I began painting buildings a very long time ago. I’m fascinated by how everything fits together, how the shapes and surfaces reflect the light and create the shadows and how the silhouette works against the sky. 

I fell in love with Durham Cathedral the minute I saw it from the train that was taking me to my interview for Neville’s Cross College in early 1973. Passing over Durham viaduct the city was suddenly revealed – houses, churches and trees crowned by a castle and an iconic cathedral.

John Ruskin, the great Victorian critic, called the view from Durham Station the eighth wonder of the world – and this from a chap whose house overlooked one of the best views in the Lake District.

Some of the very first paintings I ever made were of this building for the simple reason that they were painted for the Cathedral bookshop. I lived in several places in Durham - Neville’s Cross, Potter’s Bank, Crossgate, Gilesgate – and from each point found that the cathedral reveals a different character.

Durham is unusual for being a complete Norman cathedral – a tour de force of dogtooth arches, barrel vaulting and round-headed windows – where most British cathedrals are a collection of building styles depending on whatever look was fashionable when some money was available.

Durham was built to house the shrine of St. Cuthbert, whose much-travelled coffin rooted itself to the ground here. The monks who had been carrying Lindisfarne’s premiere saint around for 120 years (on and off) were probably glad to finally put the coffin in the ground and he still lies at the heart of the building.

I get a lump in the throat and a tear in the eye whenever I go back and I must have painted the great church dozens of times but I still find things about it that make me pick up my brush again.

In Notes from a Small Island Bill Bryson says: “If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful.” I couldn’t put it better.

The paintings shown are all available from The Gallery, Masham. CLICK HERE for details

Artison are currently taking bookings for my painting course:

A Contemporary Approach to Watercolour

on Friday 18th May. For details and to book CLICK HERE

I’m working on some ideas at the moment for my exhibition in July 2013  about the Yorkshire Dales and I’m doing a lot of reading. Apart from collections of Dales stories I’m reading an excellent book on Yorkshire geology.

The special character of the Dales is closely associated with the limestone beneath. When you’re walking in the hills the evidence that this was once the floor of a sea is evident in every fossil-studded rock. For an artist, however, it is the more recent legacy of the ice ages which lends the skyline its character.

Four hills in particular: Penyghent, Ingleborough, Penhill and Addleborough owe their distinctive profiles to a combination of smoothing ice flows and hard layers of underlying rock giving the flat-topped, step-sided horizon which typify the Dales and make them such a pleasure to paint.

Of these four, Penhill holds a special place in my heart. It’s in view most of the time when you’re travelling in Wensleydale, where I live. It is a lovely climb, with fantastic views from the top and it’s a hill of stories:

• the legend of the Penhill Giant – a maiden snatching, cow-munching psychopath whose grave caps the summit.
  
• the tumbled down beacon thought to date from the threat of the Spanish Armada 500 years ago. 
  
• the strange tracks cut into and around the hill made by drovers, traders, monks and possibly by the Brigantes tribe who once ruled the Dales before it was England. (They made Tor Dyke – a big ditch cut across the top of neighbouring Coverdale).
  

Here are some paintings done over the years of my favourite hill along with an excerpt from a recent poem, written for the forthcoming exhibition.

On Penhill

Always on the skyline of my life for two score years now,
Seen from a train, a distant castle, a motorway,
From a road rolling in the belly of the dale,
From ship shaped village green,
From beyond the torn walls of a ruined chapter house
The hill, prow lifted to the east,
Sails against the sky.

Rising from the sculpted ordered Georgian bridge
By hand hewn hedges smooth as hounds
And lifting to the racehorse rumbling high moor
The symphonic heft of Wensleydale behind, beneath,
And suddenly the sky is close above us.

Art course coming up ...


There are a few places left on Top Techniques in Watercolour 
- a course for everyone interested in painting in watercolour - 
at Artison (near Masham, North Yorkshire) Thursday, 5th April. 

The course, which will focus on a variety of very effective techniques, costs £65.00 (which includes an excellent lunch). 

CLICK HERE to book.

Helvellyn, Ian Scott Massie

"Artists are people who say I can’t fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight and a half by eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be."
                                                                                                                                                               Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut understood the artistic mind very well. In his novel Bluebeard about the fictional abstract expressionist
Rabo Karabekian he lifts the lid on the life of an artist and the tension that exists between control and liberation in every media.

The Old Man of Coniston, Ian Scott Massie

In watercolour great results are frequently born out of happy accidents, and so it is one of the most divisive media.  At one end of the scale are the purists who dislike compound colours such as Paynes Grey (a neutral tint originally made up of red, blue and yellow), and abhor the use of white or black. At the other end (a district in which I am happy to reside) are the experimenters for whom anything is fair game – inks, gouache, acrylics, wax and so on.

Both approaches can produce great results, because both camps include people with great artistic ability and vision. Both also represent an ever-present divide between those who strive for complete control and those who wish to be unconfined.

Dallowgill, Ian Scott Massie

I am setting out to reconcile both groups through a course I’m teaching at Artison next week called Liberated Watercolour and I’m going to try a few ideas in which there is an element of control which the artists can then deliberately undermine. The thinking behind this is that many artists want to break from their self-imposed degree of control while others find that an unstructured approach comes all to easily and often want to find ways to repeat the happy accidents which befall them. I'll be letting them explore what happens when you just let the paint do the work, but also ways to intervene and channel the developing picture.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the end result allowed someone to echo Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful words and, by losing control, find the right picture?

To book a place on Liberated Watercolour CLICK HERE

To join my 4 week course in Working With Watercolour CLICK HERE

One of the most frequently found terms in contemporary painting is “abstracted landscape “. Its one of those terms which could mean almost anything, but this is an illustration of what it means for me.

This is a painting I made a few years ago after a moving visit to Wasdale Head. Wasdale is a small valley in the Lake District in North West England. It holds the remarkable lake of Wastwater  - its surface two hundred feet above sea level and its bottom 50 feet below. The painting is of Wasdale Head, home to the Wasdale Inn and the starting point for many climbers of England’s highest mountain.

In the valley bottom is St Olaf’s church. Its roof trusses are reputed to come from Viking ships. Inside are small memorials to climbers who have died on mountains all over the world and many are buried in the graveyard. The inscriptions of their untimely deaths make very hard reading.

We came here because we have an old Turner print which was found in Masham and we were looking for the place where Turner made his picture. We found it. Afterwards we had quiet, reflective beer in front of the fire in the slate-floored inn.

Some places have so much personality a realistic painting of surface appearances would simply be not enough. So this became a landscape painting abstracted by experiences and emotions and, to help me find some of those things, I wrote a poem at accompany my sketches. The rest came from colour and movement and my thoughts as the painting came into being. I don't ask what the elements of the painting represent - they just came out that way. But I know it means to me the time we spent at Wasdale Head.

Wasdale Head
Deep into shadows under the hill
To the heart of the rain
And scumble of the falling water
To the bright-fired and slate-floored bar.

Wood smoke and fresh coffee
In the first chill of autumn
And then the path drawn upwards
Into the painting
Until the contour lines
And engraver’s furrows
Absorb us.


If you'd like to see Peter Hicks - one the greatest of landscape abstractionists - in action, CLICK HERE

I've been going through a few acrylic ink paintings recently because I'm teaching a one-day course on this medium at the studios of Artison, just outside Masham, in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire.

The course is on February 24th and what I hope to do is show a whole range of techniques which exploit the potential of this terrific medium.

Acrylic inks are a perfect crossover medium. They create inpervious surfaces in rich colour, like acylic paint, but can diluted and applied like watercolour. They can create intricate textures and will happily combine with other watersoluble media, like gouache.

Here are a few of the pictures I've created with acrylic inks over the last few years.

As you can see the colours are amazing and the textures varying from the subtle to the visually dissonnant.
 
If you'd like to book a place on the course click HERE

If you'd like to see more of my work featuring acrylic ink go to The Gallery, Masham, North Yorkshire, or visit their website by clicking HERE

And if you can't make the course but would like to try acrylic inks my recommendation would be for the wonderful range made by Rorher & Klinger of Leipzig. You can visit their site by clicking HERE

Its a beautiful, cold day in Masham, North Yorkshire. The frost- caked cars haven't shown a sign of thawing since dawn and now the light is fading. Last night the moon was enormous in a cloudless sky but tonight the clouds are over the Dales and maybe the temperature light creep above zero by morning.

I've been playing around with a few images over the last weeks which have resulted in the above screenprints. One of the great things about cold weather, and particularly the snow, is that it paints the world in a simpler palette. Somehow a one-colour landscape like the one of Masham, above right, seems perfectly fine in this weather. Similarly the one of Ladyhill, above left, reminds me perfectly of the way Wensleydale looked a few weeks ago when the first snow came.

Looking at them now reminded me of a poem* I wrote a few years ago as the weather began closing down the high road from Masham to Nidderdale, which it does nearly every winter around December:

Last Journey Of The Year

It is winter
And the thread of road over Pott Moor
Is dusted white
With the threat of January.

The wind has muscles here
That can tread life into a shallow grave
Without even trying.

Perhaps we won’t pass this way again
Until April relaxes the madman’s grip
On his axe of ice.

And standing in St. Chad’s tiny church
On its hill at the dalehead
It seems that we inhabit islands
In the archipelago of the Pennines
Whenever the snow falls.

Happy New Year!


To read more poetry CLICK HERE