What is it that draws our eye to the line of the sea horizon?
Do you, like me, instinctively pause, take a few deep breaths and just gaze?
Why is it that in these anxious times, when calamities seem to bear down on us one after the other with no end in sight, that simply looking out to sea can feel so rebalancing?
The horizon pulls us out of ourselves and stills our busy thoughts.
These seven drawings attempt to capture that moment.
When you live on an island as I do, the line of the sea horizon is ever present, glimpsed in the distance whenever I look up from my desk, peeping between blunt headlands when I go for a walk, or spreading so wide from my local beach that I can see the curve of the Earth.
And yet it’s always changing. The North Atlantic meets the sky differently each day. Sometimes the boundary between air and water is smudged and soft or lost in a blur of rain. Other days it’s as sharp as if cut with a knife. But always, something shifts in me when I look at it. The chattering mind meets that place on the horizon where the seeable falls away and is, for a moment, confounded and silenced. In that brief quietness something comes back into balance.
To celebrate the opening of my exhibition of paintings at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, I’ll be releasing this suite of seven large drawings exclusively to my email subscribers.
Would you like to receive an invite to join the online viewing room on September 3rd?
‘Sea Road’ 2022, gouache and acrylic on paper, 59 cm x 87 cm (framing suggestion)
“I’ll be able to look up all the time I’m working and be calmed and enchanted throughout the day. I love all your work, but this is the one that gave me that real solar plexus tug that only comes once in a while.”