Loe Bar Beach, Porthleven and Stretching Canvasses.

I visited Loe Bar beach, Porthleven over the weekend as part of my exploration of the wider local environment to enable me to make work based upon a new location. I took photographs of both the beach and cliffs themselves as well as close up images of rocks and their texture, finding them very different to those I have studied on Falmouth’s beaches.

I also collected some rock samples and completed two larger scale rubbings of the rocks at Loe Bar beach on canvas fabric to bring back to my studio and work into with rock paint and potentially further drawing.

In contrast to the rocks on Gylly and Swanpool beaches, the majority of these rocks were very flaky and layered and there was huge contrast in their colours and patterns visible as I walked over the rocks along the length of the beach. Something that was particularly intriguing about the rocks at this location was the very visible strata lines in contrasting tones of rust orange and slate grey. Samples of different sections of these rocks allowed me to develop rock pigment powder in a range of earthy tones, something I have not had the opportunity to explore before now. I found crushing and grinding up these rocks in the process of making the pigment powder much easier than some previous samples due to their flaky, relatively soft nature.

A tutorial on the idea of paint as a language introduced me to the artists Michael Porter, Ian McKeever, Claude Heath and Graham Sutherland. Claude Heath was of particular interest; Heath creates blind drawings done by touching an object with his left hand whilst simultaneously drawing said item onto paper whilst looking at neither paper nor object, an example of this is ‘Head (Drawing 137)’ (1995), a drawing of a life casting of his half-brother’s head. The only guide in this drawing was a piece of Blu-tak on the same point on both the paper he was working onto and the head cast. This method of working forces the artist to rely solely on his sense of touch to create a visual outcome, creating a much more visceral, direct impression of the source object than if it was completed as a regular observational drawing. This aspect of Heath’s technique is similar to the rock rubbing in my own work – I aim to create a direct impression of a landscape through the technique of frottage which allows for the pencil to ‘feel’ the textures of the surface beneath the fabric and translate them into visuals, the pencil being my version of Heath’s own hands in his blind drawings. There is a sense of the automatic in both of these ideas, with the visual outcome being beyond the reach of myself and Heath, the drawing produced relies entirely on the shapes and textures felt on the object being drawn.

Head (Drawing 137) (1995)

In an attempt to use my sense of touch to dictate my work in a similar way to Claude Heath I will experiment with the use of graphite powder, both in its powder form and as a liquid mixed with water or gum Arabic. I will explore the outcome of a rock rubbing done by using my hands as the pencil – moving my hands, with graphite powder on, over the surface of a piece of canvas in an effort to create a more direct sense of place by removing the ‘middle man’ of the pencil.

For the first time, I made my own stretchers to stretch my two rubbings from Loe Bar beach to experiment with some more structured work as the majority of my past rubbings have been done on loose canvas fabric. I found the outcome of these to be successful: the three dimensional nature of the stretched canvas giving a sculptural quality to my rubbings, especially as the marks continued around the edges to the back of the canvas, making the piece almost like a more artificial looking version of my rocks wrapped in fabric covered in rubbings. After stretching these two pieces I was able to add colour with rock paint. On the smaller piece I added more overall colour, covering almost the entire canvas in shades between a pale beige and a dark ash grey, the tones getting lighter going up the canvas, giving the impression of distance and hinting at the appearance of a landscape despite the visually abstract nature of the work. Though this idea proved successful, I prefer the more minimal outcome of the colour on the larger canvas as it has more subtle undertones of landscape, the colour working just to highlight certain sections of the pencil rubbing. The light to dark sections work in a similar way to the smaller canvas to show depth of field , though the piece could just as easily be of a section of rock as an entire landscape – this is an idea I intend to explore further in my future work.