On Sunday we managed to gather a lovely group for an afternoon of painting outdoors, right in the middle of the heather.
I look forward to this time every year, when the landscape turns all shades of purple. There’s something about heather in bloom — the depth of colour, the softness of it stretching across the land, and the way it changes as the evening light moves over it.
This year, though, the heather has had a hard time. After several spells of very hot weather, some areas have turned almost completely grey, and a fair few plants look scorched by the sun. So it felt all the more special to find a place where the heather was still blooming beautifully and we could settle down to paint amongst it.
I do hope the damaged patches recover. I’ve grown very fond of this landscape, and every year I come back to paint these colours again.
We were quite a mixed bunch, coming from different parts of the Netherlands, with roots in the Netherlands, Moldova and Russia. Dutch and Russian were spoken, some of us painted in oils, others in watercolour.
Different languages, different paints, different ways of seeing the same landscape — but none of that mattered much. Good company, brushes and easels, heather all around us, and nowhere else we needed to be.
The weather was kind to us, and by evening the light had turned beautifully warm. Purple heather, long shadows and a sunset to finish the day — you couldn’t really ask for much more.
That’s what I love about painting outdoors. You spend a few hours properly looking at a landscape and begin to notice just how many colours are hiding in what, at first glance, simply looks purple. 💜
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