Atmospheres and fragments

Ayr in late February feels suspended- grey veils over everything. The light is too weary to push through, and everything is moving at half speed or not at all. I have joined forces with inertia and joined the season’s slumber, hibernating amongst soaked brushes and half-squeezed tubes, letting the outer quiet feed an inner harvest. The atmosphere pools like a mist, visual fragments drifting in from half remembered dreams and distant places.

I’ve been turning the word ‘Dreich; over in my mind these February days – like a stone smoothed by persistent rain. This is one of Scotland’s most characteristic words for good reason, it captures that special wet, dark, cheerless weather: overcast skies pressing low, drizzle so fine it feels like

breathing through damp wool, everything slowed to a sluggish hush. The roots of this word go back to the Old Norse language - ‘Drjugr’ meaning enduring or Lasting - twisting over centuries from ‘tedious’ and ‘slow’ in the 1400s to our modern shorthand for gloomy persistence. Today in Ayr right now its textbook

dreich: a chilly damp clings to the southerly breeze and there is a constant fine drizzle. I’ve been experiencing low energy, long teas, and there are half finished canvases that are waiting patiently for me. Yet ‘so be it’.

Growing up under India’s saturated light, where every colour felt alive and urgent, the sun burning bright over the Santiniketan landscape, I have of late started to appreciate this quiet endurance. Dreich doesn’t pretend to be anything else, it simply is. And in all that honest relentlessness, my mind

wanders freely, catching atmospheric moods like fog rolling in from the coast, piecing together unbidden visual drifts. The warm ochres remembered from the brighter days of youth clash softly yet beautifully with todays slate blues and muted greys. There is a creative simmer building in me , one quiet idea at a Time. Fragments. Patterns . Wisps of smoke and remnants of dreams.