There's a music track to go with this - Return 2 (song). It's quite a repetitive trancey piece, but if you get it going just now I'll come back to the why later. Meantime, this painting's image source was a photo I took a few years ago while on the Borders Railway, which runs alongside the main road through the Gala Water valley to Galashiels. The precise viewpoint is not far south of the Heriot A7/B709 junction, a few miles into the Southern Uplands, almost here.
The initial composition was put together very fast, which led to several problems I should have worked out before starting. It was originally all about the interesting shapes of the fir plantations within the valley, but I misinterpreted my single photograph, and began pursueing a series of rather panicky solutions in trying to fix it. Helpfully, there were some streetview sources very close to where the original photo was taken, which presented more information and some new options. Deciding not to slice a couple of centimetres off the bottom edge of the picture, I shifted the foreground grass-line and shrubs up a centimetre or so to flatten the problematic middle distance area in front of the trees and the valley. I had by now lost control of the tones and was become a little desperate. After a good long sit-down and think, my decisive remedy was to darken the entire landscape with a neutral Ultramarine/Raw Umber glaze, and it was at this point (I was playing some of Richter's hypnotic epic 'Sleep') that 'Return 2' began. As the landscape fell under shadow, the sky above it began to glow and open up; the blue became more intense, the clouds became animated, and the unhappy painting began to breathe easier and nodded me towards an alternative conclusion. The sky – that just happened to be there at the time – presented itself as the interesting thing, and the new overall darker tone let me get away with a much more two-dimensional landscape. Bacon gratefully saved, or at least not gone to waste. (And having said all that, there's some quite effective scratched paint in the foreground grass line)
Thinking about it now from the safety of having finished it, if I was to do this piece again (I won't), I would probably have kept the same proportions, but would have stretched the landscape down to deepen the 'bowl' of the valley, and steepen the curve of the wood that describes it; an easy thing to do in photoshop. That may have made the near grass line (with its quite effective scratched paintwork) and shrubs unnecessary. Maybe not, but at least I would've tried it out first before committing to it. I might even have realised how potent the sky was right at the beginning.
As my art teacher at school, Mr Knight, told me several times - 'Work an idea out to destruction or until it doesn't work, then do what worked just before that'.
Hmm. Flippin' know-it-all art teachers. Never there when you need them.
Now, some interesting stuff. The Borders Railway runs from Edinburgh to Galashiels, with a slightly anti-climactic terminus at Tweedbank. It was one of the swathe of railway lines culled in the late 1960s, but was rebuilt by the Scottish Government after a long campaign. When it opened in 2015 its popularity was found to have been somewhat underestimated – it is single track for a lot of its length and is usually quite full. It's also a pity that it didn't quite make it the two miles further to Melrose - an already developed tourist town with a fine abbey (ruins, unfortunately, like the other Border Abbeys, but that's another story). Once you're out of the Lothian ex-mining towns – Newtongrange, Gorebridge – the line rises into the hills proper, where it's flanked by medieval castles. The train crosses and re-crosses the river and road going south, the turns and valley sides getting tighter and steeper as the line approaches Galashiels. There are, apparently, plans to extend the line to Melrose proper, and eventually to Hawick, and thence to join the main West Coast line at Carlisle. Something very much to look forward to.
I just hope they work it all out properly before building it...
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