Throughout my studies I have sought to relate the art that I create to specific localities, endeavouring to not only capture the macro-scale view of the landscape but also the underlying fine detail that builds to create the essence of place.
In recent times I have been concentrating on the area of the Suffolk coast that stretches between Aldeburgh in the north down to Bawdsey in the south and in particular the small hamlet of Shingle Street. This small community of cottages sandwiched between salt marshes and sea holds a fascination that belies its size.
As artist who has recently been working on a similar project is the Yorkshire based painter Judith Tucker. She has been working with a small community on the North Lincolnshire coast known as the Humberstone Fitties, which like Shingle Street lies between salt marsh and the sea. Her series of paintings Night Fitties (2018 – 22) portray a group of cottages, shacks, old railway carriages and the like that together make up a community that looks very similar to Shingle Street.
By choosing to depict night-time scenes Tucker has enhanced the feeling of seclusion of the cabins while at the same time the Union Jack flags help to create a sense of unity between the residents based around some idea of ‘Englishness’. The titles of her paintings are taken from snatches of conversations she has had with the local people.
She has also worked on the project with the poet Harriet Tarlo, a long time collaborator with Tucker, to create books and exhibitions related to the Fitties and the surrounding salt marshes.
https://www.judithtuckerartist.com/home
https://www.projectfitties.com/
Another Yorkshire based artist is Helen Thomas, an artist who likes to look into the close detail of a place. In particular her paintings depict the plants that colonise the edges and cracks of the built environment, the little reminders that nature will always reclaim what we build. She co-ordinated a major project that involved over 60 members of the public submitting images, photographs and paintings entitled ‘Dandelions and Double Yellows’ that looked at the urban plants that are more usually described as weeds and how they contribute to the biodiversity and colour of our built environment.
http://www.toastedorange.co.uk
Thomas’s paintings got me thinking how difficult would it be to paint the plants that uniquely grow in the shingle along the coast as they part of the essence of Shingle Street. This has opened up a whole new line of thought in my work.
Using the overlooked, the ordinary, the parts of a place that do not attract attention as a subject for artworks is also a feature of the paintings of Narbi Price. This Newcastle based painter used the period of lockdown during the Covid crisis when travel was restricted to produce a series of paintings based on his local area that captured the strangeness of the time through the effect on the mundane.
Using photographs taken by his friends as source material he then developed photo-realist acrylic paintings of public benches that had been wrapped with tape to prevent people sitting on them. These images captured that period when the ordinary became the strange, but then after a while the new reality came to almost be the ordinary.
Another artist who is inspired by the overlooked and the ordinary is Mandy Payne. Her work concentrates on the urban environment and in particular the sort of brutalist architecture exemplified by the Park Hill council estate in Sheffield. This work could seem a world away from the sort of environment that I have been studying, but it reflects her fascination with textures, surfaces and materiality and how these aspects create the sense of place.
I am interested in how she uses concrete as a support for her paintings, relating the subject matter to the process as I have in the past tried painting views of the Lake District on locally sourced slate.
An artist that I have long felt an affinity for (no pun intended) is Richard Long.
His practice involving solitary walks through the environment, recording what he sees, hears and feels, sometimes leaving small interventions, captures the sense of place in both physical and temporal dimensions. The process of walking from one point to another links the two locations creating new associations as well as highlighting differences. The encounters he records during the process create a map of intangibles that stand in contrast to the physical existence of the path walked.
My own work in Shingle Street involves walking the beach and in doing so I encounter the pebbles and shells that will form the basis for my paintings. Each one feels like a gift from the place challenging me to find the beauty that it holds.
