Never Ending Or Beginning

This painting is a studio version of one I made in the mid 1990s at Embleton Bay on the Northumberland coast in northeast England. It’s a special place for me which I’ve been visiting as an artist since the late 1980s and where I first camped in 1979 as a student at Newcastle University. The original was painted on the spot in acrylics on MDF; this version is in oils on canvas and was painted in my studio. Although superficially similar to the first painting it has been on its own journey of composition, colour and mark. As such, paintings made away from the place depicted can develop a reality of their own not to be confused with the actual place at a particular moment in time or with a photograph. I think it allows for a deeper meditation on place, one that has been fed by repeated visits and memory as well as knowledge of this and similar places. It attempts to evoke a certain feeling that the original place and time has imprinted on my memory but it goes beyond that in becoming a new place with its own genius loci, as alive in the present as the real place was in the past. Although I didn’t see a fishing boat between the reefs back in 1997 I do know that Cobles are still used on this coast for inshore fishing and I know what they look like. The footprints in the sand are mine, or maybe not. Where have they come from? The weather out at sea is grey and changeable and the sea although very calm shows a disturbance on the surface where the turning tide is causing a current to begin, one that will become a flood. The wooden structure of the well-painted beach chalet seems strong and permanent, but time moves on as marked by the tides and the weather, never ending or beginning.

$1609

About the artist

Lionel Playford

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I am a painter of northern landscapes and of the sea. I'm an established artist in the north of England but I'm also known more widely with for example my TV participation in the SKY Portrait Artist of the Year competition.