If you are in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, you can see some of my paintings in Blandscliff Gallery’s summer exhibition, until the end of August. It is an interesting gallery full of stunning ceramics.
And you can also see some of my new paintings in Coast Gallery, Cloughton. On the way to Robin Hood’s Bay and Whitby, this gallery exhibits the best local painters and serves great coffee and cakes.
Yesterday I was thinking back to where my current seashore paintings have evolved from. Of course, this beautiful North Yorkshire coast can only inspire…
I think of myself as facing North, twix land and sea.
On my back is the warm sunshine of yesteryears. Robin Hood’s Bay is my South, where so long ago I fell in love with that village and a beautiful man, though my roots originate much further South.
On my left are those awesome moors, clad in purple cloaks in Summer and a white mantle in Winter. There, is glory. And there, sweet sorrow buried on a hillside.
And on my right, the ebb and flow of the North Sea. Its gentle waves and fearful tempests, its constantly changing light, the chiming sound of waves over a shingle beach, those deep and rhythmic blues, the feel of soft sand, and those big skies…
I always go back to the sea… And today three beautiful women came to my studio. One, whom I hadn’t seen for about 40 years, bought “Mermaid”. Painted in 2012, soon after I moved back to the coast, it is very different from my current work. One, whom I didn’t know, bought “Runswick Bay”, unusually for me depicting the sea in winter. One, a close friend, had fallen in love with “Robin Hood’s Bay Rainbow” when I first showed it on Facebook. All three paintings are very different in approach, mood and scale, but I take it as a good omen for my current attraction/obsession/compulsion/fascination for the seashore, which I think many share.
