Painting on the Edge

For lovers of wild landscapes, there can be few places in Scotland better than North-West Sutherland. The rocks here have been dated to 3 billion years old, and whenever I visit this area I am aware of a sense of both great age and timelessness. A human lifespan is tiny compared with geological time, and so the landscape seems to be unchanging. And yet we can see how the rocks have been thrust up and folded, and then worn away by glaciers, in a process that seems almost incomprehensible. It's a place for allowing the mind to wander and wonder.

Location - https://goo.gl/maps/uPMb43aRhUu

"On Hill of Forss" - watercolour - 24 x 35 cm

One of my favourite painters is Edward Seago. He was working around the middle of the Twentieth Century, and many of his paintings were of the landscapes around his home in Norfolk, in the east of England. It's a very flat area, with lots of waterways and lakes, but the main feature of his paintings was the big expanse of sky. Scotland isn't normally thought of as being flat, but Caithness is sometimes known as the "Lowlands beyond the Highlands", and it is predominantly low-lying and open. Like Norfolk, the skies are big and have a wonderful variety of cloud formations.