Pictures : Makry Gialos - Sand Sea and Sky. Paintings 2015- 2017

Sand, Sea and Sky

Sitting on the beach in Makry Gialos, Crete, over a three-year period, 2015-2017.watching the sea. Always the same place.

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I started the water colours in 2015 to solve a problem I’d been thinking about ever since I’d been to the Agnes Martin exhibition at the Tate earlier in the year.

I’d seen her Arizona paintings and while I assumed they were influenced by the landscape where she lived I kept asking myself, were they abstract landscapes? Blues, yellows, pinks delineated in horizontal bands across the canvass.

The pink bothered me, there was pink in her paintings, was there pink in the bright sunny vast vivid colour wilderness of Arizona landscapes?

In my mind, never having been there, there could be no pink so where did it come from in Martin’s paintings?

Then one day, sitting on the beach in Marky Gialos looking out to sea there it was.

It wasn’t a bright Mediterranean blue day, it was a slightly overcast, heavy, humid, southern Crete October day.

Pale grey clouds, grey seas and a pink hue, not a vivid pink, a restrained pink, hanging delicately in the clouds.

Capturing these colours was another thing. In the vastness of the sky settling down onto the sea how could you capture such an image?

Martin's work provided a solution. The delineation of her work provided a abstracting compartmentalisation of what I was seeing;

sand, where I sat,

sea at the end of the sand

sky topping it all off.

Three horizontal bands of colour, delineated across the page.

Over the next three years I sat in the same place, not always at the same time, painting the same three bands.