ARTISTS AT GLENFIDDICH AUGUST 2016.
Scenes around The Dorback. 
One way or another, inspiration's been slow lately. A wee dander round my favourite local spots often helps, but it's taken the second exhibition of The Artists At Glenfiddich Distillery to prompt a return to this neglected blog site.
Along with some members of the Forres ForWORDS writing group, I took the Dallas road to Dufftown. At any time, it's scenic, but an approaching autumn made it particularly colourful with the surrounding heatherclad hills turned purple and bracken to gold.
That night, the sky had lent an indigo back wash against which windmills sculled their white paddles whilst, a rainbow maker had dropped a pastel arc over Dufftown's Glenfiddich Distillery.
It was as welcoming as co-ordinator, Andy Fairgrieve, responsible for serving generous cocktails in an art gallery transformed by the resident artists' work.
Exhibitions, such as these, appeal on several levels and in different way and how fascinating to share the artists' vision through their undoubted skills.
Life at Glenfiddich was captured in a number of delicate pencil and ink works and brought to the walls by Korean Min Joon Park.
'Did ye notice there's thirty of these?' asked Patricia O'Shea who would later pen and read a haiku on the Angel's Share at a small poetry-reading slot. (Not, owing to Andy's hospitality that there was much alcohol allowed to evaporate on this particular occasion.)
'After our last visit and seeing Australian Joan Ross's
Right to Roam,' Tez Watson explained to the attendees, ' I wrote a poem on the same theme.'
Since Joan's subsequent work, is a mischievous mix using an eclectic mixture of materials, figures and wall hangings, it'll be interesting to see if Tez will be similarly inspired.
Andy Allan, a Dufftown loon followed, taking a poem about his sister going to America from his recently published book,
Breath of Dragons.
Meanwhile Margaret Bain had done a test run in one of Emily Bink's sculptural installations. Some of her work's been inspired by mountain bothies and rudimentary shelters. The one outside, built of old sofas,crates and polythene, worked! Despite the rain, it allowed Margaret to return dry and bring her North-east honeyed voice to a poem she'd written about whisky.
Newfoundlander, Eleanor King was thoughtful. Her written presentation, '
Be-stilled in the FUTURE PAST
at Balvenie Cottage accompanying a scene recreated from an 1899 Dufftown
showed how different all forms of art can be.
'You had to be there,' is a truism, and it's hard to capture in words what's on visual offer. Still, anyone can go and see that exhibition for themselves. It's open each day from 12.30- 5.30 apart from Mondays and Tuesdays and admission is free. Go on! Why don't you? You couldn't help but be inspired, but keep an eye out for scarecrows!
