This morning I took myself to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where there is currently a small exhibition showing some of Francesca Woodman’s photographs. I have been interested in Woodman’s beautiful and unsettling work for a long time.

Connected with this – in my head, anyway – I have been reading Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

There is little to link these artists, except that they were two American women who produced intense and intimate bodies of work, neither of which were discovered until after their deaths. 

However, their work lives on – emitting a poetic radiance through the years.

The Poets light but Lamps –

Themselves – go out –

The Wicks they stimulate

If vital Light

Inhere as do the suns –

Each Age a Lens

Disseminating their

Circumference –

Emily Dickinson

Coast, a micro exhibition of artworks responding to the topic of coastal change, will open at An Talla Solais, the contemporary arts centre in Ullapool on Saturday the 20th of July.

My monotype Submerged will be part of this exhibition

I didn’t make any prints while Edinburgh Printmakers was closed for relocation. A five month break is plenty long enough to lose the thread of one’s artistic practice. In the past few weeks I have been back working again, playing around without an end in sight.  For me there is only one thing to do when you’ve lost your way: make something, anything, just the act of creating gets your muscle memory flexing

When in doubt do something, anything.

Just make a start.

Begin.

On Wednesday evening I went to a party at The Fine Art Society here in Edinburgh to celebrate the publication of the artist’s book Holy Rood by Norman McBeath and Robert Crawford.

Holy Rood is an Old English poem of the words spoken by the tree from which Christ’s cross was hewn. Robert Crawford has translated it, and the text is illuminated by Norman McBeath’s exquisite photographs.

The book is loose leaved and presented in an elegant drop back box. I can’t resist the allure of a beautifully produced book. It is a delight and I wish it were mine….