The red shed

The road from Ballater to Braemar makes a sharp left turn to cross the Dee on the south bank…Just before you get there is a minor track that leads through a plantation of Scots Pine to a gate. Park there and start walking along a track that parallels the road and the river heading back East. Walk along it and shortly you will pass this red shed on your right. It is an extremely functional agricultural storage building and it colour contrasts with Spruce woods behind it.

The colour is unusual. Most buildings in this area are made of granite. The red has echoes of the Falun Red paint on the timber buildings of Scandinavia but this is “crinkly tin clad and roofied. It is the kind of building that Victorians shipped all over their Empire so you will find similar agricultural sheds in Canada with Spruce behind them.

The red shed catches your eye from the top of the nearest hill as well as from several points on the level. It may have been brightly painted once but it has weathered to a warm pink and the track beside it is well worn, not by walkers but by Estate vehicles that have left it deeply rutted. My favourite trio of colours offed themselves to me.

I have wanted to paint this shed in the landscape for years but never could think of a way to make a statement out of it. It was overwhelmed by the scale of its surroundings. I thought of expressing that: a pinprick of red in a field of dark green. Very abstract but lacking impact. If I added in a sky, grey or blue, it became banal, another Scottish landscape.

So I started drawing the shed carefully in true side elevation on my sketch pad and as I did that I realised that it has the same 3 to 2 proportions as the canvas I had ready from a batch I had bought in. I could play off a rectangle in a field of the same proportions. Now the issue became one of placing it on the canvas. Again. this was solved by proportions and dimensions. My architectural training which I have suppressed for so long was reasserting itself.

The Spruce was a plantation where the alternating rows of trees had been set out to allow maximum space for growth. I rendered this as an offset grid of trunks. I drew the composition onto the canvas fairly faithfully following my sketch so the drooping branches of the tree criss-crossed each other. I painted these in a mdi green, contrasting it with the pink y orange of the tree trunks but then I remembered the purple and violet colours on the tree trunks and colour broke loose.

Now I emphasised the bright green of the edge foliage and the dark violet of the shadow side of the trees and started to scratch in some highlights to suggest the rough texture of the trunks. When it came to the shed, I decided to make the ridge orange and to contrast the sloping roof against the wall by shifting the colour more towards pink on the roof and dark red on the walls. I made the two rectangles equal in their height on the canvas. I added in a porch – I am not sure whether it really is there and will check when I am next up there, but I knew that a lot of vernacular buildings featured porches where you can shed your boots and coat under cover. And because I have often seen both red der and roe in these woods, I added a skull of a red above where the door would be. I think that is called artistic licence!