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Northern Exposure

This is my take on the boathouse at the bottom of Loch Muick; a free translation would be "Swine Lake". Gaels were pretty straightforward in their naming, so I imagine there must have been a lot of wild boar around here along time ago. Now the flats behind the boathouse are dominated by red deer from the Balmoral herd.


We have just been up near here and the weather was sunny. It can be very gloomy here so I have taken a few liberties with the colour key: I pretended to myself that the hills were covered in dormant heather which has been caught by late evening light. I needed that to emphasise the darkness of the granite used to build the boathouse.


As usual, I painted this out of my memories of the boathouse, which forms an unavoidable landmark at one corner of the loch. I have never seen a boat pulled up there but , hey, a boathouse needs a boat! The trees on the left hand edge of the picture start somewhere about the point were i have placed them to emphasise


After the intimate scale of "Coffee on the carpet" this picture opens up to the big horizon of the Cairngorms - which it then close down to contrast the rectilinear manmade building with the glacier formed hills around the loch.


The loch is very deep and so the waters tend to be very dark, right up to the shore line. However there is a transition when it approaches the beach which is made up of pink granite grains. As the water comes in it gets darkened.


And yes, the grass can be that green! Showing it running up to the boathouse allowed me to put in a green triangle to rhyme with the pink triangle of the path that runs around the loch.





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