Sunshine in Falmouth

‘Trips to Falmouth in Cornwall are joyful for me; mostly because my son is at university there, living his best life and it is wonderful to visit him, and also because it is on the sea.

The coastal environment brings me back to childhood, having grown up on the shores of Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada. Once you have lived in close proximity to water you always yearn for it – it has a way of drawing you in, never completely letting go of your soul. So, sketching on the shores of the mighty Atlantic on the Cornish Coast is inspirational for me – sitting with my sketchbook and natural paints on a lichen coated rock, in awe of the powerful tide crashing in or gently receding out, fascinated by the mini ecosystems in each rock pool, exhilarated by the changing weather, moment to moment – trying to capture a small portion of the raw energy and beauty of it on paper. My woad paint, in various shades of blue, is absolutely brilliant for these sketches for both sky and water.

Sometimes you cannot see where the sky ends and the water begins, which I love. My natural, soya-based crayons are perfect for creating diffused light in the sky, reflections on water and foreground texture of rocks and rock pools by using wax resist technique. I tend to use a lot of splashing movements with my brush to mimick the crashing waves and always aim to capture the energy and feeling of the moment in my work. Sometimes I emboss the shapes of shells and found objects into the foreground before I begin painting to create extra textures in the foreground – I love the way the paint collects in the groves to tell a more detailed story of what was on the beach in front of me that day.’