Women in Art - Raising the Bar

Study 2 Plashy Place Series.
Oil, charcoal and conte on canvas
45 cm x 50 cm x 4 cm
2019

Signed verso

My childhood days were spent in the unassuming Somerset town of Minehead, and it is the landscape of that post-industrial beach town that forms the bedrock for much of my painting.  

In this series of paintings I find that the canvases echo the marks, lines and shapes that we made in the wet, grey sand of my home town beach: thus the canvas becomes the beach that acted as the canvas of my child-hood.

Acting as our playground the beach provided a canvas for mark-making, inscribing names, hop-scotch, drawing out goal posts or strange messages to the gods. A concrete paddling pool, a sea wall built high and colourful windbreaks that doubled up as modesty screens all jostled for space and recognition; this was a place where fortifications were swept away by the tide and where gritty tea was drunk from plastic cups.

And as the seasons changed I became aware of how a place full of noise and laughter, people and sunshine became one of out-of-season emptiness; the windswept promenades, ripped hoardings and harsh winds had transformed our beach, only the tides and the lugworm castles were a constant.

It is this abandon of play that WB Yeats’ The who Dreamt of Faeryland, who, careworn with the fears and concerns of adulthood, observes the humble lugworm rising to the surface, singing of higher places and golden skies …

It is these watery Plashy Places that I return to in these works.