'On The Beach', oil on canvas, 30 x 30cms, 2024
During the October half term, we went on holiday as a family to Fife in Scotland. We normally head up there for a week at this time of year to visit my brother-in-law and his family who live in Burntisland, a small parish town with a rich history which includes shipbuilding, fishing and being an important port for coalmining in the region until the late 1960s, before the de-industrialisation that ravaged so much of Scotland in the Eighties. In this sense, it reminds me of the scars and legacy this left on the Black Country region and its landscape and people where I grew up in during this time.
Autumn is the best time of year to visit Scotland, where the landscape blazes with autumn colour on the Fife coastal path where we have stayed in various small towns and villages along here for several years. I, somewhat typically I guess, love the views of the oil rigs out at sea that can be spotted along the coastline. The long sandy beach at Burntisland, where we stayed in a cottage at the end of this year, despite washing up each tide a line of black coal dust along the edge, is picturesque in the summer, and in the autumn has an appealing bleak beauty beset by ever changing weather conditions.
From our cottage, only yards from the sea, we had wide views across the Firth of Forth to Edinburgh and the Pentland Hills. I would sit outside after breakfast each morning with a cup of coffee and a sketchbook as the sun came up, with the tide drawn back to reveal the muddy, wet sand where hundreds of long red legged Eurasian Oyster Catcher birds enjoyed digging the worms out of the sand with their equally bright red beaks. They weren’t the only ones doing this. On a couple of mornings, I enjoyed watching a distant lone figure obsessively doing the same, moving rapidly from one spot to another with his long-handled spade and bucket. I began equally obsessively drawing him one morning, trying to capture his movements.
Sketchbook drawings
Sketchbook drawings
I wasn’t quite sure what he was doing so I asked him as he walked back up the beach and passed the cottage. He told me he too was digging for worms to go fishing with the following day. He had big Tupperware boxes full of them…Further on down the beach there was also another solitary figure with a large metal detector which beeped loudly as he scanned the beach floor. I was equally fascinated by him and made more drawings. By the time I had finished my coffee I felt excited because I knew I too had unearthed, in the act of looking and drawing, some ideas for some new landscape paintings when I would get back to my studio in Birmingham. And here are the results…
'Digging For Worms', oil on canvas, 80 x 100cms, 2024
'The Detectorist', oil on canvas, 60 x 100cms, 2024
Despite thinking that it might make a nice series to work on over the next two months, I ended up painting these six paintings in quick succession over a few days (the dark, black and grey one is of a different spot along the coastline). I’m really pleased with them and really enjoyed painting them.
'Coming Home in Winter', oil on canvas, 100 x 120cms, 2024
'Like Exploding Stones', oil on canvas, 120 x 120cms, 2024
'Breathe', oil on canvas, 50 x 75cms, 2024
The subject allowed me to be freer and I experimented with different coloured grounds and also painting on top of older paintings, their images having a faint ‘ghost-like’ presence of colour and mark beneath. I think they would be a nice companion to my paintings of the Black Country and Midlands landscape at
some point...
