Spring has arrived.

Spring has arrived.

I was so happy to finally put the paint and brushes back in the shed. By the time finished I’d had enough of emulsion paint for at least another year. After I finished the hall I went on to paint the new handrails on the stairs, then I decided to paint the skirting boards and door frame in the bathroom and then, I repainted all the walls and skirting boards in the kitchen. Once I started painting the kitchen I realised how discoloured it was and how much it desperately needed painting. Anyhow, now that it’s done, it looks so much better, nice and clean and bright and white. Those are not my paintings on the kitchen wall; the landscape is a print I bought from a shop. I saw it, fell in love with the view and promised myself I would go there one day. It’s a place called Riomaggiore which is a tiny medieval village high up on the cliffs above the coast of North West Italy. I bought the print and have kept it on my kitchen wall ever since to remind myself that one day….. I will go there.   The yellow rose on the kitchen wall is a photograph printed on canvas, it was taken by a friend of mine (who is an excellent photographer), she had it printed up on canvas and gave me for Christmas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riomaggiore

And as soon as the decorating paraphernalia was back in the shed, out came the canvas and acrylic paints. I finished off the portrait of Justin, my grandson. He is only 13 but he’s joined the army cadets and goes off to camp every month. He’s very proud of his uniform and made a special point of asking me to make sure I paint the red feathery thingy on his beret (sorry military people can’t remember what he called it).   

Once he was finished I planned my next couple of paintings. I need to do a snowscape of the hills for my daughter, that’s what the long canvas is for, and I plan on doing four small square and two small round canvases of bright yellow sunflowers. Today, I prepared all the canvases and made a start on the snowscape painting. 

Last week was mostly spent saving photos to my flickr account. I’ve finished saving everything from 2014 and I’m up to date with this years photos. Looking back at the flickr account I realise I actually saved every thing quite regularly until about the end of 2010 and then for some reason, I just stopped, and now I’m playing catch up. If you want to see my growing collection of literally thousands of photos they are here;

https://www.flickr.com/photos/forget-me-not5275/

The one time I did venture down to the harbour this week I spotted the inshaw lifeboat crew doing a training exercise and I saw the old dredger was back. That same dredger spends a couple of months here every year which I guess means our harbour is high maintenance.

And lastly…………Its spring, yep its official, my snowdrops are in full bloom which means its spring in my garden. Even if its not spring anywhere else, once the snowdrops bloom, its spring in my garden. Within a couple of weeks I’ll open up my old gardening blog.

I have already booked my grandson, (the one in the painting), to help me paint the garden fences. He’s coming over for the weekend on Friday 13^th and that’s when it will all kick off in my garden.  

The sun shines but its soooooooooo cold.

The sun shines but its sooooooo cold 

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on the computer these last couple of days. After my ‘almost’ lost everything incident, I’m taking my sisters advice and storing some stuff online. I didn’t realise how much stuff I had stored on that external hard drive until it was almost too late, its quite a bit, in fact its loads. It would take me forever to transfer all those files somewhere else so; I decided … prioritise. I’ve made the photos my major priority. Not all of the photos, just the ones I’ve taken of all those lovely places I visited over the last few years. I have an old flickr account that I used for every thing until a few years ago. Then I became busy, and began storing stuff on the external hard drive, so I stopped using it. Now I’ve gone back there and started sorting through the huge backlog of photos I have and I’m saving them a few at a time on flickr. It doesn’t help that while I stopped using flickr, it updated itself, it has changed and completely and virtually reinvented itself. It never was the most user friendly site but now every thing has changed, it’s even worse. I spent the first few hours figuring how to use it again. Plus it seems pretty slow but, as it’s already there, and as I have loads of storage space there, and as I’ve already paid for it, I’m going to persevere and get as much stuff on there as possible. This could take a while, I’m thinking I’m going to have to schedule in at least a couple of computer evenings per week to keep up with every thing. All the other stuff, documents of various types, I guess I’ll just back up with other plug in storage devices. One thing’s for sure, being that close to losing everything has made me sit up and take notice of how important backing up is.

I’ve also had my PC completely overhauled by my brother-in-law and sister. It’s amazing what technology can do, I just download a little programme, logged in, sat back and watched my computer magically fix itself. Actually what really happened is that the programme I downloaded allows my sister to sit in her house in France, log into my computer in Scotland and magically fix it……I love technology.

So today I spent catching up with every ones blogs here. I was wondering why no one seemed to be posting anything and then I realised you were, but all my notifications were ending up in my Spam folder. Another thing I noticed was the spell checker has mysteriously disappeared from the comments section, so if I have left a comment on your blog and the spelling is a little ‘unusual’ that’s why.

Feeling kinda good today, the decorating is more or less up to date, the computer is more or less up to date and I’ve have had a few great days out even though it’s been very cold here. So thought I’d share a few of the photos I’ve been sorting through.

First are a couple of photos from a little village called Letham. We tend to go there when the weather is too bad for us to go too far away, it has a fantastic craft shop that sells every thing you could ever possibly need for any type of craft and then more stuff you would never dream of. It also has a little coffee shop that sells home made soup, home made bread, a selection of home made cakes and….. Has Local craft work on display and for sale.  There’s another shop there that’s a bit pricy but has wonderful, wonderful felted and fabric craft work for sale. This is the view from outside the craft shop, the one with snow on the hills was taken in December and the damp misty one was taken a couple of weeks ago.The one at the top of the page was also taken in Letham on the misty day.

Next up are a couple of photos from the harbour taken in January on a day that felt like the ice age but looked like the middle of summer.  

This is Glenesk taken on another beautifully bright but totally freezing day in February.

On Saturday I had my first visit to the beach for the year year. We walked along Elliot water until it reached the sea and then walked back toward the harbour along the beach. It was a bit odd, the photos make it look like the middle of summer but every one out that day wore many layers of warm clothing toped off with hats scarves and gloves.  

This last photo was taken from the nearby town of Forfar. My daughter lives there and she actually called me over to take photos of the snow on the hills. She can see those hills from her house and she wants a painting of them. This is the photo I’ve decided to use for her painting. I’ve cropped it into a longer shape because I have a long canvas I can use, also I think the shape will enhance the look of the hills.

Decorating the hall is finished.

Decorating the hall is finished.

Once I recovered from the awful shock of thinking I’d lost EVERYTHING, which of course I hadn’t, it was onward and upward with the decorating. So glad I did because, as I said in the beginning, I’m very impressed with my white stairway, and how it showcases my paintings and I wanted the same for my hallway. Now that it’s finished, I think I can safely say, I’ve achieved my aim.

At the end of last year I gave away most of my larger paintings, the ones I thought were my best, to my daughters, leaving the smaller ones for me to hang here. My stairway is like a rogue’s gallery with all my portraits and my hallway is like a little bit of France with all my poppy and lavender paintings. That big green, geometric painting is one of only two paintings I have kept from when I was a teenager at Art College. I’ve noticed it has several scratches across it; in places it’s quite badly scratched and damaged. It was painted in about 1970 and it’s been hauled around the country with me ever since so some damage is not exactly surprising. I’ve never been able to retouch it because it was painted in oil and now I only use acrylic. But, one of my friends gave me a small box of oil paint for Christmas and now I’m thinking I should do a little remedial work on it.

It’s funny how when ever I get the decorating gear out of the shed, the single job planned ends up with lots of little ‘add ons’. This time the ‘add ons’ included; fixing all the little bits of loose moulding that hide the seam between floor and skirting along the hall, removing (or at least trying to) all the old paint that had accumulated along the edges of the door frames, washing down all doors and doorframes, spraying various patched of black mould spores that appeared along the wall/ ceiling join in virtually every room and then re-touching the white ceilings. The more you do, the more you see that needs doing. While I have this gynormous pot of white paint, plus brushes and paint rollers sat here on the kitchen table, I’ve noticed my kitchen walls need a quick coat of white. I need to cover the (many) splatters and sploshes of acrylic paint accidently sloshed in the wrong direction while sitting at the kitchen table doing my paintings. I really need to be more careful and aim for the canvas not the walls. Once that’s done I can definitely put the decorating stuff back in the shed for another year. Oh… one exception, I need to get some interior wood paint to paint the new hand rail on the stairs and maybe retouch a couple of the treads that are looking a bit warn. And then…… it’s DONE for at least another year. As I get older my approach to home DIY etc has changed, these days I realise the only way I can cope with all this stuff is to keep on top of it and never let it get too bad. 

Yesterday I noticed all my snowdrops are up in the garden, I’d forgotten how many spring bulbs I have and now I’m thinking, next on the list ( after shoving all the decorating gear back in the shed) must be a little light gardening. In fact I’ve even thought about starting up my gardening blog again. Yesterday was an absolutely beautiful day. The sun shone, the sky was a cloudless blue, the sea was sparkling and shimmering , the birds were singing and all was well in the world, except of course for the biting cold. If it wasn’t for the fact that the trees remain skeletal and every one dresses as if for the Antarctic, yesterday would have looked like your average mid summer day. Cold, wind and rain be gone, a little gardening is called for very soon.  I feel it calling me.

I'm under crisis

I feel as if I’ve just suffered the biggest disaster of my life. It’s as if someone just flushed my life away. It’s not the decorating, that’s all going fine, paper’s successfully on the wall, it’s all looking good and I’ll start painting this weekend, if I feel up to it. At the moment I couldn’t care less about the damn decorating. I just want to sit and cry.  

This is far more serious, this is a genuine, major, mega life crisis; my external hard drive has wiped EVERYTHING stored on it and now, it doesn’t even register on the computer. It’s well and truly knackered. Maybe that doesn’t sound too much like a crisis to some people but consider this; my computer is old and not to be trusted and every couple of months I transfer every thing from my computer hard drive onto the external hard drive and then wipe the computer hard drive. When I say EVERYTHING, I really do mean EVERYTHING. ALL, yes ALL of the  photos I’ve taken over ALL the years of the wonderful Scottish countryside, all my family photos, my photos from France, last years photos of Barcelona, Carcassonne, La Rochelle, every last one of my photos GONE forever. It gets worse; believe it or not I have kept copies of EVERY single blog I ever posted. It started with 360, onto Multiply and then here on Blogger. My way of writing a blog post is to first write it out on a word doc (as I’m doing now)  then put the word doc in a folder together with the pictures for the post and then post online from that folder. ALL of those folders were named and dated and then kept in bigger folders marked either, 360, Multiply, Blogger or FB. There was other stuff, personal stuff; all my passport details, insurance details, email lists etc. I had so much stuff from when I worked in the school, pictures of the kids and the work they did. I know I am a bit (maybe more than a bit) on the obsessive side, but keeping everything and backing it all up on the external has been part of my life and my way of doing things for a long time now. I genuinely feel in shock, it’s almost like grieving, I can understand the devastation people feel after losing everything in a house fire. Right now I feel physically sick. I’ve been onto my sister, she’s the computer expert, and I’ve followed all her advice but…..NOTHING……………it’s all GONE.

Back to the decorating, in appreciation of white.

Back to the Decorating.

Every time I get the decorating gear out, I say I’m too old for this, it’s the last time, etc etc.  But here we go again, out comes the step ladder, the brushes, the buckets and all the paraphernalia associated with decorating. I tend to ask my daughters for B&Q vouchers for my Christmas and birthday. There is really nothing wrong with my hall. It has reasonably new pale green wallpaper with a tiny white flower and its all in fairly good condition. It looks OK, nothing too ‘in your face’, its low key and perfectly acceptable. 

It’s just that compared to my stairs which were finished after the hall, I don’t like it. My stairway is papered in embossed paper and painted white. It has made my stairway so light and bright I love it. Now I want to paint as many walls as possible nice, light, bright, white.  My kitchen and bathroom are both half tiled and half papered in thick paper painted white. It makes maintenance so much easier. On the stairs the white walls are a perfect backdrop to my paintings. 

White walls are so easily maintained, I just keep a pot of white paint and go over the dirty bits. Or in my case, go over the bits of wall I have splashed and splattered with bright acrylic paint while working on my paintings.   If you paint your walls any other colour, even a neutral colour like magnolia, you can never get exactly the same shade and end up having to do the whole thing all over again just for the sake of a couple of marks. So…the plan was; get the vouchers for Christmas, go buy the same embossed paper as I used on the stairs and then buy a couple of pots of cheap white emulsion paint and away we go. I’ve had the vouchers since Christmas and only now do I have the new paint and paper sitting at the top of my stairs. I’m talking myself into making a start. I’m very enthusiastic about seeing the end result, just not so enthusiastic about the work involved between now and then. So, ok, ……….here we go……….its a small space and, as decorating goes, a simple task, my aim is to be finished before this time next week.

The Paint Shed

I've made a decision; since I'm here anyway, I'm going to restart the blog I made for my paintings. I've just spent a little while reorganizing it and now I guess its ready to go  :-)

http://thepaintshed.blogspot.co.uk/p/introduction.html

St Bride at Imbolc

John Duncan, St Bride, 1913 Tempera on canvas, 112 x 144 cm.
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.
This is one of my favourite paintings; I’ve posted it several times in the past, on several different sites, usually at this time of year. Imbolc is the perfect excuse to share (again) this wonderful painting.

According legend the Irish Saint Bride was transported miraculously to Bethlehem to attend the nativity of Christ. Here she is shown with two angels who carry the white robed saint across the sea. Duncan was fascinated with the Outer Hebrides and the Isle of Iona. The birds and seal are the natural environment used as a backdrop to the supernatural angels carrying St Bride. Scenes from the life of Christ decorate the angel's robes, and include the artist's self-portrait as the tiny clown (a holy fool) accompanying the procession of the magi on the leading angel's gown. The Irish Goddess Brighid is the keeper of the sacred flame, the guardian of home and hearth, the crone.  When Ireland converted was to Christianity, the people refused to let go of their deities and the Goddess Brighid became a Christian saint. 

Beautiful moon tonight over my house.