Shoreline 1

SHORELINE
In the past men seldom built their settlements directly on the coast, preferring instead to abide a little inland, sheltered more comfortably behind a fold in the land or nestling in the natural harbourage of a creek, away from the seas “long, withdrawing roar.” Dependent, perhaps, on the sea for a living once ashore they turned their backs on it, faced inland to commerce and the civilising benefits of material progress.

In our day the land is tamed, ploughed and harnessed to support our material needs, to civilise the race, but the sea (on which men still hunt as our forebears hunted the land) laps at the shore, a constant reminder of the fragile structure of our lives. As we become increasingly dependent on the city we need periodically to renew contact with the natural elements and so we see a growth of the town as resort, a temporary encampment of the city dweller. As a child growing up in the centre of England the sea exercised its distant song. The people of the industrial Midlands made their annual pilgrimage to the sands of Rhyl, Clacton or Skegness.

Here on this narrow strip we shed the raiments of civilisation and seek the restorative powers of the ocean, our primeval mother. We wish to rest, to live for a little time in “no man’s land,” between the two great warring powers: the drive to improve, to develop, to civilise and the elemental forces of destruction seeking to break down to dust, to wash away and dissolve, to coalesce and fructify to new life.

These paintings are based on the beaches of St. Ives, England; the Costa Brava and Calpe, Spain