Painting at Mulgrave

How a first major theme for my Mulgrave work was born

In January 2012 I traded my usual January trip to the Kingshouse Hotel for a few days at Robin Hood’s Bay on the North Yorkshire Coast staying with Dave Tolcher. We were joined by Joe Cornish for some of it and I had an enjoyable time including some days at new locations (to me).

However it was the day we all spent at Mulgrave that is most memorable and significant to me. I had been visiting frequently at this point and although the project structure of my work was still not fully formed, the notion that this location was going to be that project was clear.

We took Joe down the steep path and slope to the huts and then on to the beach. My photography that trip had felt a little forced to me but the moment I arrived I just relaxed and started to make images.

At the time I had begun to think of image construction as not a process of finding compositions or collecting photos from a location but more of an interactive process of drawing in the landscape using the available objects. To imagine a composition, I moved my hands and drew a distilled or abstracted sketch in the air. This was to make perfect sense some 12 years later when I discovered I actually had a super strength when it comes to photography – aphantasia – but at the time I could not explain why I was doing it or how it was working.

But this notion of photography being a bit like painting was starting to influence my thinking. I made a couple of images of the huts and then as I was walking over towards another hut I saw an overturned boat with some amazing pink, red, blue and white colouring. It was a cacophony of colour enhanced by transparent waterproof sealant added to the boat to presumably stop it sinking.

I looked at it and my eye was drawn to a small patch of the boat – around 1.5× to lifesize (for 5×4). Out of all that complexity I could draw the structure of the image in my head using my hand. I set up and made the main image. I had made a lot of images now on Velvia around this size so I was sure of my technique.

When I got the transparency back and onto a lightbox it was remarkable. It reminded me of an abstract painting I had seen made by Kandinsky and although that wasn’t the intention at the time the notion that I could make images that echoed paintings began to take shape as a theme.

This concept of exploring themes discovered in your own photographs is I think one of the crucial creative dynamics for an artist.

The alternative image was made just after – a nice try exploring the same idea but it didn’t quite work as well. I remember I was fatiguing a bit and started to fight the composition rather than being able to go straight to it. We went to play on the beach for a bit but no other images flowed that day.