It sounds absurd but it’s a place that doesn’t really exist. It is there one moment... gone the next. The tide comes in or the weather changes and the place’s structure changes completely. It becomes somewhere ‘else’. Other.
The pencil lines are there to give you the barest of directions as to where you are.
For the most part you are in the creek of course and that’s those watery lines in the foreground.
Pencil and Wash
View catalogueThere is a creek here called Norton Creek which runs pretty much east/west. It’s tidal and makes Scolt Head an island at high tide.
Whenever I draw these pencil and wash landscapes I am always thinking of here.
The starting point for these works therefore is to take the most ephemeral nature of such a place and treat it with the lightest of touches. Its all just air, water, sand and light.
As with the ink on paper, there is also a pencil line to indicate the sky usually, but not always. Some compostion to give you a sense of volume, air and space.
Then, always, there is the thin horizon. So much a feature of these salt marshes and the estuary. Thin, level and comparartively pronounced, this is always where the information is, though invariably right out there in the distance. A line of trees usually, some bushes, a building or two.
