Skanör, Skåne
Yesterday at the beach I sketched the leaden cloud … clouds … that filled the sky and hung heavily over the sea. Did I sketch because I wanted to or because I felt that I should? Intellectually I understand that sketching is an exercise that trains the eye and that hones the connection between the eye and the hand … it’s just that it feels somehow artificial … as though I am performing … doing what is expected … doing what I expect of myself if I am to be taken seriously as an artist. The blustery conditions meant that the cloudscape was in constant evolution … never static … how to convey that in graphite on paper? I was aware of the difference in scale between the vast and rolling sky, and the small movements of my hand across the A5 page. Sketching … observational sketching is not a regular part of my practice. The last time that I sketched was probably this time last year when I was here with L … what does it mean to be an annual sketcher?
I am thinking about the walk on the beach in Latvia … an exercise in experience rather than image … another way of paying attention. If it hadn’t been for that walk and seeing those tall pines collapsed at the frontline of the beach’s errosion of the forrest I may not have come to the more collapsed positions in subsequent installations.
Writing now I am recalling a series of ink sketches made on the insides of disected manilla envelopes … broad landscapes loosely sketched in fountain-pen ink … each envelope opened up so as to create the widest panorama. I made them when I was on my foundation course. Did I take materials with me to Plumberow Mount and work there … I don’t remember that crucial (?) detail at all. Were there sketches of the Southend seascape … estuaryscape? … too? I do remember keeping some of those sketches for a long time. I liked the dark ink on the unglazed and absorbent light tan paper. I miss manilla envelopes … their colour, their texture, their proportion … their materiality.
