Snags Of Drumguish.

Getting Back INto My Rhythm.

Drumguish, Scotland. 9th September 2021.

Doing the 21 Days of Creativity, after a bit of a creative block, led me to start my first painting since the series I made for the interim show back in March. The painting grew from a quick sketch I drew during the challenge, where I tried to do something creative every day. Of all the sketches I made, this one really caught my attention - it sparked that familiar excitement and drive to paint something new.

The painting is based on a photograph I took during a hike with my parents while we were staying in Drumguish in the Scottish Highlands, near Kingussie. It was during a holiday in 2021, when Covid restrictions had eased enough for us to leave the city and find a little reprieve.

On that particular day, the air was thick with fog. The further we climbed through the woodland and up the hill, the closer the fog seemed to settle around us - it created a comfortingly eerie effect. Sound was muffled, everything seemed so still and quiet, and we were enveloped in this endless blankness, able to see only a short distance ahead.

Eventually we reached a clearing, and these jagged figures emerged from the whiteness - disfigured trees, some almost charred-looking against the fog. The ground was strewn with the remnants of other trees, as though this clearing had once been a dense part of the woodland. There was something striking about the space - the contrast, the starkness - that has stayed with me since.

That image of the clearing has stayed with me, and as I’ve continued developing my research paper, I’ve begun to understand why it resonated so deeply. I’ve been exploring disfigured and contorted trees, like snags or trees struck by lightning, and how they can speak to the embodied experience of being human. The jagged, scarred forms of the trees in Drumguish mirrored something of my own inner landscape: navigating life with fibromyalgia and scoliosis, and coming to terms with a late autism diagnosis. I’m interested in how experiences like these can be translated into contemporary art through natural landscapes, particularly through the lens of arboreal structures. I’ve also been reflecting on what it means to move through the world as a woman, and how our pain is so often dismissed or misunderstood, making it harder to reach the right diagnosis and feel seen in our experiences, much like these broken trees that still stand quietly in the forest, their stories overlooked yet deeply rooted.

I wanted the primary focal point of the painting to be the snag, standing in isolation against the fog yet holding space with a quiet kind of power. I spent much longer working on the textures of the snag than I would have in the past when drawing trees. It was important to me to convey its slow decay and layered surface. To achieve this, I worked with ink washes and a very fine brush, building up the composition of the tree in delicate layers rather than defining the trunk with a single brushstroke. Although this process was time-consuming, I believe it paid off. The tree has much more definition and depth, and you can almost see the flaking bark and the exposed wood beneath, as it appeared in person.

The most challenging element of the painting was conveying the fog while using only the same ink wash as the rest of the piece. I experimented with a stipple brush dipped in the discard water from cleaning my brushes, so the ink was just a faint wash to begin with. This allowed me to use broad, sweeping strokes to suggest the movement of the fog and the dramatic atmosphere of that day. I then layered very light washes of ink and more of the discard water to build up the effect gradually. The result is an ethereal, almost eerie sky that seems to close in on the scene, much as the fog did in reality. It’s an effect I haven’t achieved in this way before, and one I’ll certainly explore again. I’ve always struggled with painting skies, and they often felt flat or disconnected from the rest of the scene, but here I feel I’ve made real progress in creating depth and atmosphere.

Working on this painting has felt like an important step in reconnecting with my rhythm after a period of creative block. It reminded me how much can emerge from simply showing up and allowing a single idea - even just a quick sketch - to grow into something more meaningful. I feel as though I’ve deepened my understanding of how technique and emotion can work together, and how much potential there is in pushing myself to spend longer on the details and embrace experimentation. This piece has opened up new directions for me to explore, both in how I depict skies and atmospheres, and in how I use natural forms like snags to speak to more personal and collective experiences.