http://www.painters-online.co.uk artistMarch 2020 43
D
uring 2010 I painted my
way around the 3,000-mile
English coast at extraordinary
locations from Berwick-upon-
Tweed in Northumberland, clockwise,
to the Solway Firth in Cumbria. It was
a fascinating trip, culminating in 180
plein-air paintings that were sold in aid
of RNLI beach lifeguards.
Whilst exploring I became very aware
of the environmental impacts of a whole
range of issues from plastic pollution to
over-fishing. I found seabirds entangled
in ghost gear at Hastings and watched
shocked as twelve feet of slippery,
brown mud slid into the sea on the
Lincolnshire coast, taking a bungalow
with it. A few run-down fishing towns
were slowly becoming gentrified while
other once thriving tourist resorts
suffered through a lack of industry,
funding and vision.
My aim for my 2020 coastal journey is
to capture and document these changes
both environmentally and culturally
through the artworks that I make on the
journey. To delve into the historic past
of our coast and to peer into its future.Cuckmere Haven
Cuckmere Haven is an English Channel
haven of chalk and flint, white and
black, curve and vertical; I have long
had a yearning to paint this part of the
Sussex coastline. This is the spot where
the chocolate brown Cuckmere River
meets the sea, and the two mingle for a
short while before the river gives in and
gives way to the grey English Channel.
This low plateau, surrounded by some
of the highest and most dramatic
coastal scenery in England, is home
to grey herons and black cormorants.
Swifts – dramatic in flight and in natureFRAGILE COAST CONSERVATION PROJECT:
1ST OF 6John Piper and Cuckmere
Glyn Macey begins a new six-part
series in which he documents the
changes to the English coastline with a
painting inspired by a well-known artist
for you to try
- seem to suit this landscape perfectly;
their graceful curved flight paths
punctuated by staccato, stop-and-start
turns that mirror the soft rise and sharp
fall of the chalk cliffs.
One of the many draws to this part
of the English coast is my fascination
and admiration for the work of artist
John Piper, 1903–92. John Piper made
artworks of the Sussex coast that
are, for me, unsurpassed. Capturing
the very essence of that coastline,
these paintings are stunning in their
simplicity, worked with fascinating and
truly contemporary combinations of
collage, fabric, gouache and ink, and are
tightly composed yet completely fluid
in application. The John Piper white cliff
paintings capture the very essence of
the Sussex coast. These works evoke
the history and pre-history of the place
where the chalk downs meet the sea;
when I look at them I can smell the
coast: the salt, the dank slippery mud
and the acidic chalk. And I can hear the
skylarks.
John Piper made the Cuckmere and
Seven Sisters paintings in the early
1930s after Jim Ede, the founder of
Kettles Yard in Cambridge, introduced
him to the work of Braque. This pivotal
moment helped to form a new body of
mixed-media work, which was shown
in his first exhibition in London in
- Around the same time, John
Piper received an invitation from
Ben Nicholson to join the Seven and
Five Society group of modern artists,
which helped to cement his place at
the forefront of modernist painting in
Britain.
When John Piper was visiting
Cuckmere and the Seven Sisters back
in the early 1930s he discovered the
same captivating landscape that we
find today, albeit with a few subtle and
sometimes dramatic changes. The white
cliffs have slowly retreated over the
last 80-odd years between Piper’s visit
and mine. Coastal erosion is a major
problem on the Sussex coast as the soft
chalk cliffs are vulnerable to the ever-
encroaching tides.
The white cliffs are synonymous
with a glowing, nostalgic welcome for
those heading home from Europe
and as a defiant line of defence – no
more so than when John Piper made
his artworks. One war was still fresh in
people’s memories and another about
to begin; the cliffs became deeply
immersed in the national identity, a
complicated jumble of romanticism and
nationalism, a longing for something
intangible now lost, a metaphor for an
England that never really existed.Inspired
John Piper’s studio in Oxfordshire was
crammed full of collected ephemera:
labels, newspapers, packaging and
cardboard. These collage elements
were combined with hand-marbled
paper made by floating sheets of
paper in combinations of ink and oil
to create unexpected, naturalistic
results. Such working practices were
not completely new but John Piper was
using them for a new reason, to capture
the landscape. Gone were the tiny
brushes traditionally used to describe
every leaf in every tree and every wave
upon the sea. Instead the structures in
the white cliffs were described using
newsprint from the New Statesman, its
black and white graphics lending depth
and implied detail to the vertical cliffs.
And wrapping paper, complete witht English Channel Storm, watercolour, acrylic,
ink and found materials, 22 22in (56 56cm)