Budleigh Salterton - Oil on Board

Between Exmouth and Sidmouth on the South Devon Coast lies the small and almost unspoilt town of Budleigh Salterton, which has largely escaped the crush of modern development because the beach there which shields the marshes and lagoons of the lovely little River Otter's estuary, is formed not of sand but of pebbles. And what beautiful pebbles they are, very hard, pastel coloured and perfectly smooth, for the most part slightly flattened, and three or four inches in diameter. The majority are pale pink in hue, or light greyish blue, in contrast to the darker iron- rich rocks nearby. In fact, by some caprice of time and tides they come from over two hundred miles away in France, where millions of years ago they formed the bed of a great river. For nearly forty years, since first coming to live in Devon, I have visited this beach in many weathers, enjoying the undamaged view of the pale shore that sweeps in a magnificent curve away to red cliffs, the contrast of distant meadowland rising above the polished stones and silhouetting a long line of sentinel pines that seem to spear their way towards the sea, and the little reef called Otterton Ledge that pokes shyly into deeper water, where the Otter cleaves through the banked pebbles to discharge itself into the sea.
The Otter flows West and South from the high Dunkeswell plateau through rolling hills, wooded at the crown, and the scene behind the beach is as lovely as on the front, though entirely different, being protected from the sea. It is all emerald green farmland there, some of it once owned by Sir Walter Raleigh's forbears, and his childhood home near Colaton Raleigh can still be found just four miles upriver. So here on the beach at Budleigh the founder of the colony of Virginia, gained his first views of the sea that he later made his highway to the Americas. I imagine he liked this beach as much as I do, and maybe loved to lie on the hot pebbles as my own children used to on hot summer days after swimming and splashing at the shore. The seascape of Millais' famous picture, "The Boyhood of Raleigh" was painted on the land of Lady Rolles near here, and in it one can see that Millais, too, loved the glow of the Devon sun on these mild waters that sometimes seem to ripple with colour, milky green against dark turquoise blue and ultramarine, as light and shade pass over them.


Over the years I have got to know these pebbles more closely. Each one is unique, each one a pleasure to hold, and in painting this picture I wanted to unite two dimensions: the mere existence of one pebble, and the great expanse of a whole beach of them. In the finely calibrated natural world we live in, each detail is marvelous, although we are unable to even begin to take them all in. But if we cannot grasp all the particulars, we can allow ourselves to wonder at the whole, and gazing one hot midsummer's day along the curving ridge of sun-bleached, sea-smoothed stones, I was struck that so much patient work of aeons could give way to such a pause of vast tranquility. Pebbles, clouds and sky, billions of wrinkles of light and colour on the surface of the sea, bending hill slope and edge of cliff, people walking and lying, cool shadows, hot sunshine, soothing breeze, and the soft sucking of the sea as each successive wave dragged a clutch of stones gently to and fro, all were united in a harmony of line and colour and restfulness that said that each had been made for the other, and balanced the other, and had come together for the fleeting moment, to take it altogether out of time .....

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