Filey Head - Oil on Board

North East of York the coast between Flamborough Head and Bempton Cliffs is as wild as most day-walkers could want it. Some of the highest cliffs in England are here, and an abundance of coastal wildlife. I love all precipices, and especially sea cliffs. What I tried to capture in this painting is the exhilaration produced by the buffeting of the sea wind, and the wonderful sense of height and space and volume opened up by the plummeting depths beneath our feet. Only a cliff can offer such dramatic perspectives both horizontally and vertically, simultaneously. I wanted to reproduce for someone pausing to stare for a few minutes, the strange temptation that can come to anyone on a cliff or on a precipice, to let go and plunge into the void.
I also love rocks. A cliff face is a thing of wonder, like a great dinosaur that has rolled over to let you examine its belly. The story of the millions of years of its making is opened right before your eyes. Immense contortions of time are laid bare. To paint a cliff face is to brush into origins and trace the contours of creation.
Rocks are very beautiful. There are rocks laid down by water and rocks laid down by fire, rocks formed under immense pressure, and rocks formed by release from virtually any pressure at all. Some rocks crystallize out of solutions, and others, such as these vast limestone cliffs near Flamborough, are formed from the skeletons of innumerable sea creatures. I feel great respect for rocks and love to stand and stare at a cliff face, searching its perspective on time. I wanted to put that respect in paint.
Then there is the sea, boundless to the horizon, yet stopped below by these magnificent cliff walls, these old guardians of the shore. And although the focus of this painting is the cliffs, I hope also to gently tip the viewer into a reverie engulfed by the vast reaches of the sea. The great blue, silver-grey sea, playful, and lulling in calm sunshine, but hiding an immeasurable potential for upheaval. The sparkling sea shining to the sky-line, and yet secretive and dark in these very depths right beneath our feet. Charming, restless, untameable, irresistibly beautiful, the sea is a seductress of humdrum lives, tempting men to steal recklessly forth from their domestic shelters, to love other places at the ends of the world, for the sea caresses them all. True only to herself, yet not always fickle, the sea is also a bright shield bearer to the sky, mirror of the limitless realms above. Into the sea the sun sinks, and from the sea the stars also rise.
For not only time and tides meet these cliffs in ceaseless blows, but also the vast sea-skies and the heavenly hosts. They all collide, as whole weather systems collide, right along the line where rock plunges into water. So a cliff is a place of endless drama among all the elements, in all dimensions, of glorious peace and pitiless war and constantly broken and refashioned treaties. And into this turmoil come the seabirds, effortlessly riding winds that hold the seas in thrall. I wanted to paint the seagulls as if among them, because if you sit on a cliff edge and watch them long enough you do begin to fly with them .. ......
over the edge and into the unbounded air. So graceful on the wing, surfing storms that sink our human endeavours, these soft white-feathered lords of flight amaze us with their power to take their living and raise their young right here, at the cliff face, at the crack between worlds, here where air, water and rock crash together.


The cliffs of England are among the most beautiful wildernesses the nation still possesses, and to walk them is to walk not only the boundaries of nature, but of history too, because the English were a sea-faring people, and sometimes as the clouds skate past and the sun breaks through, and light catches some distant breaking wave, the foam flecked prow of a longboat, or the white sails of a tall ship seem to come gliding into view. ........ But of course all that has passed. The lovely thing is that the cliffs are still with us.

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