It's that time of year again.  I am preparing for an exhibition of my paintings, to be held in the GALE centre in Gairloch, Wester Ross.  The same place where I held my Local Letterboxes exhibition last year.  It is a lovely place; specially designed to be energy efficient - lots of wood and glass and light.  There are huge floor to ceiling windows along the front which look out over the sea towards Skye.  Not just towards Skye, you can see the north end of the island.  I took some photographs of the building last year, which you can see above. I'm not quite sure that whoever put the sign together in the top middle photograph had fully thought through what the finished article would look like. Perhaps I am just being childish.  Not that that is such a bad thing.

I am busy framing paintings, deciding which paintings to reproduce as prints, mounting work, putting together new sets of greetings cards and generally gathering my work together.  It has given me a good chance to review what I have done in the past year.  I realise I have probably not been as focused as I might have been. I start out with good intentions - to paint a series of boats, or buildings, or birds.  And I end up with a smattering of each, a few birds, a few sheds and houses, some more boats.  Perhaps that doesn't matter.  This year's exhibition is entitled "Inspired by Scotland", so all of these subjects can happily be included.  It's an eclectic mix. It will be interesting to see what people think. 

I have been asked a few times recently, what I paint.  I have happily told the questioners that boats feature a lot in my paintings at the moment; ones from both the east and west coasts of Scotland.  And then I mention the sheds, and they look slightly bemused and I feel rather apologetic.  I'm not sure why this is, so I have spent some time thinking about it, as I suppose there really should be some underlying reason as to why I feel drawn to sheds, particularly ones with corrugated iron roofs.

This is the conclusion I have drawn.  It all goes back to summer holidays spent in Lochcarron, in Wester Ross, in what had been my paternal granny's house.  Not just summer holidays, when we would spend hours on the shore turning over rocks looking for butterfish and crabs, or digging very fast to try and outwit clams which scooted down into the sand, or for lugworms, beneath their telltale casts, to use as bait on fishing expeditions.  No, we were often there at Easter too, and in the winter as well. There are diaries of those holidays somewhere.  One day I'll look them out.

At the back of my granny's house were a couple of wooden sheds, where the garden tools and coal (I think) were kept.  They were quite well-maintained, these sheds; wooden slats with sloping corrugated iron roofs. They were of no particular interest to me. It was my job in the summertime to clip the long grass away from the outer walls of the shed, so the wood would not become damp and rot.  This job was done with an old pair of sheep-shearing shears.  I loved using them.  I learned to scythe in those summers too, when the grass was thigh-high when we arrived, and had to be cut down before it got trampled flat.  There is a rhythm required for scything - enough speed is required to cut the tough grass stalks, but go too fast and you get tired very quickly and the grass is not properly cut.

But the shed I liked best was the one away up at the back of the plot or land (part of a croft at some time, I suppose).  It had no door, but the doorway faced away from the prevailing wind, so it was always sheltered and warm.  I think it even had a little window, grimy and cobwebbed. I set up a wooden table and a stool, made from logs and planks of wood that I found. It was my den. I swept it, tidied it, put a jam jar filled with wild flowers on the table.  And then I had a visitor. I think he lived in the shed next door, or under a nearby pile of branches. A hedgehog.  I provided a saucer of milk, sat in the corner, barely breathing, watching, listening, drinking him in. I was in love. In my shed.