the post to him at the beginning of another week.

Here's where my family and my artwork come together, as the painting, at 47" x 39" x 2" deep, is too big for one person to safely handle in the wrapping process. My brother was up on holiday this week, and he agreed to help me with this delicate operation, which took place this last Tuesday afternoon. The packaging involved a couple of layers of bubble-wrap, outside of which were two sheets of 1" polystyrene sheeting (one each side), outside of which were another two layers of bubble-wrap. Then the cardboard outer protection went on, secured by copious quantities of parcel tape. I plastered "Fragile" stickers liberally over it, and attached my previously-prepared "Documents Enclosed" adhesive envelope. My brother reckoned the package was now well-nigh impregnable. I wasn't so sure, but it was difficult to tell how we could have reinforced it any more, so that's the way it went next morning. The post office counter assistant assured me that it would take 48 hours from Wednesday morning, but this turned out to be over-optimistic, as it took until Monday to arrive.

Work has been steady but slow on the commissioned painting of the Helford river in Cornwall. Calm water is always tricky to portray, and I won't be satisfied with the work until you feel you can dive into it for a swim! I've hardly touched the "stock" work of Gourdon harbour, but I'll be able to make better progress on it, and other works, now that the big job has finally been completed and despatched.

On the printing side. more greeting cards are on the way, and I've been replenishing my stock of giclee prints for my forthcoming stalls at the Toll Clock Centre. More of this in about a month's time. Very soon I'll have to turn my attention to decision-making about which magazines and newspapers I'm going to advertise in, in order to catch the eager eyes of the online Christmas shoppers. One tragic sales scenario which has yet to befall me is running out of stock - I'd sooner print too much than too little.

Here I am, preparing for another Christmas sales campaign, and it seems such a short time since the last one. According to the Met Office, the weather is to take on a rather Christmassy feel over the next few days. My sister Mary managed to get a flight out of strike-ridden France yesterday, after a few days holiday there. She was at Birmingham when I phoned her this morning, and she hopes to be back in Shetland on Tuesday morning. I fancy she'll find it a bit chilly after the Basque country. Winter draws on, I guess! Have a good week!

SENIOR MOMENTS?

2010-10-17T02:49:00.000-07:00

I must apologise for not contributing a few lines of prose, of whatever quality, to this blog last week. I have been rather busy, and, looking back over the past two weeks, I seem to have remarkably little to show for my industry. Twice during that time, I have sat down of an evening in front of this clipboard (on which I write my notes for these posts) and twice I have fallen asleep and woken up with a start, with scarcely a line written.

I think such occasions are known as senior moments. Although I'm only 62, I'm starting to make little blunders which I can only attribute to slight faculty-loss, such as going shopping for toiletries, without my glasses, and arriving home with a bottle of conditioner instead of shampoo. As a result, the other night, I was standing at my kitchen sink, scrubbing my hair desperately and vainly in an attempt to get a lather going. It's a wonder I have any hair left! Whatever conditioner does to a fellow's locks is well and truly done to mine now!

I'm starting to mislay things as well. The other night I found myself in need of my pastry brush (for cooking purposes, I hasten to add!), which is normally among the miscellaneous culinary weaponry in the side compartment of my cutlery drawer, and it was not to be found. That and a medium-sized black-handled vegetable knife seem to have become the latest victims of my absent-mindedness.

I've got an appointment to see whatsername at the Lerwick Doctor's thingummy tomorrow afternoon, to have my blood pressure checked. Perhaps I should mention whatever I was talking about earlier to her. I've got to take a urine sample with me, and I'm wondering what to transport that in - they're taking the whatsit, aren't they?

WAD OR DAD

2010-10-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

While I much prefer summer to winter, I don't think I suffer from seasonal affective disorder (even the name doesn't make much sense to me). The long hours of summer daylight translate into more time at the easel, resulting in greater daily productivity, and the more work I get done, the happier I am. My mood varies according to the light conditions (leaving aside work output for now), so I think I will own up to a kind of weather affective disorder, or possibly gloom-induced depression, which is a strange expression indeed, come to think of it. Enough!

Monday was bright and sunny, with light winds (good mood weather), and I took advantage of the conditions to put some good work into the big man-o'-war painting. I put the final details into the masts, hull and rigging, and did a bit more on the sea around the ship. My sister Thelma came along for elevenses, which presented her with problems, as she had just had a tooth extracted (by her dentist, I hasten to add!), and the local anaesthetic was causing her to dribble a bit.

I phoned the people in charge of the Toll Clock Centre, to be told the bad news that I was too late to get Saturday slots for my stall in the run-up to Christmas. I settled for Thursdays, same as last year, from mid-November onwards. How early do I have to book to get a Saturday spot, for goodness sake? I received a quotation from DCS Printing Services for the production of greeting cards for the local branch of a well-known charity. I relayed this information to my sister Mary, who is the local organiser for the charity.

Tuesday saw the arrival of the last and largest cruise ship of the season. When I got up for my bath, at 6.30am, the "Grand Princess" looked impressive and luminous in the early morning half-light, filling a large section of my view of Breiwick Bay, as she came to anchor off the Knab. The wind rose during the day, and the sky clouded over ominously in the afternoon, but the rain held off until evening, so those of her 2,200 passengers who went for a run ashore would have had a decent day's sight-seeing. The port authority representative, who came on Radio Shetland that evening, was spinning the usual yarn of how important cruise ships are to the local economy, and I take issue with this. Apart from the port authority and the bus companies, which section of the local economy is benefitting? Perhaps the odd knitwear outlet might see some trade, but not much else. Very few cruise ship passengers buy anything from local businesses.

I worked again on the big picture, tidying up a few lines and angles, and doing a bit more on the sea in the immediate vicinity of the ship. Thelma arrived for elevenses again, and we had our usual natter about life, family and music. I made kedgeree for my lunch, and remembered to put out my bin-bag for collection, before taking a walk down to the corner shop for essential foodstuffs. I then worked on the Cornish scene painting for a while, although my heart wasn't really in the task. The sky was clouding over and the GID was coming over me again. And this continued into the evening, which should have been spent working on SEO projects for my newly-upgraded website (http://www.tait-gallery.co.uk/), but little of this was attempted or achieved on Tuesday.

Wednesday was dull, wet and increasingly windy, and I struggled with the light to get more done on the big seascape during the morning. In the afternoon, I started on a new "stock" work, a picture of Gourdon harbour based on photographs I took on my last little jaunt to the mainland, back in April. That now looks like being my last trip of the year.

Mary arrived after work, and we took a run out west, first stopping at her home at Strand for some of her delicious risotto before setting out again in the gale-driven rain to visit our mother in the Wastview Care Centre. She seemed to be well and enjoying her respite care period, and I enjoyed getting away from the flat, with all its paraphernalia of life as a self-employed artist, and breathe some unpolluted air, despite the atrocious weather conditions.

Thursday was the deadline which I had set myself (and was foolhardy enough to declare to my client) to have the work finished on the alterations to the big picture. I just about made it (I think) and phoned him with an upbeat progress report (I don't know who I'm trying to kid - him or myself!). I fully expect him to reject the work again, when I get it photographed and emailed to him in JPEG form, possibly on Saturday, if the weather allows (it's still pretty dismal and blowy today). This project has blown large holes in any confidence in my own ability I may have previously had.

I made a big pot of scotch broth on a lump of brisket I had found at the Whiteness shop when we called there on our way to Walls yesterday evening. Mary and I enjoyed the stuff, which is very tasty, but tends to have side effects which match the weather - wet and windy! In the afternoon I worked a bit more on the Gourdon harbour painting, the drawing of which is quite tricky. It's a very simple composition, but all the more care has to be taken over laying it out. In the early evening, I phoned my brother Arthur, to wish him many happy returns on his 60th birthday. Time marches on - for everyone.

Friday dawned bright and breezy, and my mood was more upbeat than it had been all week. The wind increased steadily during the day, and was touching storm force by late evening. I watched fishing boats heading for the shelter of Lerwick harbour during the morning - they'll be glad of the lee it affords. I went out early to get my copy of the Shetland Times, and spent my morning coffee break, along with hundreds of others around the islands, poring over the pages of this institutional publication!

I took the big picture off the easel and put it on my living-room radiator, to accelerate the drying process. I spent the rest of the daylight hours carefully examining it and doing little bits of "snagging". The thing takes up an awful lot of room, and will look good in a much larger space than is available to me in my little abode. As the wind whistled round my top-floor flat, I spent the evening attending to domestic and administrative tasks.

Saturday morning was bright and clear, with only a fresh southerly breeze after the previous night's gales, which did some minor damage to Mary's polytunnel at Strand. I had determined to plant some flower-bulbs at Whiteness when I go out there on Monday, so I took a walk down to the garden shop to get some of these. Last autumn I had deliberated upon doing it, ended up not doing it, and regretted my inaction since. Thelma popped along for a cuppa, before she headed out to our mother's to do some preparation for her return on Monday, so she took the bulbs and an old earthenware casserole pot (which I intend to use as a planter) out there with her.

I had arranged for Mary to give me a hand with photographing the big picture, so I prepared a meal of fried fish for the two of us, which I timed pretty well, considering that I only had an approximate time for her arrival. The digital operation was successful, with a few good JPEGs to show for it - these will form attachments to my next email to my client. Mary headed off to effect polytunnel repairs with her neighbour, and I settled down to an afternoon of work on the Cornish painting. Progress is slow on this one, as the colours and shades of this remarkable scene are very subtle, and take a bit of getting. With a quiet ensuing evening (I had considered going for a pint or two, but couldn't be bothered - changed days!), so passed a reasonably succesful Saturday.

This morning, I listened to the service on radio 4 before going for a walk down to the Co-op to get electricity meter tokens, as my power was about to go off. Remarkably it still hadn't done so by the time I returned some 40 minutes later. I had several emails to send before I could address myself to the task of writing this blog post. Tomorrow, I'll be heading out to Whiteness to see that all is ready for mother's return from respite care. If I have time, I'll plant the flower-bulbs too. I desperately need some good news this incoming week, and I hope yours goes well too!

STUNTS!

2010-09-26T06:47:00.000-07:00

Shetlanders are very fond of a bit of free entertainment, and it arrived this week in the form of "Stunts 'R' Us", a quasi-scientific terrorist group otherwise known as Greenpeace. Members of this noble organisation gratuitously attached themselves to one of the anchor chains of the oil-drilling ship "Stena Carron", which had been lying north of Lerwick harbour for the previous couple of weeks while preparations for a forthcoming drilling operation west of these islands were made.

While the television, and, for all I know, the newspaper media (I never read the daily papers), gave the action of the "activists" the oxygen of publicity on which they thrive, for a couple of days at least, the islanders appear to have been less than sympathetic to their cause. The locally-based internet forums have been inundated with proposals as to how to respond to this unwelcome intrusion into the lawful daily business of the oil-drilling vessel. Suggestions included the employment of guns, harpoons and torpedoes, and the idea of dropping the anchor at regular intervals was also mooted. Personally, I thought winching up the anchor from time to time would keep the uninvited guests honest and regular.

In the end, nothing much came of the stunt. The rig operators obtained an injunction against the "activists", and both parties to this incident seem to have gone elsewhere - at least the drilling ship and the Stunts 'R' Us mother ship, "Esperanza" have disappeared from my Ship AIS map of the islands. Best of luck and safe operations to the former, and good riddance to the latter!

While islanders are as concerned as anyone about the risks involved in offshore oil exploration and recovery, it is the undemocratic modus operandi and arrogance of the protest group which gets up Shetland noses. Like other people around the world, we all watched in horror as events unfolded in the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding shorelines earlier this year. We had our own incident about seventeen years ago, when the fully-laden tanker "Braer" was wrecked on the Garths Ness rocks. Accidents can and will happen in the best-regulated households, so what do you do? Cease all of man's endeavours which involve an element of risk?

(Incidentally, the "Braer" incident was unconnected with any oil operations around Shetland. It happened because Shetland lay on the north side of the Fair Isle channel, through which the tanker, on her way from Mongstad in Norway to America, was about to pass, when she lost power in worsening weather conditions. The rest, as they say, is history, and the event has been fully documented in Jonathan Wills and Karen Warner's book "Innocent Passage", to which scholarly volume I have little of value to add.)

The consequences of oil exploration operations going wrong are undoubtedly grave. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Siberia, where huge areas of land have been destroyed by Russia's land-based oil extraction blunders. The scariest story of the week, for me, has been the news that Russia has laid claims to huge areas of the Arctic Ocean, with intent to exploit the enormous oil reserves which lie beneath it. If there is a country with a poor record on accident prevention in the oil industry, it is surely Russia. I could suggest this as a more likely source of an oily Armageddon, and a more appropriate venue for a Greenpeace campaign, but I doubt if they will take up this challenge and, even if they do, their protests would fall on even deafer ears than those of the Shetland Islanders.

EQUINOX!

2010-09-19T05:35:00.001-07:00

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that the weather should turn equinoctial, given that the autumn equinox takes place tomorrow. It has been blowing a gale during the latter half of this week, and I have been watching fishing boats, many of them Norwegian, scurrying for the shelter which Lerwick harbour affords. As the meteorological conditions become unsettled, I have been feeling strangely ill at ease this week, and I am at a loss as to adequately explain why.

I have had yet another effusive email of thanks from a grateful customer (to add to the many), and progress has been maintained on the other works, apart from the big picture, which I feel has been doomed from its delayed start due to damaged canvases being delivered to me. I now feel thoroughly discouraged with the project, and dread entering the side-studio where it sits broodingly on its easel. I feel like taking a four-inch brush, loading it with the most fluorescently inappropriate hue I can find among my paint-tubes, and vigorously obliterating the image before me on the canvas. What cathartic fun that would be! Never mind that I've spent four months creating that image and, a month ago, I was very happy with it. My client is dissatisfied, and I am not far away from returning his deposit to him, along with a letter telling him where he can put his patronage. As things stand, I am dabbing away at the painting, making little alterations here and there, for no good reason, and I know not, and care less, where the project is going.

I have started another two "stock" works (subject-matter yet to be decided) and continued work on my commissioned Cornish river-mouth scene. I have got all my greeting cards bagged up into "assorted" fours, single-themed fives, and a few singles. I have discovered that my new display units fit neatly into my two large holdalls, which is good news for when I'm carting all the stuff from and to the stall at the Toll Clock Centre (these will be starting again in November).

It has been a week for strange email messages about Taits (most of them polite!) from around the globe. One was from a woman of Tait ancestry who runs a beautiful guesthouse in the countryside of the Burgundy region in France. She complimented me on my work, and expressed her desire to trace her Shetland roots. She got in touch with me, as I am a Shetland Tait with a website and seemed a good contact to start with. Her grandmother, Grace Tait, was from Brae, so I forwarded the message to Dr Ian Tait, of Shetland Museum and Archives, who is also from that part of the islands. I also replied to her in helpful and appreciative terms.

Apparently there is, or was, a prolific landscape/seascape artist knocking about America somewhere, who signed his paintings "TAIT". This week I received an email from a lady in Austin, Texas, who is the second American to contact me with regard to this artist. I have had to tell her that I haven't the foggiest who this dauber is. "It wisna me", has been the main thrust of my replies to such enquiries, along with apologies for my inability to help. Anyone out there in the blogosphere know anything about him/her?

September is a big month for birthdays among the members of my family, with that of my brother, two of my sisters and my late father's all falling within that month. My sister Mary (not one of the September lot!) invited me to go with her, after she had finished work, down to Sandwick churchyard to lay a bunch of flowers on our father's grave, on what would have been his 99th birthday, on Friday. The wind was practically blowing us off balance as we performed this little task, after which I took some photographs of the scene. I emailed these to Mary afterwards, so that she could print them off to show mother next time she visited her. She (mother) goes in to the respite care centre for a much-needed holiday on Monday. She gives us a few anxious moments, but looked positively robust when I visited her earlier on Friday. She never ceases to amaze and perplex us!

And now the wind has dropped, the sun is shining, and it's a beautiful, if rather chilly, afternoon here in Lerwick. I've promised myself to do a bit of cleaning after I've posted this, but don't hold your breath! Have a nice week.

WHALES, SALES AND HEAVY MAILS

2010-09-12T05:29:00.000-07:00

The humpback whale, which put my islands of birth and domicile on the TV news programmes on Thursday, and was responsible for the first part of this post's very questionable title, disppeared as mysteriously as it had arrived, apparently taking with it the string of lobster creels in which it had earlier become entangled. Whether the animal had gone eastwards to freedom, or downwards to its death from exhaustion and drowning is still uncertain - one hopes the former outcome obtained.

It's changed times since my father (1911-1996) was a youngster. In those days of poverty and hardship, and before a universal electricity supply became the plumbed-in norm, such an event as an entangled whale would have been regarded as Christmas come early in the adjacent community. No part of the beast would have been wasted, it's various constituents being used for food, heating and lighting, and even its ribs being used as "rollers" for hauling boats up over stony or gravel beaches. For most of my life, the family boat was manually hauled or winched up over greased whalebone "linns", probably acquired from a similar beaching of old, or the now long defunct (and famously foul-smelling) factory at Olna, Brae.

Moving on, as seamlessly as I can manage (and with more than a whiff of Shakespeare in the air) from the foul to the fair, I can now address the subject of this week's artwork progress, which has been good. I've completed two works, begun another, and I can now display a work from which the burden of secrecy (which frequently attends presentation paintings) has now been lifted, and which I completed about a month ago. It features an aerial view of the cruise ship "Seabourn Legend".

The first painting to be completed this week is a snow scene of Baltasound Voe, and is to be the Christmas raffle prize for the local branch of a national charity. It will also be the cover illustration for their seasonal greeting cards. Being the crafty sod that I am, I did some negotiation with the charity's organiser, and gained permission (in view of the fact that I am not only not charging a penny for the painting, but also paying for the scanning of it by a local graphics firm), to produce giclee prints of it to sell for my own business. The other completed picture is another cloak and dagger presentation job, which won't be on public view until sometime in November.

It's just as well I've sold a few paintings, as it's been an expensive week! I bought a couple of display units, from an internet source, for the sale of my greeting cards at the Toll Clock Centre stall, as well as sealable cellophane bags for the same cards. I also bought a pricing gun, as my manually-written price-labels look scruffy. I'm justifying this on the basis that, with due care, these products will last me for as long as I am in business. In addition to this extravagance, I have also just paid for my year's normal web-hosting, and have received another bill for the design of the new e-commerce website upgrade (www.tait-gallery.co.uk). On top of this, I have had more giclee prints (paid for) produced by my usual graphics/printing firm, who are also doing the scanning of the charity painting and production of prints therefrom (still to be paid). Ouch!

I had much to ponder, therefore, as I placed myself in the capable hands of one of the staff at Jon Stone Hair last Wednesday afternoon. My head had become, in the words of my late father. "laek an aald rop fender", and I reflected that I really ought to come here more often! I suppose that I should be thankful for the fact that, unlike most of my contemporaries, I still have a full mop of hair, and it's the same delightful (and natural) shade of "mooskit" that it's always been. There's considerably less of it now than there was on Wednesday morning though! Have a nice week!

FERRY GOOD!

2010-09-06T12:35:00.000-07:00

It's not often that Radio Shetland is the bearer of news that I actually feel like jumping up and down at the sound of (alas, my legs won't take the impact of such behaviour any more!), but tonight was the exception. Apparently, our lifeline ferry service is not, after all, having £1m of bits cut off it during the coming year.

Islanders were being asked for their input into what bits they'd have minded a bit less having removed, as against other bits. It was like asking turkeys which part of being slaughtered for Christmas they disliked least. Some of the more sensible, and printable, of the suggestions (for ferry cuts!) included laying one of the two ferries up during the winter months, making them both go slower to save on fuel, and replacing the passenger ships with dual-purpose freight/passenger vessels and doing away with the dedicated freight boats. Quite a few suggestions involving sex and marine travel were mooted by more forthright islanders.

Of course, we only travel at the current level of luxury thanks to the good offices of the Scottish government, who insisted that the route should go out to tender around the turn of the millennium, and were in charge of the tendering process. Up to that point, we had been grumblingly acceptive of the service provided by good old P & O Ferries. However I, for one, have become accustomed to the service which has been provided by Northlink Ferries over the past eight years or so, and I would bitterly resent having any bits of it removed whatsoever. So there!

Leave our bits alone, Scottish government - it's not our fault that there's a squeeze on! And if you're going to squeeze us, be equitable in your squeezing, and don't squeeze some places more than others.

BLOWING IN THE WIND

2010-09-05T09:03:00.000-07:00

This morning having dawned bright and breezy, I hung a batch of shirts on the line, and they came in dry and un-seagull-decorated at lunchtime. It's been a good week really, both in terms of weather and work, with the oft-times-promised-and-never-delivered website e-commerce upgrade finally up and running, and with good progress to report on two of my artwork commissions. It also appears to have been a good week for using hyphens!

Monday, which dawned fine but clouded over with drizzle later, was one of work on the charity painting (of winter over Baltasound), during the morning, and the commission of the "St. Clair" (IV) off Girdleness lighthouse in the afternoon. In between, I concocted myself a leftover pork and rice creation (which was palatable) for lunch, and took a walk down to the shop for essential supplies. In the evening (they're beginning to draw in!) I attended to the burgeoning contents of my Outlook Express inbox, and did a few other minor tasks on the computer.

Tuesday, which was rather cloudy but calm (brilliant for midges!) was spent on the same two artworks, with the welcome interruption of a visit by my sister Thelma, with whom I had elevenses and a natter. I made myself some kedgeree for lunch, and remembered to put my bin-bag out for collection by the "essie-kert" squad. In the evening I phoned my brother, and came to the realisation that my plan for a trip to the mainland over the first weekend in October is now not going to happen. Certain things have to fall in place for this to be successful. Firstly, I must have an outside cabin on the ferry to myself. This is a selfish indulgence, I know, but I spend two of my three nights away on that boat, and I want it to be a pleasant experience. Secondly, my brother has to be available, so that we can spend the Saturday cruising the roads of the north-east of Scotland in his car, with me busy taking loads of photographs of the picturesque scenes we come across for my reference library. Thirdly, there has to be decent accommodation available for the Saturday night in Aberdeen. On this occasion, the boat is fully booked and my brother is otherwise engaged. The trip is being postponed until late March next year, just before the period covered by my Northlink Ferries discount vouchers runs out.

Wednesday's weather was mostly fine, with light winds. It was also a big day, the one set aside for getting the final work done on the website upgrade. Igor Mournly, my web designer, arrived, as arranged, at 10am, and we set about putting the greeting cards on the product database, and getting the other elements together for a fully e-commercialised online sales system, complete with the appropriate basket and checkout functions. We hit some technical snags, of course, and, at midday, Igor set off back to his own office to get these ironed out, leaving me to make a light lunch and spend another afternoon on the two commissioned paintings. Later still, I took the painting of Johnshaven harbour to the post office for onward shipment to its new owner in Cornwall. This cost me £38.95 to send, which hurt a bit, so, to numb the pain, I had a couple of pints of the yellow stuff in the Lounge. On my return home, I discovered that Igor had been doing some good work on the website, and had made a test order of £0.01, using my online payment system in conjunction with Paypal. The thing was clearly working. I phoned him my thanks for the generosity of his payment, which will no doubt be added to the amount of his invoice later!

Thursday was bright and clear, although a little low cloud occasionally threatened during the day. I'd arranged to make a soupy lunch for my sister Mary and myself, and it now looked as if I would have a third guest in the shape of Igor, who was coming along to do the final preliminaries to going "live" with the website upgrade. All in all, it was the most chatty lunch that has taken place at the Tait Gallery for some time, with the food being also acceptable, and the website mission being accomplished too. Then my two apparently satisfied guests left, leaving me to clear up the clutter, a task which took me over half-an-hour, and do a little more artwork. I spent the evening chilling out a bit.

http://www.tait-gallery.co.uk/

Friday dawned and remained bright and mostly sunny, with light south-easterly winds. I took my usual trip out to mother's, collecting her pension and pre-ordered shopping along the way. I did the usual Friday things, such as watering the greenhouse, frying mother's favourite fish lunch of whiting in batter for lunch, clearing up afterwards, making tea and coffee, and generally helping her out with things. She is keeping quite well, if you disregard her severe mobility problems (which it's difficult for her to do!). She is now into her 95th year, and just getting through a day is a bit of a struggle for her, but she has decided that she'll stick it out at her home at Brugarth, Whiteness, for another winter, provided that my sister Mary carries out her promise to stay with her if the weather gets snowy and the access road becomes problematic for the home helps. Everyone got a fright over the severity of last winter, and no-one wants another like it - ever again.
Back at my flat in the evening, I made the mistake of trying to assemble a self-assembly cardboard display unit for my greeting cards. All my efforts at self-assembly tend to self-dissemble within a very short space of time, and this project never really got off the ground. The bits just didn't seem to fit. After an hour I realised that I was unequal to this struggle, threw the parts, which were now looking decidedly grubby and furry, into the bin, and ordered a couple of ready-assembled plastic units from a display units shop on the internet. Hang the expense!

Yesterday was also bright and sunny, with a moderate south-easterly breeze. I spent the morning on the "St. Clair" painting, and the afternoon on the cloud reflections in the water of the Baltasound picture, quite a tricky operation which I nearly finished before the end of the afternoon. I didn't do a lot in the evening, except watch what was watchable on the box. For some reason I hadn't yet seen the third film in the Bourne trilogy, which turned out to be even more frenetic, violent, scowling and frankly daft than the previous two, but it was fun to watch - a bit like Young Guns meets the Wacky Races, with a touch of Rocky thrown in.

And so to today, and I am determined to get this posted. I failed last Sunday, due to the fact that I spent the morning wrapping a painting and then went for a run out west with my sister Thelma in the afternoon. (I did the same run this afternoon, but I had most of this written beforehand.) Must do better, as they say! Have a nice week.

GET SHOPPING!

2010-09-02T06:45:00.000-07:00

The new website upgrade is live! Take a look at the new products!

http://www.tait-gallery.co.uk

ALMOST THERE!

2010-09-02T01:18:00.000-07:00

We didn't quite get the website upgrade ready yesterday, as there were too many things to sort out, but my web designer and I put in some good work on it. More will be done today, and I still hope to be up and running with it by the weekend. It'll be worth the wait, I promise you......

www.tait-gallery.co.uk

GREETING CARDS!

2010-08-31T11:16:00.000-07:00

The latest product from the Tait Gallery is A5 (when folded ) greeting cards featuring my artwork. The cards are blank on the inside, making them like larger-than-usual notelets. They carry a short description on the back, and are available at £2.00 each, plus 50p postage, or £7.00 + £1.00 p & p per set of four.

They will be available through the website (http://www.tait-gallery.co.uk/) from Monday 6th September), or just drop me an email with your contact details (jim@tait-gallery.co.uk). I look forward to hearing from you!

A REALLY GRUMPY OLD ARTIST

2010-08-31T08:12:00.000-07:00

Well, really! The BBC came out with some distressing news one evening last week, namely that grumpy old men are between the ages of 35 to 54. How they arrived at this postulation is not clear to me, as they did not explain the reasoning process behind it. However they came to this position, what it means is that I am now old enough to be A GRUMPY OLD MAN'S FATHER!

As if that wasn't distressing enough, the large painting, on which I have put in a summer's labour, failed it's first client inspection, and it is now back on the easel for remedial work. I'm particularly annoyed about this, as I was convinced that I'd made an excellent job of it, and I am not sure exactly what I have to do to make the picture more acceptable to my customer, who, of course, is always right. He reckons that I have not quite got the details of the 18th century American warship (which is the main feature of the painting) correct, and, not being an expert on the navies of this period, I am left without a definite idea as to how to proceed from here. I suppose I'll just fart around with some of the angles and colour fields, and hope that I hit the spot with some of these footerings. And if, on the second presentation in about three week's time, my efforts have again been found wanting, I'm going to have to admit defeat, give the man his deposit back, and put the whole wasted summer down to bitter experience. I don't want to do the artistic equivalent of running on the spot, sit-ups and squat-thrusts for ever - I'm 62 now, my health isn't what it was, and I have other clients waiting.

Not that all the news has been bad this week. I spent most of Sunday morning wrapping the painting of Johnshaven harbour (above) for the journey to its new owner in Cornwall. The same customer has commissioned another work, and I have continued to make progress on the other two commissioned works "on the stocks". These are both looking pretty good now.

My web designer is coming to visit me tomorrow, and the purpose of the call is to make the new website (www.tait-gallery.co.uk) upgrade live. And then what a wonderful new spectacle will unfold before your eyes. One of the problems with the old system was that the sold and unsold works were lumped together. This will change with the new one, I hope from tomorrow, and I also hope that you will visit it. Enjoy the rest of your week!

THE BIG PICTURE

2010-08-22T06:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon I put the finishing touches to the painting which has been occupying the easel in my back bedroom (which has been functioning as a side-studio) for the past three months. At 47 x 39 inches, it is too big to be accommodated, along with all the rest of the paraphernalia, in my living room, which is also a main studio, office, dining room and the place where I watch television, read and generally loaf about, as well as entertain the odd visitor.

I acquired the easel specifically for this job, as it's too big to work on "flat", which is how I do my other smaller paintings. It has been a useful exercise getting familiar with this mode of operation, which I haven't used since my art college days (and that's a VERY long time ago!). I think I'll do a few more using this method now - I have one particular work in mind.....

In an earlier post, I described how much trouble I had getting a mainland supplier to send me a canvas of a suitable size in a usable condition. Their packaging was woefully inadequate, and twice the thing arrived holed. At the third attempt, and three weeks after the first order, a package arrived undamaged, and I was able to start work on the masterpiece.

On the first two occasions they told me to keep the damaged canvas, despite my protests, and this has created its own storage problem. My rooms aren't big, and two large useless canvases take up a lot of space. I offered them to Shetland Arts (they'd be OK for such temporary uses as stage scenery creation), but for the last three months they've remained on my premises. Then, last week, a council skip appeared in the car park across the road, so I took the two ungainly objects, negotiated them downstairs, and was making my way towards the skip, when a couple of workmen claimed them for their children, who would, they thought, find them useful to learn to paint on. Needless to say, this delighted me. With a bit of Mepore adhesive bandage tape covering the holes at the back, the canvases would make superb temporary painting surfaces. There would be other possibilities too. Anyone who was good at joinery could make new smaller frames, cut up the canvases and create new good permanent surfaces therefrom.

Once the painting, which is of an 18th century man-o'-war in a gale, has dried, I'll take it out to the back of the house to photograph it, and then begins the task of wrapping and packaging it ready for its journey to Cheshire. I have already established that it's not too big to send by Parcelforce, which is a lot cheaper than most independent carriers. I have acquired a large roll of bubble-wrap, and tomorrow I intend to visit my local builders' merchant for a sheet or two of 1" polystyrene sheeting. This, together with the cardboard in which the virgin canvas was wrapped, and copious quantities of parcel tape, should provide enough buffering to protect against the bumps and scrapes of the delivery process.

I'm not sure if I can display the "big picture" on this blog or on my website. I was commissioned to do a fairly fathful copy of a work by an 18th century artist and, although there are important differences between the pictures, I risk being taken to task by copyright lawyers, should I put the painting on public display. This disappoints me, as I seem to have put very little by way of new work images on this blog lately, for various reasons. As well as possible copyright issues, clients are reluctant to have their commissions put on display before weddings, birthdays or anniversaries, for which the paintings are presents, have taken place. I am quite used to working under such cloak-and-dagger constraints!

GIRDLENESS LIGHTHOUSE AND A MAN O' WAR

2010-08-15T08:17:00.000-07:00

The large (50" x 40" approx.) painting of an American man o' war in a gale is almost finished now. I hope to put the finishing touches to it tomorrow, and I hope my client thinks as much of it as I (and my visitors) do. I'll know quite soon. I finished the eagle's eye view of the cruise ship ten days ago, and it is now in the hands of another satisfied customer, I'm happy to say. I've resumed work on the commissioned painting of the ferry "St. Clair" leaving Aberdeen, with Girdleness lighthouse in the background. I had held back work on this while I attended to more urgent jobs. I've also started a painting of a snow scene in Unst, for a charity raffle and to be the front image for the same charity's Christmas cards.

Talking of cards, the ones I'd ordered from DCS in Devon arrived just over a week ago, and to say that I am delighted with them would be to understate my feelings. If I was fitter, I would have been jumping for joy when I opened the package containing them! By contrast, the ones I got from a better-known printing firm were half the size, dearer, carried the firms advertising, and were without cellophane wrapping.

One of the reasons why I was unable to post to this blog last Sunday was that I spent the first part of the day wrapping a painting for sending through the post, and the second half trying to do a group image of the cards to upload here as a single JPEG file (or something similar). Blogger, however, was unable to accept the file types I was able to produce using Open Office, so, in the end, I would have been better off just concentrating on a normal post. One lives and learns - none more so than me! Have a nice week.

MIDGES AND GOOSEBERRY CRUMBLE

2010-08-15T07:11:00.000-07:00

As long as there's a breeze blowing and the sun is out, things aren't too bad. But, at this time of year, as soon as the wind drops and the sky clouds over, out they come in their multi-millions - the midges. They don't usually trouble us here in the middle of Lerwick, but stray towards the town boundaries and they will soon make their presence felt.

My old friend Stevie Shirmer paid me a call yesterday evening. He had been eating a fish supper down by the harbour, and he was very much aware of the little blighters there. Perhaps these were emigres from Bressay, just across the sound. No doubt the good people of that island were glad to be rid of a few of them.

Stevie is over here, from his present home in Switzerland, to take part in a fencing event at the sports centre, and to visit as many of his friends as possible during his short stay here, before he begins his journey home on the ferry tonight. (I had no idea that he even participated in the sport, let alone that he was an instructor). We sat and yapped for the best part of two hours, during which I gathered that he has gleaned more knowledge of the goings-on around the islands (some of which I am glad to be ignorant of) in a couple of weeks than I have as a permanent resident. I must get out more, I suppose.

Also visiting the islands are my youngest sister Angela, her husband Nigel and her daughter Elanor. I spent some time with them at my mother's on Friday, when I produced lunch main course for the five of us, which consisted of my usual fried whiting in batter, accompanied by peas, potatoes and melted margarine. Angela made one of her gooseberry crumbles for dessert - it was indescribably delicious, and I'd cheerfully kill for it. It's a toss-up whether sticky toffee pudding with ice cream or fruit crumble with custard is my favourite sweet course. In the case of sticky toffee pudding, the ones I had last year at the County Hotel in Banff rank as just about the best I've paid for (but none come close to the standard of my sister Mary's, or, I'm told, my niece Julia's!), while the one I had at the Cocket Hat in Aberdeen a few months ago was definitely below standard. The problem with any of these scrumptious desserts is that I tend to be paralysed for several hours after eating them. All I could do for the rest of Friday afternoon was sit and grunt. And it's not as if I had nothing to do.....

SOLE PERSON?

2010-08-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

I received an email, from a local hotel, which went:

Dear Tait Gallery - sole person,

"August is the month of meteor showers
If you have a celebration....instead of flowers
Why not treat him or her to a night for two
With these special offers we have for you?"

Dinner, bed and breakfast for two persons only £130 per twin or double room, or book two nights for a combined cost of only £250 per twin or double room.

I replied thus:

What's all this about a sole person? Does this refer to my taste in fish, or my single marital status? Does the fact that I'm a sole trader make me a fishmonger?

August means that summer's waning,
Where did May to July go?
Soon the gales will be a-blowing,
Followed next by winter's snow.

You can shove your Perseid showers
Underneath your bain-marie.
I'll be dining on my ownsome,
Hard-boiled eggs for one, for me.

Munch-munch!

Byee!

Fortunately they have a sense of humour, and seem to enjoy my curmudgeonly outbursts. They replied to this effect later.

You gotta laugh - I guess!

PAIN, PAINT AND A SPECIAL PARTY

2010-08-01T13:23:00.000-07:00

My lower back trouble returned with a vengeance this week, and this has had a predictably adverse effect on my enjoyment of life. My bed has ben transformed from a source of peace, rest and surrealist dreams into a symbol of fear, dread and discomfort. I hope the pain and stiffness goes as quickly as it appeared last Monday when I was picking some of the bumper crop of blackcurrants at Whiteness.

Work has gone on as usual, however. My client in Arbroath is delighted with his miniature of the SS "Clermiston", and his cheque arrived in the post, as promised. I have almost finished the eagle's eye view of the cruise ship, and the large seascape is nearing completion on the easel in the back room. I have resumed work on the painting of the ferry "St. Clair" (IV) off Girdleness lighthouse, a commission which has a November deadline, so I shelved it while the more urgent jobs got done.

I've ordered my first batch of greeting cards! I chose a firm, based in Devon, called DCS, who quoted me a very reasonable price for the job. I'll report on the quality thereof when I receive the cards, which are coming, complete with cellophane wrapping and envelopes, sometime soon - I hope.

Talking of greeting cards, my mother received a lot of these on Friday, when she reached the grand old age of 94. As many of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren as could attend, did so at Brugarth early in the evening, to be fed with bannocks and sandwiches with various fillings, jam tarts, chocolate crispies, melting moments and a "Happy Birthday" sponge which my sister Thelma had baked and skilfully decorated for the occasion. My mother sat happily in the midst of the eating, tea-drinking and merry-making which always attend our bashes, and no doubt everyone was thinking the same thing that was going through my mind, which was that it was so good to have her still around. The place where she lives is so beautiful too, and I hate to think of a time, which will come all too soon, when Brugarth will no longer be the venue for such parties, and someone else will be living there. Mother's age and mobility issues will cause all this to happen in the not-too-distant future, and I'm torn between keeping this in my mind as a kind of defence, or dismissing the thought completely.

Enough! The present is enough to cope with! Have a good week.

FRIDAY READING

2010-08-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

I was grateful to my nephew Kenneth, who is up here for a long weekend, who offered to run me around the various places I had to go to on Friday morning, saving me a small fortune in taxi fares. I had to get fish from the shop at Sound, my mother's medication from the Scalloway pharmacy, my own medication (the blue ones are best this week!) from Boots and mother's usual pension and shopping from the Whiteness shop (not necessarily in that order).

While I was in the various buildings, collecting whatever had to be collected, Kenneth sat in the car reading the Shetland Times, which goes on sale throughout the islands on a Friday morning. When I emerged from the last (and lengthiest) of our stops, he said that if life in Shetland is as depicted in our local newspaper, he is glad he stays in Aberdeen. He says the Shetland Times portrays life in the islands as much the same as anywhere else, with its drug, drink, domestic abuse and general crime problems. It is Shetland's uniqueness which makes it an attractive place to stay, and, if it is becoming like everywhere else, he doesn't want to live here any more. Now, how much this is due to media portrayal and how much to the present nature of island life, I don't really know. I certainly don't recognise the Shetland which I see on a daily basis reflected in the pages of our local paper, so Kenneth seems to have a point.

Here we have to face two unfortunate facts, namely that good news doesn't sell newspapers, and that Shetland now has serious drug and social problems, which are affecting the lives of many young Shetlanders in particular, and consequently the columns of our local rag. I have a suggestion!

Most of the chatty bits of news (much of it good) from around the county have been hived off into sections headed "South Mainland Notebook", "North Mainland Notebook", "Isles Views", "Views from the Scord" (Scalloway), and sections on archaeology, the arts, wildlife and an amusingly ill-informed fishing and marine column, as well as regular features on religious activities, cooking and news from the SWRI branches. There are probably others I've neglected to mention, for which I apologise, and I mustn't forget the large sports section at the back. Why don't they do the same with crime? Shove it into its own compartment, and anyone who isn't interested in the minor misdemeanours of the local crackheads and bampots can ignore it, as most people outside the "catchment" areas do to the district news columns. There you go, petal! Once you put a problem into its appropriate box, it won't hurt as much. So it can be with Shetland's burgeoning social and crime issues (the causes of which are too complex for this blogger to address here).

As the folk singer John James neatly puts it:

Put a little label on it
So you won't know
Just what it was that frightened you so!
I said, put a little label on it
And give it a name
Then everything can go on just the same.

That's all, folks!

GET OUT THE GUNBOATS!

2010-08-01T02:44:00.001-07:00

India and Pakistan have only recently achieved an uneasy peace in the dispute which has been raging, at times more or less violently, over their territorial claims to Kashmir, since Britain's colonial adventures in that part of the globe ceased over sixty years ago.

So it was with mouths agape and eyes popping that the world witnessed our clod-hopping new PM, colonial foot planted firmly in imperialist mouth, choosing India as the venue to issue a firm telling-off to these damned natives in Pakistan, who were just not playing the game properly. "Harbouring nasty people within their boundaries while claiming to be allies in the war against terrorism is just not good enough - don't you agree, Indian politicians?" Thus any diplomatic progress in that region, over any disagreement on any matter whatsoever, over however many years, is now at threat.

Now they're burning effigies of DC (who is obviously taking George W Bush's strategy in world affairs a stage further!) on the streets of Islamabad and other Pakistani cities, and any progress on co-operation on matters of terrorism has been nullified at a stroke. Well done, David! I think I'll pop down to the Lerwick branch of Effigies R' Us and get one to burn myself.

Talking of gunboat diplomacy, I see that Iceland and Faroe have held two brawny fingers up at the EU over their mackerel quotas for this year. Hurrah and well done! They're doing what Britain should have done decades ago, especially over our whitefish quotas. Now all sorts of sanctions are being threatened against our Nordic neighbours. No doubt Britain will support these, as it supports every other mind-blowingly ridiculous edict to emanate from the undemocratic plutocracy which is the EU.

As things are, our fishing industry has been decimated, with the tacit collaboration of our negotiators, over the last twenty years, while, year after year, our pathetic politicians have still returned from meetings with the clueless and mandate-less bureaucrats of Brussels with ever-decreasing quotas and disregarded representations (especially from Scottish representatives, who are ignored as a matter of EU policy!).

It is time to join with Iceland, Faroe and Norway (not an EU member state) to formulate a sensible system with regard to what can or cannot be caught where and when, and regain control of our own waters. Then our fishing rights will no longer be a bargaining chip at the gaming table of European big business, but will be properly regulated in the interests (long and short-term) of the nations inside whose territorial waters the fishing stocks are located. Then fishermen of other nationalities who want to catch fish in these waters will have to negotiate with US!

RETAIL THERAPY

2010-07-25T07:48:00.000-07:00

I have more clothes than will ever be on my back (or other bits), so, when I go on one of my occasional shopping sprees, with the associated emetic effect on my bank accounts, it is usually for non-sartorial items. The binge, in which I indulged my democratic right as a consumer (don't start me on the consumer society!), earlier this week, included the purchase of medical remedies, paper bags, maps, books on social media marketing and ink cartridges for my printer (rather an expensive item!).

The maps are utter self-indulgence for me - I just love browsing through them. I'm an artist, producing paintings, prints and all sorts of lovely things, but the only things that adorn the walls of my studio are maps, a calendar and a year planner (rather bare of events this year). The medical remedy is a supply of Jointease tablets, probably a palliative, but my joints always seem to feel stronger when I'm taking the stuff than when I'm not.

The other items are connected to the business. The ink cartridges are self-explanatory. The books on social media marketing are for study with regard to making my blog, website and artistic efforts more visible to the online public. The paper bags are for issuing to the public with their greeting card and postcard purchases from my stall at the Toll Clock Centre. In a way, this reflects my over-cautious mentality. Whenever I am confronted with a situation which I am uncertain how to deal with, I prowl around the outside of the problem for some time, before I take the plunge, metaphorically speaking, and tackle it, frequently with more disastrous results than if I'd just waded in as soon as I was aware of the issue! So it is for me with the greeting cards - I have the customer presentation issues all sorted before I've even designed a single card. It's odd - I know!

This frequently happens halfway through a job too, and it's true of the large painting which is progressing nicely on the easel in the back room, despite the fact that practically everything else seems more attractive, as a work option, than working on IT. Whenever I need to put in a painting session on the monster work, all of a sudden dish-washing, filing, cooking, cleaning and computer work seem to be things that I'd rather do!

This commitment aversion and over-cautiousness also explains the ridiculously low scoring rate with the opposite sex during the latter half of my life. I've lost all my IMPULSIVENESS! It is a true saying that faint heart never won fair lady, and, at some point during the 1980s my get-up-and-go got up and went, taking all my bollard-pulling power with it. Now, in my encroaching twilight years, I am left with only memories which are fast fading to sepia......

Enough of this morbid reflection, and back to the present - quick!

This week I finished the smallest commission I have undertaken to date - a tiny painting of the SS "Clermiston". I was able to get it into a large mail-lite envelope, along with its extra bubble-wrap and 1-inch polystyrene sheet as backing. I'll be posting it tomorrow morning, before I head out to Whiteness to prepare for my mother's homecoming from her latest two-week spell of respite care at the Wastview Centre in Walls. She'll be 94 on Friday, and my sisters are planning a family get-together for the occasion. I know that nothing pleases her more than having her family round her. However, I'm very happy to leave the planning to my siblings.

All the best to you and yours!

CARDS AND COPYRIGHTS

2010-07-18T07:07:00.000-07:00

Two or three weeks ago, I mentioned my plan to produce greeting cards, featuring my artwork, to sell in the run-up to Christmas this year. I've taken this a couple of tentative stages further now, having saved a few images into a "cards" folder, using Photofiltre, which is an ideal package for this purpose. It has the advantage, over such sophisticated applications as Paint Shop Pro, that it's free, and it does all the clever things that I need it to, such as size reduction, cropping and adjustment of colour and brightness. I've searched the large number of paintings in my Tait Gallery folder, and cropped out parts of some of these images to use as card designs. I'm also hoping to have these cards available in the Products Database of the new all-singing, all-dancing website upgrade (which is still in the making), and I've emailed my web designer on that subject today.

Progress has been steady (how often have I said that in these posts!) on the painting commissions, and I've just about finished the smallest of these, the tiny picture of the SS "Clermiston", on which my client's grandfather served as crewman. I probably won't display it here, or in the website gallery, simply because of its diminutive size and odd shape.

The subject of the big canvas, taking shape quite nicely on the easel in the "back studio", will regrettably not feature on website or blog either when it is finished, for a different reason entirely. It is because I am closely following a painting by another artist (who lived about 200 years ago), in this work, and I fear reprisals in the form of nasty letters from copyright lawyers. In fact the same could apply to the third commissioned work, which is an eagle's eye view of a certain cruise ship. The photograph, on which I am relying for my details, could only have been taken from an eagle or an aircraft (probably the latter!), and could well form part of the cruise ship operator's advertising copy.

You can't be too careful these days. Have a nice week!

P.S. My web designer thinks the cards are an excellent idea for an item for sale on the website, both singly and in sets. Now all I've got to do is produce them!

BIRTHDAY FILING CABINET!

2010-07-18T03:08:00.000-07:00

I turned 62 summers (and a few hard winters, especially last one!) on Friday - not really an occasion for celebration, merely a reminder of the ever-swifter passage of time. I received a card depicting a young lady (who, I am sad to say, just looked impractically dressed as far as I am concerned nowadays) from my brother, and more circumspect ones from my mother, sisters and one of my many nieces. On the morning of this momentous day, I got soaked on my way back from Alex Morrisons shop, where I'd dutifully gone to buy my Shetland Times, and found myself wondering, having read it, if it was worth getting wet for! I found an email from Philips in my inbox, offering me their felicitations and £10 off any purchase over £100 from their products range. This was sweet of them, but I didn't take them up on it, and duly got on with my scheduled tasks for the day, more or less as planned. As I recall, this went rather well that day.

The big birthday present had arrived (rather presumptuously!) earlier in the week, in the form of a 3-drawer filing cabinet! My family have always given practical presents, and they knew that I had been considering the acquisition of such an item for some time. I had been reluctant to pay the substantial sums of money which such a piece of furniture (in a decent finish) would cost to be delivered to me, but I was getting round to paying it anyway, when this timely present arrived. I'm very grateful, yet again, to my family, who have been so supportive over the years.

Support has been the watchword between us, especially over the last few years. We have formed ourselves into a fairly efficient unit, each of us ready to slot him/herself, at a moment's notice, into whatever role or function might be demanded of us by whichever situation. This was particularly true of some of the scenarios which faced us during the snows of last winter. Looking back, there was a providential element to some of the "support solutions" which presented themselves at crisis points. For instance, the schools were closed on the day that a foot of snow needed to be cleared from the "Brugarth Brae" before my mother, due back from a respite care stay (which could not be extended) at the Fernlea Centre in Whalsay, could gain access to her home. The school closure meant that a team of fit nephews, nieces, grand-nephews and grand-nieces were available, and the clearance, which would have been impossible for me on my own, was done in an hour, and another serious problem was solved (and a lot of fun had in the process!).

But I have reflectively digressed from the subject of this post, which is my birthday on Friday. The best present I could possibly receive is for everyone around me to keep well for another year. That, and a few more painting commissions, would mean another happy return of the day in 2011. By then, I'd also hope to have next year's Catterline exhibition in an advanced stage of completion, and my new state-of-the-art website upgrade operational. But that, as they say, is another story.

A MAIDEN VOYAGE

2010-07-11T07:03:00.000-07:00

There's a photograph, in the "Times Past" section of this week's Shetland Times newspaper, of a crowd of people gathered at the head of Lerwick's Victoria Pier, witnessing the arrival of the brand-new state-of-the-art "St. Clair", the third vessel to bear that name for the North of Scotland, Orkney and Shetland Steam Navigation Company Ltd (quite a mouthful, isn't it?), who ran the lifeline passenger and cargo transport link between the islands and the mainland at that time. I was there in that crowd - somewhere! My father and I had risen at some ungodly hour of Friday July 1st, 1960 to drive from Sandwick to Lerwick, in our recently-acquired Wolseley 6/80 (PS2012), to see this splendid ship docking at the end of her maiden voyage from Aberdeen. I would have been just 16 days short of my 12th birthday, and I was as mad about ships and boats then as I have been ever since.

Later that same decade, the North of Scotland, Orkney and Shetland Steam Navigation Company was taken over by Coast Lines (which at least involved less breath in pronunciation). They, in turn, were absorbed into the massive P & O network (co-founded by a Shetlander!) during the 1970s. The third "St. Clair" was the last purpose-built vessel on the route until the arrival of Northlink Ferries and their large ro-ro ships in the early noughties. She was also the last side-loader on the route, the two subsequent "St. Clairs" (both acquired second-hand to operate on it) being ro-ro ferries. Consequently, she was the last "north boat" to use Victoria Pier as her base for loading passengers and cargo.

She did this twice a week, arriving at Lerwick on Tuesday and Friday mornings, and sailing on Tuesday and Saturday evenings. Seeing the "St. Clair" off on Saturday at 5pm was always quite a social occasion, with people coming down, from all over the islands, to wave goodbyes to departing family and friends, or just to enjoy the moment. Little did anyone in the crowd, on that bright summer morning in 1960, even dream that daily sailings would be a reality, from another part of the town, within thirty years, or that you would be able to drive your car on and off the boat within seventeen years.

I can remember little about how I felt about the new ship as I watched her dock. I was probably just as interested in the drifters, which would have been coming into the harbour in numbers at the same time, this being at the height of the summer herring fishery. I probably would have been reluctant to join my father in the Wolseley for the fifteen-mile journey home, leaving all these lovely boats behind us. The sights, smells and sounds of the fishing industry have filled my senses pleasurably for as long as I can remember.

STRUGGLING AGAIN

2010-07-04T11:35:00.000-07:00

The title of this post doesn't refer to progress on my artworks, which is steady, or my website upgrade, which is still on hold, or indeed any other aspect of my pitiful existence. It simply means that I am struggling to find anything remotely interesting to say about any of it. I even went through this week's Shetland Times newspaper, in search of an article I could put a personal slant on, but I came away with nothing but a headache and severe depression.

I've been working on three commissioned paintings this week, one a massive canvas of a sailing ship, another of an eagle's eye view of a cruise ship, and yet another one of a steamship, which, at 16.75 x 9 inches, needed a small piece of hardboard to be made even smaller for it. I brought the old handsaw out of its retirement in the meter cupboard to do the job. With regard to the big job (120cm x 100cm), I am starting to get concerned about how I am going to get it wrapped and taken to the shipping company for onward transport to north-west England, although this part of the job is still some way off.

Talking of transport, I sent a painting and an A3 print to North Tyneside on Tuesday morning, and have been told of their safe arrival, which is a relief. I haven't tried to assemble my greeting card display units yet, but I am looking forward not one tiny bit to trying it soon. For someone who is passably good at painting, I am remarkably useless when it comes to all kinds of 3D work. Even my wallpaper is covered in blood. Does anyone else remember a crafts project, which all p7 pupils at my school had to do (around 1959), called Jimmy Rabbit? It was a grey and white felt animal which we had to stuff and sew together, and, while all my classmates (especially the girls, of course), were making a beautiful job of theirs, I was producing the most evil-looking beast that the eye of man had hitherto beheld. Both its eyes were in the same half of its face, some of the stitches were half an inch long, its stuffing was coming out in several places, and it was heavily stained with my sweat and blood. It looked like a bit of roadkill!

Apart from that, there's little else to tell you about. The weather has taken a turn for the wetter and windier, as we're into a track of Atlantic depressions now. I was praying for weather like this last winter, when we were getting nothing but northerlies and snow. I was able to get a few hours in at my mother's garden again on Friday, clearing a bit more undergrowth from the front border and planting a few more pansies. I also set a couple of slug pubs and filled them with snakebite, which the slimy invertebrates are very fond of - they die happily by the hundred in them. The people in the Whiteness shop had raised eyebrows when cider and lager were included in my teetotal mother's shopping list! Talking of drink, I had a few pints of lager at around teatime on Wednesday, when I paid one of my occasional visits to da Noost and the Lounge. Very nice it was too.

Cheers! Have a nice week!

DONNER UND BLITZEN!

2010-06-27T06:44:00.000-07:00

Early this morning, I awoke to the sound of thunder and torrential rain. My first thought was one of satisfaction that the plug plants, which I had set into my mother's front border last week, wouldn't need watering for a few days. Two weeks ago, any such horticultural thoughts would never have entered my head. By the time I had come out of my bath at about seven o'clock, the sun was attempting to break through the low cloud, and the kerbstones on the street outside were beginning to dry up.

I had decided on a walk to the Co-op again this morning, to take the air, stretch the legs and lay in a few of life's essentials. I was passing the nearby Morrison Dock, when I was amused to see the German flag flying from the foremast of one of the local whitefish trawlers, no doubt in response to the English one draped from one of the windows of the "Bibby Blockofbedsits" at the other side of the dock. Nothing like a good wind-up, eh? At the Co-op, several people asked me if I'd be watching the match this afternoon, to which I responded, in each case, in the negative. My lack of interest in the "beautiful game" must be the cause of great disappointment to so many people for whom it appears to be so important. In fact, the only World Cup fitba' I have seen has been on the pub tellies on the three occasions when I have been in such establishments since the tournament started. One of these visits was on Wednesday, in response to a phone call from an old friend who had come up for the Hamefarin. I had more than my usual quota of lager on that occasion, and I wasn't feeling too clever on Thursday morning.

It's been an odd couple of weeks really. I have had a power cut (while my computer and tumble dryer were both in operation - fortunately with no visibly adverse effects), a leaky boiler (which had to be replaced), a few raised glasses, and a few art sales too. And, on Tuesday, my sister Thelma took me on a tour of the south mainland of Shetland, an area of my native islands with which I am only partly familiar. I was at the Voe, Quendale Mill and the now ruinous Quendale farmhouse, Garths Ness (where the "Braer" was lost in 1993), Vanlop and Ireland (sic!), where I was up at a chapel I didn't know existed until a couple of weeks ago. I had never been to any of these places before, and there were many others that I had not been to for many a long year. One of these was the Sumburgh Hotel, where we had an excellent bar lunch and met a few more old Hamefarin friends. I had a lot of photographs to save onto my hard drive that evening.

And the artwork? It's been progressing steadily throughout. I have a new commission of a cruise ship, I'm in negotiations about another fishing boat painting, and work has continued apace on the others. I now feel the need to make more haste with the large 50 x 40 inch sailing ship work, as I promised to have this completed by early August, although I lost three weeks at the start of this project to a canvas supply problem, and I know my client would rather wait a little longer than have the quality of the work compromised.

I have been considering, since last Christmas, getting greeting cards printed, and I have spent a bit of recent time looking into possibilities with regard to this. My two new cardboard display units for these arrived this week. Guess what? - they're self-assembly, something at which I do NOT excel. At least I've got until November to get them finished!

Have a happy and successful week!

COMPOOGLING?

2010-06-20T02:44:00.000-07:00

Could I have invented a new buzzword here - or has someone else stolen my thunder and beaten me to it with this magnificent addition to the internet lexicon? It is a term for the behaviour of someone like me who, when once started on a search for a particular item on the web, carries on with the search for hours on end until either the search has come to its end, the phone or doorbell has rung, or nature has intervened, his compulsion/obsession having taken the whole exercise over.

The other week, I compoogled "Filing Cabinets", a singularly unsuccessful exercise. I spent a whole afternoon, which would have been better spent doing something more useful, discovering that the kind of cabinet I need doesn't exist, and anything approaching it is way beyond my means. This morning, it was "Small Display Units Suitable for Postcards". I found many items which would have been ideal for my purpose, but there was always a snag - a blip in the ointment (sic!), as I once heard a well-known female weather presenter (and metaphor-mixer!) describing it on a renowned television breakfast news programme. On that occasion, a strange image presented itself to me, of a fly appearing, mysteriously and unaccountably, on a radar screen in a parallel universe somewhere!

Anyway, to return to my own universe, which, far from being parallel, consists mainly of ever-decreasing circles, I came across the usual pitfalls in my search for small display units. One firm doesn't deliver to destinations outwith mainland UK (because they can't be bothered to find out how to do it - I'd be quite willing to pay an extra charge for this service). Another had a fault on its online registration/catalogue request form. Every time I pressed "Submit", it came up with the message "You have selected an 'Other' - please specify", despite the fact that I had done no such thing. There's probably someone at "Display Units 'R Us" who's wondering why they haven't had any requests or registrations lately. Come to think of it, how many businesses are going down the tubes because of such flies in their online ointment? Is mine one of them? The sooner I get my website upgraded the better!

Strange how many issues can arise out of a Google search which, in this case, stemmed from an inadequate postcard display at my stall at the Toll Clock Centre in Lerwick yesterday. I did OK, by the way, but not spectacularly well. I sold a few prints and postcards (out of a cardboard box!), met some old friends and made some interesting new ones, and had some good repartee with my fellow stall-holders. The day passed quite quickly. My next set-up will probably be in the run-up to Christmas, and I'd like to have a better presentation unit for my postcards (and maybe Christmas cards!) by then........

PAINTING LATEST

2010-06-14T03:06:00.001-07:00

I hope you like the painting of Lerwick's Hay's Dock (above). I used my own photographic archive for reference to get the details, of the place, as they were before the recent North Ness and Shetland Museum developments changed the appearance of this area of town completely. It's as it was around 15 years ago, with locally-owned pleasure craft and workboats drawn up on the beach, at their moorings, or alongside the "arm" of the dock.

I received fresh supplies of oil paint from Jackson's last week, but I am having trouble getting hold of the kind of fine-point oil/acrylic brushes that I use to get best results in my detail. I have done more work on the big seascape project - it sits on my easel in the back bedroom, which now has temporary status as a side-studio, as there isn't enough space for it in my main workroom (which also doubles as a living-room, dining room and office). I'm going to have to paint masts, sails and rigging soon, which involves fine lines, so I have been casting my supply net wider for the tools to do the job.

Talking of tools, my efforts at clearing moss and other clinging vegetation from the concreted paths outside my mother's house at Whiteness on Monday, using a Dutch hoe as the most effective weapon, left me with a badly blistered right hand palm. I'd carried on working with the injury a bit longer than I should have, so I've been carrying the handicap of a bandaged weeping sore for most of the week. It's on the mend now, fortunately, as I'm very right-handed!

From an northern archipelago about to embark on a week of serious yippee-yahooing, I wish you all the best for your midsummer festivities. I'll be back, possibly with a slight hangover, next week. Enjoy!

ISLANDERS AT WORK AND PLAY

2010-06-13T13:25:00.000-07:00

Shetlanders are good at organising and enjoying a party, as was clearly demonstrated during the Tall Ships Race of 1999, and the International Island Games two or three years later. I recall mentioning this faculty to my mother on the occasion of the former event. She looked at me with what amounted to slight indignation, and said, "Of coorse! Look at an Unst wedding!". Although the scale was a bit different, the enthusiasm and skills involved are much the same.

We are now on the threshold of Shetland's big summer bash, at the height of which the population of Lerwick will almost double. This week, a number of happenings are going to coincide as they never have before, and amalgamate into a gigantic party around the Victoria Pier area. The 2010 Hamefarin begins tomorrow (officially), and lasts for a fortnight, all kinds of events having been organised for the visitors, who will have returned to the land of their forebears "fae aa da erts". This happens once every ten years or so, and this year the competitors in more regular events, such as the four-yearly Round Britain- and annual Bergen yacht races will be here at the same time. All these people will be well fed, watered and entertained by the Flavour of Shetland binge from the 17th to the 20th, and a good time is going to be had by all. There will be a gastronomical and musical extravaganza at the harbour, and the only losers will be those yachtsfolk who want to get some sleep! The climax to the whole thing will be the midsummer carnival next Saturday evening. As for me, I am hoping, perhaps forlornly, for some overspill from the Victoria Pier area to visit my stall at the Toll Clock Centre.

THE WORLD HOP

2010-06-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

So the World Cup has started, and with it my four-yearly channel-hop to avoid any reference to it whatsoever. This is increasingly difficult, as many of the adverts on the commercial TV channels now contain material which is referential to it. I already have a policy, however, to turn the sound off all commercial breaks, so this does not present a real problem. Why? Because I'm worth it, of course!

I don't care who wins the World Cup, as long as I don't have to witness the obscenity of this spectacle. Whether it's England, Brazil or the Trashemite Republic of Asphyxia who carries off the coveted silverware doesn't matter in the slightest - they'll be doing it unwatched by me. And the same situation would obtain if Scotland had succeeded in achieving the embarrassment of participation in the later stages of the tournament. I feel no particular national affiliation to Scotland (I've always regarded myself as British), and Scottish goal celebrations (on the rare occasions when they occur!) are as obscene as any other nation's. The same goes for for the foul-mouthed, drunken, ill-natured throng who compose the team following. If anyone harbours any hopes with regard to how far mankind has advanced over the millenia, let him/her take a look at an aggrieved football crowd and weep. And why can't they sing in tune, for heaven's sake??

Ugh!

LIVING BEYOND MY INCOME?

2010-06-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

"All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income." These lofty words were hunted down by a writer in desperate need of a quotation from a famous person to spice up what would otherwise be another humdrum chapter in the dull journal of a struggling Shetland seascape artist. The words were penned by Samuel Butler in 1912, probably part of a dissertation on a completely different subject from the one I'm tackling now. Most artists, unless they are in the VERY successful earnings bracket, will probably live beyond their means most of the time. Another quoteworthy person (I forget who) once said words to the effect that an amateur artist has another job to support him, while a professional artist has a wife to support him. I have neither, so where does that leave me? Answers on a blank signed cheque, please!

As regards my artwork, progress (to return to Butler's theme!) has been steady, for what it's worth. I promised you a report on the Jackson's Studio Academy easel, which I have been able to "test-drive", following the delivery, a week past Monday, of an intact canvas from the supplier I mentioned in my last post on the subject. I have to tell you that it is an excellent easel, it having withstood all my enthusiastic brush-hammerings without retreating an inch before me. I can see a wonderful relationship developing between it and me.

I recently finished my elaborate commissioned painting of Lerwick's South End, and this work is now in for framing. I should have picked it up on Friday, but I was engaged in work elsewhere that day, so uniting this work with its prospective owner will have to wait until later this week. I am fairly confident that they will be pleased with it.

As well as the larger work (a seascape) on the easel, which will be occupying a fair amount of my time over the next couple of months, I have made good headway with the "stock" work of Lerwick's Hay's Dock, which I hope to have here to show you in a week's time. I have taken delivery of a consignment of postcards (from Vistaprint), featuring my oil paintings, the main purpose of which is to augment my stock for sale at my stall on Saturday 19th June at the Toll Clock Centre here in Lerwick. This coincides with the Hamefarin 2010, which was my original reason for choosing this date. Of course, I forgot that it also coincides with all the midsummer events at the Victoria Pier, so it may not be such a good idea after all - I'll have to see how things work out.

Frantic forward motion was also achieved at my mother's house on Friday, when my sister Mary and I tackled the overgrown front garden (which has been badly neglected these last two years), with a roll of black bags, a borrowed trailer and hand tools. I'm going out there again tomorrow to make further progress on this task, as we only have the use of the trailer until midweek. I hope the weather stays agreeable, as it has these last few days.

Under the "progress" heading, I must also mention my niece Elizabeth Tait (who is my brother Peter Arthur's peerie lass!). She gained her Ph.D in politics, in particularly brilliant fashion, from the University of Aberdeen a couple of weeks ago, and we're all so proud of her. Add to this another niece who is enjoying her current position of leader of the National Youth Orchestra of Wales, and I feel I am being well overtaken on the progress stakes, and very happy to be so! I believe my nephew Kenneth is making good progress on his university course too. They're all achieving what their wastrel uncle failed to do all these years ago!

One thing on which I have no progress to report whatsoever is the website upgrade, which appears to have been firmly stalled in neutral these last two months. I hope to resume efforts on this soon (I am in much need of it), but I am reluctant to give dates, as previous undertakings came to naught.

So, progress, which, in the words of Chesterton, is "simply a comparative", is also merely "the exchange of one nuisance for another", according to Havelock Ellis. "Who is he?" I hear you ask. Apparently, he was an early sexologist! "Art is long, and time is fleeting," said Longfellow. I couldn't agree more, old chap - I'll see you next week!

CRUISE SHIPS AND RELATED THINGS

2010-05-30T11:30:00.000-07:00

The accommodation barge, for the workers on the imminent Sullom Voe Terminal gas plant refurbishment, arrived in Lerwick harbour today. The "Bibby Bigmodularcubething" is, I believe, to be moored at the same place as a similar edifice was, the last time a similar job was undertaken "up nort" a few years back. When the services have been plumbed in, it will provide digs for about a hundred and fifty artisans, and a few security and skivvy jobs for locals, no doubt some of them students, who will welcome the cash boost which long shifts will produce for them.

The presence of this sizeable waterborne structure means that the berth which is normally used for medium-sized cruise ships will be unavailable for this purpose for the whole summer. This will make little practical difference to me, as, in my opinion, cruise ships are a complete waste of time and harbour space. I have yet to sell as much as an A4 print to a cruise-ship passenger, and most local retailers consider these visitors as equally non-contributory to their sales totals. These big white monstrosities may as well be shunted out to the SBS base, or the Dales Voe terminal, which has sat unused, reeking faintly of mothballs and white elephant ordure, for the last ten years (could this not have been a better location for the accommodation barge?).

Or the ships could be anchored in the inner harbour, along with the vessels which are too large to be berthed. From there, their shell-shocked passengers can be punted ashore in the ships' lifeboats, before being corralled onto tour buses which take them to all the Shetland tourist destinations which are on the "favoured" list. Those venues which charge an entrance fee to cover some of their running costs are deliberately shunned, as a matter of the port authority and Visit Shetland's cosa nostra policy. Tours organised through Northlink Ferries have the same bias. Visit Shetland only will assist local producers who have paid their extortionate membership fees. I was told, on asking them to display a few leaflets in their premises at Lerwick's Market Cross, that they would only do so if I became a member, which cost £150! Surely a scale of service charges would be a more sensible policy.

Apart from a few "iconic" items, such as knitwear, along with goods which are passed off as Shetland products by unscupulous traders to gullible visitors, little is bought from local retailers by cruise ship passengers. They have excellent food provided on board as part of their tariff, so, apart from a few confections, little by way of foodstuffs is bought ashore. I have heard that some of the cruise ship operators actually discourage their clients from buying items from shore-based retailers, as they would much rather that they would spend their limited spare cash on merchandise from their own onboard shops.

The benefit to the local economy from visiting cruise ships is therefore very limited, and much overstated by Visit Shetland and the Lerwick Port Authority. The latter no doubt benefits (from the harbour dues for these vessels), along with local bus operators, a few knitwear manufacturers, and producers of Shetland pate a foie gras, products whose Shetland identity and provenance are based on their creators' residence alone. The umbrella organisations for the local tourist "industry" have found themselves in the position of large piscatorial beings in small aqueous volumes everywhere - they have far more power than they know how to handle properly.

So whenever a large cruise ship appears off the Bressay Light, I regard it with mixed feelings. I enjoy seeing the big ships simply because of my maritime interests, but not because of any financial benefit which might come my way from their presence. The "Bibby Bigboxything" offers more by way of sales prospects for local merchants - her residents will require locally-sourced food and other products. One of them might even want to buy one of my prints to send home to a loved one - who knows?

CO-OP SHUTOUT

2010-05-30T11:12:00.000-07:00

It's been a funny sort of a morning. The weather being bright and fair, I took the notion that, having washed my breakfast and swallowed myself, I would take a walk down to the local Co-op, a distance of some three-quarters of a mile (I still haven't been decimalised distance-wise!) from my home. This would serve the dual purpose of getting my fridge and cupboards stocked with a few victuals, and getting some exercise into these getting-on-a-bit limbs of mine.

As things turned out, I arrived home again with only the exercise part having been accomplished. The Co-op couldn't open, as there was something wrong with the doorlock! I couldn't grasp exactly what the problem was, as I'm not sufficiently fluent in Co-op staff gesticulation. So, along with the small gathered throng of would-be shoppers, I made a plan B which, in my case, was to trudge home again, with about a mile and a half of exercise in my legs, not a penny less in my wallet, and nothing with which to replenish my supplies.

I could have gone to Tesco's, on the other side of town, but that was stretching the limbs a bit too far. In my pre-operation days, I would have probably made the effort, had I been desperate enough. But nowadays - nah!

CABINETS AND EASELS

2010-05-23T13:05:00.000-07:00

My sister Thelma and I headed, through the gloom of yesterday morning, to the Salvation Army's Lerwick headquarters on the North Road, having been attracted by their Shetland Times advertisement of a sale of office equipment in general and filing cabinets in particular (I have, of late, developed a need for such an item of furniture). However, we arrived too late to secure one of the only decent ones on offer, and all that was left was a couple of rather grotty grey ones, one of which I eventually decided to buy.

I'd forgotten how heavy a 4-drawer metal filing cabinet is, and I needed the muscle-power of the taxi-driver (who had arrived to provide the transport for the cumbersome object), to get the thing manhandled to street-level. Fortunately, there was a trolley there to help us. It was only when we began to move the thing that I realised just how rough it was. The bottom was rusted through, and had obviously been kicked violently a few times by dissatisfied staff and clients of the firm at whose premises the unfortunate object had been previously situated. Anyway, it was duly bundled into the back of the six-seater and, on climbing into the front passenger seat, I gave the instruction to proceed to the town dump at Rova Head with it. I had decided that it wasn't worth the effort of negotiating the revolting thing up the stairs to my flat. I'd helped the cause of the Salvation Army, and it was time to move on. I'll get a better filing cabinet somewhere else - soon.

I had better luck with another furniture acquisition this week. I have recently (see last week's post) secured a commission for a larger painting, and I decided that I wouldn't be able to work satisfactorily on the bigger work by my usual "flat" method. So I chose myself an easel from the vast selection available from Jackson's Art Supplies. These varied in price from under fifty to thousands of pounds; I opted for one of Jackson's own brand products at a mere £65, and I am well pleased with what arrived through my door on Friday. It seems much more stable than the ones I used to pursue round the room in a strange danse macabre in the old art college days. I have explained, in a much earlier post, how I used to put my left arm behind the easel (to steady it), as I belaboured the canvas with the brush in my right hand. This had the effect of moving the easel slowly forwards, and resulted in the weird dance, as described. The new easel has a square base, a much better modus operandi, and should prove much more suitable for my type of "action painting". Look out for a post next week, entitled "Jim test-drives the Jackson's Midi-H-frame Studio Academy Easel!"

The canvas which is to be first onto the easel is to be re-delivered tomorrow. I was out when a previous delivery attempt was made on Friday - this will be the third attempt by the suppliers to furnish me with a usable canvas, the previous two having arrived holed below the waterline and in a sinking condition, so to speak! I have my fingers crossed for the condition of the one which is arriving tomorrow.

Progress on the artworks which are currently "on the stocks" has been steady and unspectacular, and I hope that this is maintained during the next week. I'll let you know when I have any further news. Have a nice week!

A SHETLAND PARTICULAR

2010-05-23T12:20:00.000-07:00

I suspect that the fog, to which Dickens referred as a London particular, contained a few atmospheric elements which are peculiar to a 19th century fossil-fuel-fired nineteenth-century city, and absent from the blanket which has covered these islands in varying degrees of density over the past three days. Nonetheless, today it makes for a miserable prospect, as I survey the lack of scene from my top floor window. I saw nothing of the arrival of the Norwegian barque "Statstraad Lehmkuhl", making her first visit of 2010 to Lerwick today. In fact, the only way I know she is here is from the Ship AIS package on my computer, from which I also know that she is occupying the berth at the head of the Victoria Pier.

Having returned to composing this post after making, eating and clearing up after my midday meal, I observe that the fog has lifted somewhat, to be replaced by rain of the incessant miserable sort. This, however, will do nothing to deter the passengers from the "Statsraad Lehmkuhl", who will never let a bit of weather interfere with a trip ashore, if they have a mind to take one. The Norwegians, distinguishable by their helly-hansens and brightly-coloured umbrellas, are a recognisable feature of the crowds on Commercial Street on rainy summer days.

The week had started so promisingly weather-wise. A dry day greeted my mother as she returned from her regular fortnight's respite care at the Wastview Centre at Walls on Monday. I was there to greet her on her arrival, as I usually arrange to be, and I was looking ruefully at the rapidly-growing grass in her front garden, while regretting my inability to do much about it. As the week progressed, the sun continued to shine, until late on Thursday, when it disappeared behind a bank of fog and has not been seen since. Is this it then? Was that our summer - between Monday and Thursday of last week? Will it be like a few years ago, when I missed summer completely, due to an untimely visit to the toilet? I do hope not!

THE SYMPTOMS OF ARTWORK ANTIPATHY

2010-05-16T06:01:00.000-07:00

The malady set in badly yesterday afternoon. It's a strange debilitating condition, the main symptom of which is a pressing urge to do anything else rather than sit down at my workstation and paint. For an hour after lunch, all I wanted to do was google filing cabinets on the web (I am in need of such an item, but only in a particular design and finish).

The day had started so well. I had finished my stock painting of Shetland-model boats drawn up near Burravoe pier in Yell (shown above) during the morning. I had paused to make, eat, and wash up after, my lunch, and it was then that the artwork antipathy hit me like a sledgehammer. I just couldn't face doing any more work on my Lerwick South End commission (which is in dire need of some serious attention, as the deadline approaches). Maybe it was the beautiful weather outside, or perhaps it's the fact that I am sick of painting this particular scene - I have portrayed this location, which is one of the most iconic views of the town, so often that I can nearly paint it in the dark.

Eventually, I mustered the will-power to prevail over the ailment, and did some work on the painting, but the results were well below my usual standard, and I'll have to make substantial adjustments during my next session on the picture.

Other items of bad news this week may have contributed to the malaise. The replacement for the large canvas, which was delivered substantially damaged last week, arrived on Thursday, also with a hole in it!` I knew, as soon as I looked at the gash in the single layer of cardboard (which was all the protection afforded by the suppliers) that there was no way in which the contents of the package could have survived intact, and so it proved. I immediately phoned the firm responsible for sending me this inadequately protected item, and they are sending me yet another one. The woman assured me that the next package would be more adequate for the purpose (it will have to be!). I also phoned my client, explaining why the deadline for completion of the artwork might have to be extended. Fortunately, he is an understanding kind of chap, and was sympathetic with my predicament. Other clients may have been less accommodating.

That same day, I heard of the death of my friend Tommy Watt, who had been ill for some time with leukaemia. He was only 50. As curator of Shetland Museum, he had overseen most of my exhibitions at the old building, and I could always rely on him for a fair and frank assessment of what I'd put on display. One of the last occasions I spoke to him was on the day I hung my only (so far) exhibition in the new museum. His words were enthusiastically approving of what was on the walls around us, but I could see then (early last year) that he was not in the best of health. I intend to be at his funeral in the museum on Tuesday, and I shall miss him.

"In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part," wrote Alexander Pope to HIS friend Jonathan Swift. I seem to have lost an awful lot of friends in recent years, and perhaps it's this diminution which I've been suffering from lately.

I promise you a more upbeat post next week. Stay safe!

ARTY STUFF

2010-05-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

Looking back over previous posts, I see that it's three weeks since I last mentioned progress on my own artwork. I apologise for this, and hope to make amends for it here, as there is quite a lot of news, although I have no new completed artworks to tell you about. I hope to have more soon.

I have been working on a commissioned landscape/seascape of Lerwick's Sooth End, and I hope to have the buildings finished by the close of play tomorrow. I then have to attend to the piers, boats, foreground sea and reflections therein, so I'm still some way off completion, for which I have a deadline of 16th June. I am still hopeful of making this. I have been working on a "stock" painting too, of Shetland-model boats drawn up near Burravoe pier, on the Shetland island of Yell. There are other landscape features in the mid-and background parts of this work, and I have completed most of these.

A British ex-pat, now resident in France, was in touch regarding the possible purchase of some of my website paintings. However, despite several phone calls between this chap and me, something definite has yet to materialise from this. I still live in hope, as it's nice to sell paintings "ex-stock" now and again.

I picked up a small but interesting commission, from an old school friend, while I was away on the mainland the other weekend. This is a painting of one of the ships on which his grandfather served as crewman, the SS "Clermiston", but there is no deadline on this work, so I will "clear my feet" of more urgent jobs before tackling this one. This also applies to a November-deadlined nautical commission, of the P & O ferry "St. Clair" (IV) coming out of Aberdeen harbour, with Girdleness lighthouse in the background.

The largest commission I have yet to undertake came my way a fortnight ago, and this has already been attended with difficulties. The size of this work is 50" x 40", so I had to order a stretched canvas for this, from one of my mainland suppliers. When it arrived last week, there was a tear, about 1.5" long, near one of the corners of the stretcher frame, which had obviously been the point of impact of a blow during transit. The canvas had been wrapped in only one layer of cardboard, which is completely inadequate for the purpose of sending by post or carrier. I well remember the exertions I had to put into claiming compensation from Royal Mail for a painting which had arrived in Anglesey with a hole through it, a few years ago. Of course, on this occasion, I had to replace the tall ships-themed painting with another similar work, adding another month's work to my bill! The lesson learned from this painful experience was to use polystyrene sheeting AND bubblewrap to protect work from damage by careless and busy delivery-men. The little bit of extra effort saves a great deal of potential time and trouble. But I digress.

The firm who sent the canvas were very good about making reparation, sending me another canvas (which has yet to arrive) and requiring only photographic evidence of the damage to support my claim for replacement. I supplied them with this immediately on request. They don't want the damaged item returned to them, which was a relief, as getting a package as large as that to a point of despatch was a logistical problem for me. Nevertheless, I'm stuck with a large, slightly damaged canvas, on premises in which space is already at a premium! Anyone want it for painting stage scenery, or something? If so, just get in touch and arrange to collect it, and it's yours - free!

I gave myself until the end of July to complete this painting, and I've already lost a fortnight of this. It is of a sailing ship heeling over in strong winds, and it is for what appears to be a potentially valuable client in Cheshire, so I hope I can still make this particular deadline. To misquote the call centre operative, and out of context too, "this job is important to me!"

There have been hints of further commissons too, so "easel-time" on stock works looks like being limited over the coming few months. It is just as well, therefore, that my next booked exhibition remains that which is scheduled for the Creel Inn, Catterline in November and December of 2011. By that time, Shetland will have had its second stint as host for the Tall Ships Race, and my 63rd birthday will be a fairly distant memory. Now and then, I wish that the passage of time had a brake attached to it somewhere!

The website upgrade is still a work in progess too. I would like to get a new look to the "moveable information" layout on the Home page, and my web designer and I will have to apply our joint best efforts on this soon. I haven't updated the information on this page for ages, and this cannot be good for my online search prospects, so I hope to have better news on this in the very near future.

And there ends the latest bulletin from the Tait Gallery. Have a nice week!

BEG PARDON?

2010-05-09T05:32:00.000-07:00

"The people have spoken, and no-one knows what they've said." The situation is as summed up by whoever first came up with this already-hackneyed expression, after last week's election to the British parliament. When the dust has finally settled, and whichever party has climbed into bed with whatever other one to form a kind of coalition, the position for you and me will be much the same. The country is in dire straits financially, and it will be down to us to make the necessary sacrifices to get the nation back on a sound footing again. The fat cats in the banking world, who were partly, but by no means entirely, responsible for the mess, will suffer little by comparison - they'll have made sure that, whatever happens to the masses, they'll be well buffered against events.

As to how it will affect my life, I haven't a clue. "Whit's fur wis'll no ging by wis," is one of the many rather trite titbits of homespun wisdom which form the lore of these islands, and it's especially appropriate to the current situation. Anticipating hard times ahead, I went out and bought a new fridge last week. I think that was the same day my underpants fell down on my way home from the Co-op. Just as well I'm not a kilt-wearer, or they would have descended to my ankles and beyond. As it was, they formed a kind of slack tourniquet around my middle thighs and impeded my forward progress. Yes, folks, times are getting leaner, particularly around my abdominal region, apparently.

ANOTHER SATURDAY EXCURSION

2010-05-03T10:59:00.000-07:00

Saturday 24th April dawned dull and damp in Aberdeen, but the weather forecast was predicting better things for the rest of the day. My brother arrived to pick me up from the Premier Inn at North Anderson Drive, and off we went for a day's sightseeing and snapping. I had a vague idea that I should get more images of the fishing village of Gourdon, and of the area near Luthermuir and Sauchieburn, which I had found interesting on a previous visit, but had been unable to photograph due to adverse weather conditions. The last time we were in the area, the wind had been so strong that I could scarcely stand up, let alone use a camera.

I had a walk around the attractive harbour at Gourdon and the streets leading to it, making good use of my little Pentax Optio 50 as I did so. The sky was still largely overcast, but there were glimpses of brightness here and there - enough to make some interesting effects. Next, we headed for the Luthermuir area, where there are wonderful views of fields (some recently ploughed, some green and some bright yellow and white with crops of variegated daffodils), interspersed with groves of trees and brick farm buildings, all set against the blue of distant hills. We always seem to end up in Fettercairn, although we approached it by a different route on this occasion, and I found more camera-fodder here. In a previous artistic existence, I would have had a sketchbook, a rapidograph set and pencils with me, but this process takes a great deal of time, I only had the one day to get as much material as possible, and the images I get with this little camera are superb (provided conditions are right, as they were that day).

After a good wander around this attractive village, we set off again in the Fiesta, this time up Glenesk, and into the higher hills through which the river North Esk flows - quite rapidly on that day. We found some splendid viewpoints near a place called Millden, where the signage indicated that visitors were not entirely welcome. We didn't overstay ours, but I did get a few more photographs here, before we carried on with our excursion.

This took us up to lunchtime, which called for a visit to an eatery we have used twice before, namely the dining room of the Panmure Arms Hotel at Edzell. It didn't disappoint on this occasion either. Having eaten, the question of where to go next arose. I had achieved all I had set out to do with the camera that day, and anything that occurred from then on would be by way of a bonus. My brother suggested a visit to an old chum from our schooldays, who stays at Auchmithie, having first established that he was at home and receiving visitors.

When I reflect on the group of our contemporaries who were going through the process of growing up in the Shetland parish of Sandwick in the late 1950s and 1960s, creating our own brand of mayhem among the long-suffering parishioners as we did so, I suppose we little thought, in those carefree days, of the variety of paths our subsequent careers would take. One became a professor of geology, one a haematologist, another a seaman, one an insurance agent and Citylink bus driver (not simultaneously). Still others never left the district, married and raised families in the same parish they grew up in. One died before reaching the age of forty, and another, after promising much and delivering little on several occasions, became a self-employed artist. Kenneth Bull became an architect, and now lives, semi-retired, in a converted coastguard station atop a sea-cliff at Auchmithie, just outside Arbroath.

So it was hither to Auchmithie that we hied on Saturday afternoon. The Angus countryside was now bathed in warm sunshine, and this was creating a strange weather phenomenon - steam! The newly-ploughed fields were wet, and clouds of steam were now rising from these - when they were close to the road on both sides it was like driving through fog! We went via Brechin and Montrose, and I was saddened to see large numbers of road-killed pheasant and grouse at the sides of the highway in this area.

Over a cup of Kenneth's tea, we spent an hour or so reminiscing about past events, and discussing current circumstances and future projects. He gave us valuable advice regarding exactly how to get to a suitable vantage point from which to get pictures of the south-east corner of Montrose basin. I had noticed this scene, with small boats ebbed up in the mud at low tide, as we had passed through earlier, and I ended up with a few more useful photographs of that attractive location, when we stopped there later, on our way back to Aberdeen.

It was close to six o'clock when we arrived back at the granite city, after what had been an enjoyable and successful day, although I had no idea at that time just how good the images on my smart card were. I only discovered this on being reunited with my computer on Monday morning. Now all I need to do is to commit some of these scenes to canvas!

LENNY HENRY AND ME

2010-05-02T12:17:00.000-07:00

The receptionist at the Premier Inn seemed genuinely pleased to see me when I arrived at her desk early on the wet evening of Saturday 24th April, accompanied by a holdall which was ridiculously large for a weekend sojourn. My effects were rattling about in it like a pea in a pod, as I set off down a corridor in search of room 17, which I found at the other side of the third fire door from the reception area. The room was spacious, the bed even more so. I dumped my luggage, and set off to find the eating facility, as I had survived the boat trip on four packets of crisps and a couple of cartons of Ribena, and I was more than ready for a meal.

This hotel is remarkable in that it has no eatery contained within it - all meals are served next door in the Cocket Hat bar and restaurant, which seems to be run as a separate entity. I stood my nephew a meal there as a reward for his pains in providing me with free transport from the ferry. Very nice it was too. After we had eaten, I retired to my room, and my nephew, who is studying for a university degree, went back to whatever students do an Friday evenings.

I saw no sign of Lenny Henry at this branch of the Premier Inn. I did, however, have a Frank Spencer moment, when I went to take a shower next morning. The showerhead came off in my hand, leaving a hole in the wall, when I attempted to direct its flow to different parts of my body. Fortunately, the water was not turned on at the time, and I was able to stick the thing back on. Miraculously it still worked.

I enjoyed my Premier Inn experience, and would definitely stay there again. The room was spacious, with all the facilities I needed, and the bed was much too large for a chap on his own. I found myself reminiscing about happy times past, when hotel experiences were something shared with the woman I loved.....

In fact, the only fly in the ointment was my fellow residents, most of whom seemed to return from a celebration of some kind or another at 2am on the Sunday morning, and carried on carousing for some time afterwards. The walls between the rooms seemed paper-thin. I could practically understand every word which one particular guest was uttering!

So, the Premier Inn gets several stars from me. For someone who isn't in the high income bracket, it ticks all the boxes for comfort and service, and I'd recommend it to my friends. And they aren't paying me to write this!

EYJAFJALLAJOKULL AND ME

2010-05-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

The Icelandic volcano was responsible for extending my weekend trip off Shetland by about 9 hours, and by an extra night in the Premier Inn at North Anderson Drive in Aberdeen. Let me briefly explain. In the week leading up to Saturday 24th April, all aircraft flights on and off the Northern Isles were cancelled for most of the time. Northlink Ferries decided, in their corporate fashion, that they would run a shuttle service to accommodate the people stuck because of the flight disruption, and those who had booked passages with them previously would be accommodated too, albeit at different times from their original bookings. Are you with me so far?

To compound the problems, one of the two Northlink Ferries was still in drydock for her annual shampoo, shave and bottom-scrape, so the one ship, the "Hrossey", ran flat out, leaving Lerwick at 9am each morning, arriving at Aberdeen at 6pm, discharging and loading passengers, and leaving for Shetland again at 9pm, docking at Lerwick by 7am.

So I, as a pre-booked passenger, was left with a choice - either alter my journey to the earlier sailing time (on Friday 23rd April) which would mean spending an extra night in Aberdeen, or abandoning the trip entirely, as the whole purpose of the exercise was spending Saturday on a photographic excursion round the Mearns and Angus regions with my brother. I went for the former option, and enjoyed the day-time boat-trip in pleasant conditions, with a gentle following wind and moderate sea.

The skipper greeted us over the speaker system as Captain Scott, which amused me somewhat: "Bing-bong! Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Scott welcoming you aboard the "Hrossey". The wind is force 4 northerly, the sea state is slight. I hope you have a pleasant journey. Great God, this is an awful place! Bye." I have to confess that part of that announcement is a figment of my imagination.

By 10am, we were leaving Sumburgh Head behind, at 10.45am Fair Isle was abeam, and the next land we saw was near Kinnaird Head just before 3pm. We were tied up in Aberdeen harbour by 5.45pm, and my nephew was there with his car to run me up to the hotel. I felt that an enjoyable and profitable weekend was about to begin.

SHORT TRIPS AND TALL SHIPS

2010-04-18T05:21:00.000-07:00

I hope you like the painting of the Danish full-rigged ships "Georg Stage" and "Danmark", which I've partly uploaded to the decorative area of this blog (above). I say partly, as Blogger doesn't like my "tall" paintings, so what you see here is the middle section of the artwork - there's more sky and sea in the real thing, which you can see in the Ships section of the Gallery pages on www.tait-gallery.co.uk .

Speaking of which, meticulous and apparently never-ending work is still being done on the new version of the Tait Gallery website, in preparation for its launch in the indefinable and ultra-useful period of time which is known as "shortly". After all this, I hope it doesn't disppoint.

I'm working on another commission, for which my bespoke canvas, from Jackson's Art Supplies, arrived earlier this week. It's a very long one, as the actress said to the bishop, and will feature all the buildings in Lerwick's south end, from the "Dyook's Neb" to Church Road and beyond. Lerwick residents will be aware of the large number of buildings which this area encompasses, and how I'm going to complete this in the two months before the deadline is something I'm trying not to think about, as it will only scare the pants off me if I do.

Before starting on that odyssey, I began two "stock" works during that last two weeks. One of these depicts a row of Shetland model boats drawn up on the shore near Burravoe pier on the island of Yell. This one is nearly halfway towards completion now. The other is of Hay's Dock here in Lerwick, and this work is at a very early stage - only just drawn out, really, with no paint applied yet beyond the base coat. These paintings will now only occasionally be worked on, as all my efforts are concentrated on the Lerwick South End picture.

I'm off on the big blue Northlink canoe to Aberdeen next Friday evening. This time next week, I'll have checked out of the Premier Inn, after my first ever experience of such an establishment (provided that all is well, and the boats have been running to schedule). I also hope for a decent day next Saturday, so that my brother and I can enjoy a day's travelling round the Aberdeenshire, Kincardineshire and Angus countryside, getting lots of photographs of some of the wonderful places in this part of the country. Last time we attempted this, a gale of wind was blowing sleet across the Mearns, and none of the few images which I had tried to capture came out at all. Again, if all goes to plan, I'll be back here on the morning of 26th April, hopefully with a smart-card full of beautiful pictures which will get my creative juices flowing over the next year or so.

My mother enjoyed her week's stay in the Fernlea Care Centre at Whalsay, and arrived back, much refreshed, at Brugarth, Whiteness, on Monday afternoon, to be met by my sister Thelma and myself. Thelma is "camping out" at Brugarth just now, while her own home is undergoing extensive refurbishments - a new kitchen, including the floor, all of which, I am happy to relate, is being paid for by an insurance company. This makes me glad that I am still a council tenant, and the bill for all repairs to my top-floor flat is never presented to me at all.

And so, as a mixture of wet snow and Icelandic volcanic ash precipitates itself on my beloved islands, I must bring this post to a close. I hope that your travel arrangements for the incoming week are not affected by this potent mix, and wish you all the very best.

THE HAZAEL III AND THE HESPERUS

2010-04-18T05:03:00.000-07:00

Some months ago, I started to do a little history project, through this blog, on the subject of the old wooden 20ft Shetland model boat, which my father bought in a sieve-like condition, and restored to full seaworthiness by means of a mixture of fibreglass, glue and bits of board. We spent many happy summers thereafter, fishing in her with lines and exploring parts of the Shetland coast which, being inaccessible from land, had probably never seen the foot of man for many a day. Some day I plan to finish the story of this wonderful little boat, which my mother had christened "Hesperus" after the wreck in Longfellow's poem.

I was reminded of her this week, when someone made a posting on the Fishing Boats forum in www.shipsnostalgia.com about an old Fraserburgh drifter called the Hazael III, registration no. FR107. This was the number painted on the large plastic drift-net buoy which we found, on one of our "Hesperus" expeditions, jammed among the boulders on the beach in a rocky cove on the south end of Shetland mainland. The buoy, in good condition despite what it had encountered on its way to the cove, was a valuable find for a lad in his early teens, and it was duly taken to the Lerwick fishing agents LHD, who gave me the princely sum of 7s6d (37.5p!) for it. In the early 1960s this was real money!

I couldn't resist replying to the Shipsnostalgia post, telling them this little story.

A TRIP TA DA BOANIE ISLE

2010-04-11T03:23:00.000-07:00

I've always known that I should get out more, especially when it comes to getting around my native Shetland islands. What it requires is a reason combining with an opportunity, and both presented themselves yesterday, in the form of my mother enjoying a week's respite care in the Fernlea centre, and my sister Mary being available with her Volvo to provide the transport. My last visit to Whalsay took place in the dark, and under rather stressful circumstances, but yesterday even the weather was in co-operative mode. The ingredients were all there for a grand afternoon out, and so it transpired.

I had booked us on the two o'clock ferry from Laxo, which got us into Symbister around 2.30pm. The first thing that grabs the attention of a marine artist is the harbour, which was dominated, but by no means overwhelmed by the presence of the large pelagic trawlers "Antares", "Charisma" and "Zephyr". The whitefish boats "Athena" and Prevail" were also there, along with the cargo vessel "Havgull" and a good number of salmon-cage tenders, workboats and pleasure craft around the marina area. The harbour gave the impression of only being able to contain what was using it, and space seemed to be at a premium. It all gave the impression that Whalsay is doing very nicely, thank you very much.

This was also reflected in the buildings in Symbister, and the Harlsdale, Sandwick and Clate areas to the south of there. None of it really tempted me to reach for my camera, but it all reflected how well Whalsay has done from the fishing industry (with help from the oil industry, of course, as in the rest of Shetland) in the forty years since I was last here with the Bank of Scotland mobile unit. We called along the shop near the harbour, and seldom have I encountered such a range and quantity of products, ranging from food, household goods and clothing through to tools and ironmongery.

We took the road over the hill past Livister and Huxter to Isbister, and there I began to find myself reaching for my camera, as the true beauty of this prosperous island was beginning to present itself to us. I've seldom seen so many skylarks at close quarters as at Whalsay yesterday, and the wheatears were also very much in evidence in the lonely out-of-the-way places in the centre and east of the island. I didn't realise until yesterday that it's quite possible to walk for miles on this island without seeing a human habitation at all.

I liked Isbister, which has a slightly eccentric feel about it, and the old is not completely overwhelmed by the new, as it is to a large extent in the south-west of the island. Drystone dykes, which look as if they've stood for centuries, are quite conspicuous here. We took the alternative route over the hill towards Creedie-knowe. At the top, three children, who had got off their bikes to let us pass, gazed reproachfully at us for spoiling their afternoon out. We visited the second-hand store Shoard, more to satisfy my pressing requirement for a comfort break than to view what they had to offer in terms of merchandise, which was nevertheless impressive. I bought three books in there, but I could also have, if I had been so inclined, come out with a TV. a bed, a sewing machine and a large selection of household ornaments, crockery, cutlery and clothing, to mention but a few items from the range on offer.

From Shoard, we turned north-east again, driving past Challister and Veevoe (I've spelt this phonetically, not as it appears on the signage and the OS maps) on our way to Skaw, where we ran out of road at the golf clubhouse, which appears to be the most northerly inhabited building on the island. From there, we had no option but to turn south-east again, visiting the two hamlets I've already mentioned on our way back. Here, I began to use my camera in earnest, as the kind of skylines which appeal to me were presenting themselves.

Passing Creedie Knowe again, we turned right in the Brough road, and finished up on the shore, across a kind of causeway to the church and cemetery which obviously give the Kirk Ness its name. Here, disaster struck, as my camera had finally run out of battery-power and, despite good intentions in the run-up to our departure on this trip, I had forgotten to take new ones with me. I must return to this place soon.

We made our way back towards Symbister, calling at the Fernlea Care Centre to visit our mother. We were just in time to watch the Grand National on the splendid big-screen TV, which, we were told, had been a gift from the Boating Club. A P McCoy seemed very pleased to have won the big steeplechase on his 15th attempt. We found our mother looking very well and happy, and we enjoyed some of the hospitality on offer in the establishment when the staff came round with tea and home bakes, which were excellent.

Soon it was time to head for the ferry, and I was reminded why it is a bad idea for me to get comfortable in an armchair - I always have the Dickens of a job getting to my feet again! We 'd had a wonderful time in the friendly atmosphere of Da Boanie Isle, and I have unfinished business which it will be a pleasure to return to take care of soon. Oh, and the photographs I took came out beautifully.

I'll be back!

PROGRESS REPORT No. WHATEVER!

2010-04-04T06:02:00.000-07:00

Satisfactory and steady progress makes for a boring narrative, but it's all I have to report from the last seven days. Just think how few people would watch the likes of Eastenders (I never have, by the way!) if the characters in this soap opera got on with each other, and it wasn't a strange fractious fairyland in which everyone is either at or up everyone else!

Alas, all I have to report is maintained progress on the artwork front. I have started two new "stock" works, without many preconceived ideas about their subject-matter, apart from their probably being landscapes. I should have the second of the tall ships paintings finished this incoming week. I have ordered a bespoke canvas from Jackson's for my latest commissioned painting, the dimensions of which are to be 16 x 36 inches, rather an odd shape, but it's what my customer (who is always ultimately right!) specified. I couldn't find an off-the-peg canvas of the desired shape in any of my catalogues, so I was forced down the bespoke route. I hope my client is still keen when she is presented with the canvas bill!

The website upgrade is also progressing, but too slowly for my liking. There is an awful lot of work to do, in order to make this the quality site which my web designer and I would like it to be. I'm not confident enough to predict a launch month, let alone a date - hopefully during 2010 sometime!

In the meantime, the old set-up is still there at http://tait-gallery.co.uk

Some of my family were caught up in the foul weather which has plagued much of mainland Britain this week, but all have reached their destinations in one piece. My niece Elanor has been doing a Scottish tour with Camerata, a group selected from the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, and they were performing at Queen's Cross church in Aberdeen on Tuesday. My brother, who is a member of that congregation, reported a brilliantly performed concert attended by a disappointingly small audience - perhaps they could have done with a more effective publicity agent! The group were due to perform at Edinburgh the following night, to whence Elanor's mother and father (my sister Angela and brother-in-law Nigel) were travelling, one from Saudi Arabia and the other from North Wales. My mother was relieved to hear, on Friday evening, that they had all got home to Gwynedd safely afterwards.

Talking of my mother, she is off to the Bonnie Isle tomorrow, for a week's respite care in the Fernlea Centre in Whalsay. The weather forecast is none too promising for the half-hour ferry crossing to the island, but I hope she'll be OK. She took a liking to the centre on her last, more hastily-organised "holiday" there in late January, and she is looking forward to the experience.

I am hoping for an equally and boringly progressive seven days ahead, at the end of which I hope to have another new painting to show you. I wish you good things for your week too.

SMOOTHING OVER THE CRACKS...

2010-04-04T05:34:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I get an idea which is so brilliantly devastating in its clarity and simplicity that I fel the best thing to do is to forget all about it and take to my bed for a fortnight, in order to spare the human race the consequences of it. However, this particular wheeze would not be denied, and it was a solution to a problem I had encountered in the course of my artwork this week.

Here's the background to the issue. I have been working on the second of two tall ships seascapes this week. This one features the Danish full-riggers "Georg Stage" (the nearer of the two vessels and already more or less finished) and the "Danmark"(further away, and creating my problem). I have been carefully delineating her masts, sails and rigging in pencil, sometimes rather too heavily, in pencil, and this has been leaving scores in the canvas, which didn't matter much until I wanted to change the angle of the set of the ship's sails. This made them much more visible, and they couldn't simply be painted out.

The solution, which presented itself to me in a blinding flash of inspiration, was - why don't I press the marks out? I put my iron on to moderate heat, got my ironing board out, placed a cloth-protected phone book on it, as support to the lower, painted side of the canvas, and proceeded to give the canvas the same treatment as I would to a stubbornly-creased shirt-front. And, much to my surprise, it worked - to a large extent.

This has been another successful experiment from the Tait Gallery - but not under laboratory conditions. Please don't try this at home, children! No animals were injured during the course of this experiment, although the neighbour's cat swapped ends on the shed roof when I leant out the window to sneeze.

Blah!