Welcome to my wee corner of Substack. I am a seasonal artist living on the Isle of Arran, off the west coast of Scotland. I am the custodian of approximately two acres of land that includes a woodland, a meadow and my wee garden. I offer a seasonal book arts project for paid subscribers if you are interested and you can read more about that HERE. Grab a cuppa and lets delve into our relationship with the shifting seasons….
It is fair to say that shifting seasons bring different colour palettes with them. Emerging out of winter I think we will all take any colour nature can provide. For many years as a seasonal artist I adopted familiar seasonal colour palettes that folk would recognise. That all changed some years ago when I realised that colours were entering my world of their own accord and I allowed them to dictate a journey. Since opening up to intutitive colour I still seek those colours in the season and that then makes the journey more interesting. I hope that is translated into my creative work.
Blue made a very bold entrance into my world last autumn just before my life took a challenging turn. That is interesting as colour therapy nods to blue for supporting emotional health and treating illnesses such as depression. There is a clarity and sense of clearing about blue that comes, to me at least, from the cleansing power of water. I live metres from the sea so it is a huge influence on my daily life.
In preparing to write this piece I realised that blue had, in fact, gently entered my life in the spring as it has done for many springs before it. The reason for this is the very humble, but very beautiful, Bluebell. I am the custodian of about two acres of woodland that is blessed with English (native) Bluebells. However, the non native Spanish Blubells are now just a handful of metres away from this space and they are very invasive and will, in time, destroy the English Bluebell and that would make me very sad. So every year the ritual is the same. Just before the Spanish Bluebell goes to seed I pull them up and destroy them safely. Locals know what I am doing and why and just let me get on with it. So far, this method seems to be holding the invasive species at bay….
In the language of flowers Bluebells gives us honesty, humility and gratitude and I think those Victorian meanings speak well to my woodland Bluebells. So, in essence, blue entered my soul very deeply many years ago and is just now gaining in confidence in my creative palette. It may, in fact, be a permanent fixture because I notice when I am printing, blue is one of my go to colours to work with. Some years ago I got slightly obsessed with mussell shells and wove the design and colours into my work for a contract with the National Trust of Scotland for work to sell in Brodick castle.
The beautiful mussell shell made an appearance on one of the design sheets and that captivated the buyer and a collection of journals were inspired and ordered. When you work with a large contract you are talking alot of volume but, strangely, I never grew tired of stitching my mussell shells.
In fact mussell shells and the blues I have extracted from them, pop up regularly in my work.





Last year I launched a brand new collection entitled Lost Worlds. It was in recognition of the excellent work being done on the island to reforest our woodlands with native trees. We are an island dominated by plantation forests where nothing can grow on the forest floor and diversity is challenged. But things are changing. Native trees allow for better diversity and species like the English Bluebells can, once again, flourish. So, quickly, my Lost Worlds collection adopted the Bluebell as its central image.



Come the autumn when this collection was launched blue had created such a secure place in my world that I think I naturally leaned into it when I needed some emotional support as my sketchbook quickly filled with blue. As spring begins to dawn I have, once agan, reached for blue in beautiful hyacinths and grape hyacinths and I appear to be revisiting the mussell shell again.
My relationship with blue continues and if it departs for a while I will always be grateful for the place it has played in both my creative and wider life. Meantime, I need to ready myself for the annual ‘save the native Bluebell’ work. It is important work.
Until next time
Fiona x
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This is a subject that has become very interesting to me recently—I wrote an article a few years ago about colour psychology on Medium and ever since then I’ve taken note of the way colour appears to enter my life during certain transitional seasons. I need to explore this more.
There's so.much freedom implied in blue for me