Scotland / Week 1

Johnshaven, Aberdeenshire

A castle! Dunnattor Castle.

All sketches are 5x8 gouache

For the month of September, we are in bonnie Scotland, sketching, hiking and sightseeing. We’ve had the usual exciting mix of Scottish weather: from brilliant, shut-your-eyes blinding sun, to rain pouring down stair rods (as they say here), to mists and haar that seem to blur the line between this world and the next. And the landscape! Bold cliffs battered by the sea, stone circles making a stand against time and crumbling castles that have tried, broad vistas of fields dotted with cattle and sheep, “chocolate box” villages and ruined abbeys and oh, my! It’s a wonderful place for a landscape painter.

This past week, our first week, we spent in Johnshaven, on the east coast of Aberdeenshire. The little town has a working harbor, and from my bedroom window just before dawn, I could watch a little boat go out, stopping every minute or so to punctuate its movement by dropping a trap. Our house was right on the sea, and I could monitor the tide as it made its inexorable shift from high to low and back again, alternately hiding and revealing long fingers of reef, slippery and dangerous and a hazard to the boats. Shortly after rising, we’d walk the few blocks to the village shop for groceries, and watch the loading and unloading of traps from the harbor on our return.

We had a couple from Northumberland who had a car stay with us. Preferring not to drive this trip (as I did six years ago when in Orkney), I posted an inquiry in a Facebook group for outdoor painters to see if anyone might assist us in exchange for my expertise and payment for petrol. Bruce and Rexie popped up for this first part of the trip. Bruce sketches buildings, and Rexie takes pictures. We enjoyed spending time with them and exploring; although they are very familiar with the western part of Scotland, this area was new to them.

Although we’d made a list before the trip of places we might like to see–not a bucket list necessarily, but just options, as we wanted to have a relaxing and open-minded trip–we ended up finding things to see that were not on our list: a waterfall that we learned about from a local, a ruined castle perched on a beach overlook, a wonderful set of Pictish carved stones. (I’ll write all about this in my upcoming book on my Scotland trips.) We also met our “ride” for the second week, but more about that later.

And now we are in Portsoy, on the north coast of Aberdeenshire, starting our second week. For the moment, here are some gouache sketches and some photos, in no particular order. You can see more of all this and more regularly on my Instagram feed.