I’ve been thinking about how to capture a sense of place in my artwork? It’s not something I’ve consciously thought about exploring and I tend to depict objects in a still life that embody a memory evoked by my senses, mostly visual and sometimes linked to taste or smell.
For me being by the sea is exhilarating and calming at the same time, the weather and landscape is constantly changing and I especially love the smells and salty taste in the air, the bleached colours of wood and empty shells mingled with artificial debris.
One of my favourite places to visit is Winchelsea Beach in East Sussex, It’s a beautiful stark landscape and each season brings interesting changes to the scenery, plants and wildlife. My visit was on a windy day in February, the waves were crashing and the pebbles were making that wonderful dragging sound as the waves pull back.
I’m not really one to stop and draw at the seaside, I’m either walking, in the sea or peering into a rock pool looking for marine life and it’s a place where I feel at peace.
Initially I didn’t have any plans on what I was going to sketch until I started walking along the beach and began noticing the jumble of shapes and colours of the strand line.
The quick sketches above were created in charcoal and pastel pencil on the beach, I focused on capturing the main shapes of the objects particularly how they linked to each other with negative space.
The idea of incorporating patterns as an element in my paintings has been bubbling in my head for a while and it seemed like a natural development of previous paintings of fish on creased paper to create my own repeat pattern.
Using the beach sketches I made a design from the pebble and shell shapes. It’s been a while since I have put anything into repeat and eventually managed to line it all up so it would work as a lino block.
After experimenting with objects found at the beach and the patterned paper I started to focus more on seaweed as it sat better with black ink and I liked its abstracted forms and lines.
It was interesting to construct the composition of this still life and I looked back at my original sketches, using the negative space to find a harmony between each piece of seaweed and the patterned surface. I like the way the shapes of the seaweed stretch and twist, they are quite fragile when dried, yet soak them in water and they become strong and flexible again.
At this stage I was very unsure where this piece was going, the black ink of the pattern made it too dominant and the delicate shapes of the seaweed where being lost.
Printing the drawing of seaweed using the blotted line technique.
The colours of the seaweed have a beautiful richness and depth to them that slowly appears as your eyes adjust. They also have a similar bloom to them that appears on grapes and plums. I mixed the main colours I could see and layered washes of watercolour paint, gradually building up from light to dark.
After testing ideas for the background with watercolour I decided to use pencil to describe the broken marks of the lino printed pattern. The contrast between the materials would also push the dark inky reds and purples of the seaweed forward rather than fighting with background.
Seaweed with Pebbles - watercolour, ink and pencil. Framed W64cm x H55.5cm
Exploring the idea of a sense of place has been interesting and challenging. How to convey what I see or feel at the beach is hard as there is so much that bombards my senses and putting it into words is doubly difficult. In this piece I’ve tried to capture being surrounded by the curved overlapping shapes of pebbles, eyes constantly scanning the surface for interesting beach treasures or marine life - a quiet moment of looking.
Professionally reproduced giclee prints of this painting are available in sizes A2 and A3, please click here.
