Meet the Paintings - Evening Clouds, the Summer Isles

Meet the Paintings Day 4 - today it's 'Evening Clouds, the Summer Isles".

Here's the painting, plus a couple showing it in its frame.

This was painted when I was travelling the North Coast 500 route round the north of Scotland.  Travelling the winding single-track roads of the route is an amazing experience, but is quite weather-dependent.  And unfortuantely, the weather had been shocking up until I got to Ullapool, nothing but mist and rain - I couldn't see any landscape at all worth painting, and certainly none of the famous mountains.  Where were they?

Then, travelling one evening from Ullapool to Achiltibuie where I was staying, the most lifted and I was treated to the most amazing sunset.  Suddenly, the landscape appeared in a fiery blaze, with the most astonishing, almost primeval mountains rising up as if by magic.  Stac Pollaidh looked like Gandalf's hat!

I was able to look out of the window at any time during the night, and see the Summer Isles in a soft glow, as it never really got dark, known as the 'Simmer Dim'.  And who would want to be able to look out at something called 'The Summer Isles'?  It's like something out of Narnia.

Here are some of the photos I took on that trip from Ullapool to Achiltibuie with the sun setting along the way, plus another couple of paintings that I did based on that journey.

Please feel free to drop me a line if you;d like to ask anything about this or any other paintings that I have featured on the blog.

As usual, here the Google Maps reference for you to explore and compare to my painting.

The Summer Isles on Google Maps