Tag Archives: abstract sketching

Revelations in the reedbeds …

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For the first time in months I went out sketching last week on the north Norfolk coast at Thornham, with its salt marsh, tidal creeks and reedbeds. It was a gloriously sunny day for November and (thankfully) I decided I couldn’t face the shady studio or staying indoors in my north-facing house on such a day.

There are many reasons I’ve left it so long – I used to go out sketching each week and it was (is) an important part of my practice – but the truth is I just got out of the habit. Yet I felt so much clearer-headed and brighter once I was treading the familiar sea defences looking out to the horizon and down over the winter reeds.

Despite the cold wind I found a little shelter in the sunlight next to a pool almost hidden in the reedbed, below the path. While a late dragonfly hovered in the sun and a large fish leapt out of the still water, I precariously balanced my sketchbook on a fence rail and set to work…

…and it is this point I’ve been thinking about since. I always tell myself and others that it’s the light and the landscape that compels me to paint; that I’m trying to instil in my mind what interests me in the scene, so that later I can retrieve and distil the impressions into a piece of studio work.

I still believe this, but now I realise it’s too simple an explanation – it doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s the pleasure I take in pausing to contemplate how I’m going to ‘interpret’ the scene whether with watercolour or acrylic ink; the joy of brushing water across the white page, into which I’m going to just touch the black ink block and watch it bleed out swiftly into the wet, or trail a loaded ink dropper through it and see the colour bloom swiftly outwards; the experience that, after years of trial and error, I now know that by moving a purple-grey ink into the wet area further down it will bleed upwards into the black, where I watch it pool and spread or run off wildly in a different direction; how colours will mix and back run.

This also happens whatever medium I’m using in the studio. There comes a point quite early in the process where I forget the original inspiration and an all-consuming pleasure in the media takes over; whether it’s dragging acrylic paint across a prepared canvas with a big brush, pasting selected newsprint onto the work, scratching marks into wet paint, or scraping colour away to reveal stained texture below.

Of course, like all artists, there are times the process doesn’t work for me and pleasure turns to frustration, but when it does work there’s nothing like it.

Dungeness: sun, angels & black tar

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Dungeness sketchbook spread. © Mari French 2019.

Dungeness sketchbook spread. © Mari French 2019.

Been slipping behind with posting this year, it’s been so busy, what with moving into a new studio which has been more time-consuming and tiring than I could have imagined (more of which in the next post), preparing for a solo exhibition and several other shows I’m taking part in. However, I’ve been wanting to tell you about my sketching trip to Dungeness back in August, so here goes.

I’ve been determined to return to this otherworldly stretch of shingle, old black fishing huts and strange structures ever since I spent a brief few hours there last October. So I arranged to spend 4 nights in nearby Littlestone and travelled the few miles into Dungeness each day to get as much sketching done as possible, with the intention of prompting a new series of work.

Dungeness boat and tracks. © Mari French 2019.

Dungeness, old boat and tracks. © Mari French 2019.

Dungeness, for those unfamiliar with it (the UK version by the way), is a wedge of coast sticking out into the English Channel between Dover and Eastbourne on the South East coast of England. ‘Denge’ meaning ‘dangerous’ and ‘Ness’ nose or promontory. Over a long time longshore drift has piled up acres of shingle into a landscape of dunes and levels. It’s always been a fishing area but now many of the old black-tarred huts with their rusting iron winches are decaying or gone. There’s enough of them left though, along with evidence of old MOD structures, set up between the wars, and the more recent bulk of the Nuclear power station, plus the two distinctive lighthouses, to make this a fascinating place for artists and photographers. Wooden hulks of derelict and still operative fishing boats also litter this stretch of coastline.

Dungeness Open Studios © Mari French 2019
Creative use of waste plastic found on beaches, Dungeness. © Mari French 2019
Dungeness new lighthouse © Mari French 2019
Dungeness ‘Angel’ © Mari French 2019
Decaying boat, Dungeness. © Mari French 2019
Old lifeboat, Dungeness. © Mari French 2019
Dungeness Nuclear Power Station © Mari French 2019
Creative use of beach finds, Dungeness. © Mari French 2019
Dungeness: offbeat creativity © Mari French 2019
Dungeness fishing shed © Mari French 2019
Old fishing boat winch, Dungeness.© Mari French 2019

Bright sunshine and a strong coastal wind made for tricky sketching conditions, but I pushed myself to fill as much of my sketchbook as possible, also playing around with collaging and sketching in it back at my selfcatering place in the evenings. I went through the usual (for me) dilemma of having a fairly short time in an inspiring place, yet trying to cram in as much work as I could. I was exhausted after several fraught and tiring weeks of moving studio etc, yet I resisted taking it easy. I had to remind myself that all the time I’m there I’m taking in colours, texture, shape, sounds etc, subconsciously, even if I’m not completing as much of the sketchbook as I wanted to. I know from previous experience it will come out in the work I eventually produce, if I allow it. But it seems I have to go through this palaver each time!

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Dungeness impressions, mixed media, sketchbook. © Mari French 2019

Dungeness fishing sheds, mixed media, sketchbook. © Mari French 2019

Dungeness fishing sheds, mixed media, sketchbook. © Mari French 2019

Anyway, as you can see from this post, I did get a fair bit done, and am pretty pleased and excited by most of the results. I tried to avoid painting my usual loose, but obvious watercolour  ‘scenes’ this time. I think I succeeded a bit. I’d taken pre-stained tissue and other collage materials to help the process and to get quickly away from ‘white page’ syndrome. This was great fun when sat on shingle in the teeth of a blustery wind – hanging onto my hat with one hand and my collage bits with the other! It’s a nature reserve, and many wildflowers were growing among the shingle, the last thing I wanted to do was litter it with bits of paper!

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Dungeness fishing sheds, mixed media, sketchbook. © Mari French 2019

A few notes from my sketchbook:

So much light here. Sun is hot and wind has backed off…

Today I can see why this stretch of coast is said to have the most sunlight in the UK. The sky is a huge dome, the heat shimmers from the shingle and the tall wooden ‘angel’ structure ripples in the distance.* …

I lost the plot a bit with the wind today, it didnt work as intended, but it’ll remind me of the day! And I may be able to adapt it …

Just wandered round Derek Jarman’s garden** at Prospect Cottage. It feels like a church, very touching and, with the wind whistling in the overhead wires, beautiful but sad. ‘Busy olde foole, unruly sun’…

Dungeness Open Studios: series of small huts selling the art and linocuts of artist Paddy Hamilton. Bought one of the ‘Beach Angel’ linoprints, which shows what looks like an angel on the shingle with a trumpet, but on closer inspection turns out to be a shrimp fisherman hoisting his shovel and his great long shrimp net behind him …

If I had a few more days I’d probably get the balance of exploration, input and response about right. Wish I could stay longer …

*This very tall wooden cross structure was erected when the power station was built and was found to be blocking the view of the church which vessels used to line up their sights and navigate safely on this stretch of coast. Reminds me of Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North. A overseeing guardian.

**Derek Jarman, film-maker, artist, writer, gardener made his home here when he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. He filled his shingle garden with indigenous wild plants and made sculptures from old found wooden and rusting salvaged items. The first and last verses of John Dunne’s poem ‘The sun rising’ is picked out in wooden letters covering the whole of one wall of his black-tarred traditional cottage with its yellow framed windows. The cottage and garden are now a very popular attraction in Dungeness. Jarman died in 1994 and is buried in nearby Old Romney.

Prospect Cottage, Dungeness © Mari French 2019
Wildflowers, Dungeness © Mari French 2019
Sculpture, Prospect Cottage, Dungeness © Mari French 2019
Sculptures, Prospect Cottage, Dungeness © Mari French 2019
Wildflowers, Dungeness © Mari French 2019
Old hut is an unusual canvas © Mari French 2019

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