I’m walking along the river to Cuckmere Haven on the Sussex coast. A path trodden many times but I’ve never seen it this colour before. Flat light and an inner glow, a marshy sort of luminescence.
I stand on the bank, taking photographs, watching the dog nosing in the bluegreen reeds. He thinks he wants to be in the water yet he’s not brave enough for a Labrador-like dive. He prefers to run up and down the low path, full of the joy of it, and if I throw in a muddy stick, he’ll teeter, front paws slipping. It’s always tempting to give him a little nudge.
All the colour of the day seems to have leached down from the sky, spreading through the river and pooling in the reeds. It’s not misty, but it is ethereal - what odd combination of cloud and sun and reflection makes it so? My iphone can’t capture the subtleties so I look long and hard hoping the image will be imprinted enough to work with when I’m back home. I’m mixing colour in my mind - cerulean and ochre, white. A dab of lemon yellow perhaps to bring it up, raw umber to tone it back down. A scale of colours, a conjuring trick, pulling the paint between the cool and the warm, the bright and the muted. I fill my head like this before turning off out the light every evening. It helps me sleep.
So many words for colours. After a bit of mental riffling, I settle on glaucous to bracket this pale wateriness; neither blue not green nor grey - a very English colour. It comes from the Greek glauca but the Greeks were a bit hard to pin down over colours, not discerning between blue and green and describing the sea as wine dark. How could they think that? But I’m of course applying my Western experience and tradition to what I see, overlaying so many other expectations that perhaps all colours (that of course don’t exist anyway, but that’s another matter) depend on what you think as much as what you see.
I whistle to the dog, who has not yet fallen in, and we push on through bristly beige grass, cows in the distance and beyond them, the sea.
Ha! All part of the service Bruce! I guess each painting has a story and a thought process. What makes one landscape sing out for painting and another remarked upon in passing, well - that's what fills my head on every walk.
Glaucous
As you say, a very English colour. I’m reminded of one early October Sunday morning when I was out rowing an old Eton whiff on the Thames about thirty years ago; there was not a single boat on the river. A few hours earlier there must have been a sharp frost which had caused the leaves on the trees to fall onto the misty river where they floated like an armada of tiny coracles. And as I overtook the coracles I could see the heads of moorhens…their bodies were hidden in the mist. The occasional elegant swan also appeared out of the mist and far away in the background was the glaucous outline of Windsor Castle.
Your painting was the first I’ve ever seen that even get close to what I saw that day - thank you.
Do you treat all your first time clients like this?