About
Portrait at the shoreline — to be added
I live and work in Leigh-on-Sea, on the north bank of the Thames estuary. I draw it every day. The paintings come out of that habit: flat planes of colour against a horizon band, worked in household emulsion, oil, charcoal and varnish on birch ply. The estuary is never one thing. Twice a day it empties and refills, and what it leaves is a set of stacked bands — sand, silt, mud, algae, water, sky — that shift in colour hour by hour. I paint the bands rather than the view.
Beneath the surface the same stacking happens far more slowly. The bed here is compacted clay and gravel laid down over millions of years, and the mud on top of it is only the most recent millimetre. Everything human on this shoreline, the cockle sheds and the jetties and the plastic and the bones, will end as a thin dark line in that sequence, thinner than a single year of silt. I find that steadying rather than bleak. The paintings hold both timescales: a tide that turns in six hours, and a layer that takes an epoch. The dark ground I work over is the older one.
The work
- Location
- Leigh-on-Sea, Essex
- Substrate
- Birch ply, canvas board
- Media
- Household emulsion, oil, charcoal, varnish
- Format
- Predominantly 40 × 50 cm, portrait
Enquiries
Works are sold directly from the studio. Studio visits in Leigh-on-Sea are welcome by arrangement.