Doug Chinnery Photography

One of the first things I do in the studio these mornings is touch a painting.

Most evenings this week, there has come a moment when the wind has lain itself down on the machair and the island has fallen quiet.

There is a particular quality of light that arrives on Uist in the late afternoon of a clear day in autumn — low, slanting, the colour of weak whisky — that lasts perhaps eleven minutes before it shifts again.

It is the fourth of July, and I could be forgiven for thinking it was the fourth of March.

There is a folder on my hard drive that I have never shown anyone.

There is a particular silence that falls over a studio when the work has stopped flowing.

This morning I walked Eddie along the lane near the cottage in a thin, persistent mizzle.

The cattle grid at the end of the track had been iced over for three days.

There is a small loch about ten minutes from the house.

Ever since the earliest days of photography, this new method of creative expression has sat uneasily in the art world.

Grainy sand damp crackling in seafire A sentinel shore chalkscrawled on lemon farls The slabbed tangle of shattered glass Unsought by flyblown faces of the gone Nearer the edge of wild air, of brightness here Sinking ever as blue dusk abandoned this night…