DORSET COAST

I live close to the remarkable Jurassic Coast…a good deal of work here has been prompted by encounters in it…

Company of Birds

Over this last year of isolation…birds have become very present company

Close to Home

THE FLEET

I’m tucked away near Ferry Bridge where the wonderful Crabhouse Cafe secretes itself. An untidy little corner where an enormous Barrel jellyfish beached itself last year. It is still dark. I am there for the setting of the moon and the rising of the sun.

Restless Earths

A collection involving pieces in a show of this name at The Crafts Study Centre at UCA Farnham in 2020. An acknowledgement of common ground on the move…migration of matter- common inheritance shared by human and other-than-human life.

Landscape painter, lecturer, Associate of The Royal Watercolour Society. Studio base on the Isle of Portland, Dorset.

I grew up walking Fenland droves and fields around Littleport at the edge of The Wash. Its black earth shaped the fundamentals of my practice. Ice-edged Siberian winds marked childhood winters and sharpened an appetite for outdoor practice. My parents each had a box of watercolours they were too busy to use. The pans were ungenerous and reluctant I remember, yet they provided me with a vehicle to respond to experiences that were marvellous to me in my meanderings. Marvels like a willow flaring orange against a storm sky or ice forming in the colour. That sort of marvel stopped me in my tracks - and still does.

My way of being with the land is dirtier nowadays. I literally work with the whatever stuff surrounds me. I'm less self conscious. Less attached to outcome. With an appetite for relationship and reciprocity. I remain a praise poet at heart.

I still choose to work with water-based media- integrating colour (gouache, acrylic or watercolour) with what is available in the landscape (earth pigment foraged on site or contemporary human-generated debris).

With water as the vehicle, precipitation, humidity, temperature, gale and breeze all play with the evolving and dissolving of works.

My pieces are team-work in which weather and personality of place participate. Each site offers a palette, inviting something particular of me. Paintings become containers of experience.

When control is relinquished, then the magic can begin.

BEACH CANVAS for Frances Hatch

She is open to the open air -

a painter kneeling

on bonfire-blackened shingle

mixed with debris the sea has tossed up.

Rain won’t deter her.

Quite the contrary:

it too will be something to hand,

softening surfaces, seeping in.

She works with stuff

that is all a meeting and a mixing:

greensand, gault, lias

this present moment

with geological ages

on the Jurassic coast.

Paint encounters earth

fallen from cliffs,

plant life, flotsam, all

the material makings of place.

As she anchors her canvas

with a rock and light flashes

where the cliff torn with a fall

catches the sun, I want to tell her

what her art means to me.

I could put it simply

and it would be true.

What she brings me into,

quickened with imagination,

is the living world.

But is that enough?

We need words that glow with inner light:

Words that come with a touch

of life that makes them what they are –

life of flesh and spirit,

and not with colour daubed on,

but with the inner glow

that is energy,

the vibrant flower

and the mud it grows in.

What she reveals,

what I seek to speak of,

is place renewed,

broken shore and wave breaking

here, at this moment, all the instability

of the land we live on and love.

Jeremy Hooker. June 2023