Be more Agnes…
If you’ve read my book The Clearing you’ll know I’m a big fan of the artist Agnes Martin. I’ve been thinking about her work and life a lot recently. When the world is falling to bits and it feels ridiculous to spend my time drawing pictures I remind myself of what...
Why do we gaze at the sea horizon?
It was a great pleasure to be visited in my Birsay studio by Kirsteen Stewart last week. Kirsteen wears so many creative hats it’s hard to keep up with her! She is a designer of fashion, textiles and homewares, is well known as a skilful and enabling art educator with...
The Nerves and Their Endings
The wheels of the publishing industry turn incredibly slowly. It’s quite normal for a book to take two full years from acceptance by a publisher to actually hitting the shelves. There are so many behind-the-scenes stages a book has to go through between acceptance and...
The Artist’s Studio
This weekend I played host in my studio to a group from the Friends of the RSA who were visiting Orkney for a week. Quite apart from the well-timed need for a spot of tidying up, it was a pleasure to open my space to such an interested, curious, engaged group of...