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 shifts 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. As with the ink on paper, there is also a pencil line to indicate the sky usually, but not always.

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 pronounced, this is always where the information is. Always distant... again... somewhere else. 

HCW

PENCIL AND WASH

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There is a place in the salt marsh here called Norton Creek which runs east/west south of Scolt. It is tidal and therefore in a state of constant flux. When I draw these pencil and wash landscapes I am thinking of here. 
 


The starting point is to concentrate on the most ephemeral nature of this place and treat it with the lightest of touches. It is after all just air, water, sand and light.