A sketch on the beach at Fairy Chapel Bay in Heysham, looking across to the Lakeland Fells. Making these little studies isn’t something I enjoy. So why do I do it? As much as anything it’s a reason to be out in the air, and I love the deep looking. Painting or drawing forces you to really look. You see forms and colours and details, you’d never otherwise register. The looking is always enriching, while I find the act of painting the scene a struggle. I suppose then the process balances itself out, yin/yang. What I do enjoy is later abstracting what I’ve seen and experienced. More a sense of that day, that place. Those particular qualities that lingered long afterwards without the pressure of making ‘a good likeness’ in the painting
