Lest I be accused of false advertising. It is not always sunny in Lybster. Today was perfect studio weather.
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Sunshine? Sea air? Great meds? Life is good in the Highlands.

There is nothing bucolic about Silvia Levenson’s own work, so I was surprised when she first came to North Lands a year ago and responded so immediately to the environs. Caithness is a blindingly beautiful place, all sea and sky and craggy cliffs, nothing like the edgy domestic interiors we’ve come to associate with Levenson’s personal work.
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Flying into Inverness, Scotland is always a little like opening the door to the playroom. Despite a Glaswegian friend who knocks the Highland capital as “a bit twee”, I’m a total sucker for the greeting-card prettiness of the place, the rolling spring-green hills dotted with Cheviot sheep and tidy hay bales. Pretty has a hard time of it nowadays. Sometimes the soul needs a good shot of twee.
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Leaving the bucolic idyll of North Lands, I’m back in London for one drizzly Turner-esque day, a climactic decompression chamber in which to re-orient myself to the less romantic side of Bullseye, before I fly home to the daily challenges of a small business, its piffling aggravations and less than dreamy realities.

An overcast boat ride between the Tate galleries seemed an appropriately lugubrious place to reflect on a variety of attitudes I find particularly annoying in Bullseye’s marketplace.
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I’ve got stuff to do … a walk to Latheronwheel Harbor

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