Above Coigach 7. Oil on 10×10 inch wood. Rose Strang 2023.

Today’s two paintings continue the Coigach series on 10×10 inch wood. These will be on exhibition later in the year at the Limetree Gallery, Bristol.

The painting below is a remembered impression of driving through Achiltibuie in Coigach. I take photos as I drive past but if I were just to paint the photos it wouldn’t have that ‘glimpsed’ effect that I want as I’d paint too carefully. So the approach here is just to keep painting and wiping off until it has the sense of freshness – something on the periphery of your vision that you just grasp as you drive past.

I suppose it’s how most of us see, unless we’re focussed intently on a spot in the landscape, or meditating, or very familiar with the area. There’s a sort of ecstasy in seeing hundreds of beautiful shapes and images whizzing past, and because you don’t have time to examine them in detail, they become etched on the mind almost like photos that just grasp the essentials.

Sometimes, hundreds of such images will play through my mind when I’m half asleep, which I find strangely magical.

I wonder if Ilsa D’Hollander had that experience. I mentioned her paintings a few blogs ago as I’ve long been a an admirer of her work. D’Hollander would cycle through the Dutch countryside then return to paint memories and fragments of what she’d seen in the studio. It was difficult and sad to hear that she’d taken her own life while still young. I haven’t really researched into that as I’m not sure I want to know – in any case she left a legacy of beautiful paintings, with an incredible astuteness of eye.

There’s a peace in her paintings that’s very familar to anyone interested in Northern Renaissance paintings and a light I can relate to, coming from the northern hemisphere.

More tomorrow …