oil on panel 73x52cm
There's no music as a scene setter for this piece, but I did revisit The Skids during the last few painting sessions. They were Fife boys from nearby Dunfermline, so here's 'Animation' as a bit of local colour (Not at all mandatory).
The sources for this image were some photos of the Lomond Hills, in Fife - taken from the train coming back to Edinburgh from Perth. It was late afternoon last October – just south of Ladybank I think.
The real Lomond Hills don't look anything like this though. The one on the left – East Lomond – is really a lot higher than appears here, but that would've been a bit unbalanced. I wanted to make the other hill – West Lomond – the more important of the two compositionally, so I reduced 'East' and enlarged 'West' through the magic of photoshop for an 'improved' source image. The clear sky reaching down the right edge to the low horizon is entirely invented; in the original source the cloud extends, uninterrupted, way past and far beyond the picture boundary. The open 'new' sky defines the central cumulus more, balances East Lomond, and stops the whole composition from sliding off to the right and out of the picture. The hedges, and trees and bushes receding back into the murk were a gift for describing the distance, but they did need something more.
I knew I would have to have figures in the painting somewhere, but I only found them quite late. They are a group of four, taken from a German TV drama on the telly earlier this year, and screen-shotted directly from the BBC iPlayer later. I saw them (and they were in an interesting dawn setting which may come in useful at some point) and knew they were just right, though I do admit that they might be a little bit shoe-horned in. Only a little bit though.
It's all about the horizontally-lit cumulus of course, and I'm quite pleased with the colour and the apparent lightness of the cloud - it's difficult to imagine that such masses really weigh thousands of tons, and are kept aloft purely by rising air currents. I would've liked the paint surface to be finer and softer close-up, but it'll do from a small distance away. I did use the dreaded velvet pads (see August 2018 post) at one point, but luckily they didn't deposit too many 'bits' into the paint surface. I switched back to plain muslin after the velvet debacle, and I think I've got away with it.
Technically, this piece is all thin layers, and for some reason it took me a long time to get to grips with it. I wanted to get the central cloud 'solved' first, postponing the establishment of the overall tonality – it was about the twelfth session (of twenty in all) by the time I had any depth to the hill tones. It's as if I didn't really want to do the painting at all. Which can happen.
West Lomond is a strange and deceptive hill. From Strathearn, going along the A85 from Crieff to Perth, its conical summit pokes above the Ochil Hills, and seems to be a mighty distant peak, like Everest towering over the Himalayas. When you finally see it in its own, it doesn't really seem high at all, and, while an interesting feature in its own right, can be a slight anticlimax if you've been looking forward to it all the way from Perthshire.
This particular hill group – in Eastern Scotland – are nothing at all to do with Loch Lomond (of Bonny Bonny Banks fame) in the West. As the Interweb says: “The place name 'Lomond' may be from Gaelic – leamhan - elm, though the more popular explanation is that it is from another Gaelic word laom meaning blaze, hence Ben Lomond - beacon hill (though beacon loch is less satisfactory, unless the loch is named from the hill above it)”. The two Fife hills would be pretty good 'beacon' hills, so I'll go with that.
They are easily visible from Edinburgh when looking north across the Firth of Forth, and are known very colloquially as 'The Paps of Fife', which is very rude indeed. And, frankly, stretching it a bit...
