Musselwick – Marloes Gallery

The Dark Cliff 2

Please scroll below image for a text version of this posting.

Postscript: the distant sea in the original isn’t as vivid in the original; nevertheless, that blue still might need “killing” a bit.

Dark Cliff 2 June 29^th 2025
Unusually for me, not painted on location: while the weather remained very warm and clear-skied, the wind rose. Working on a sea-smoothed intertidal rock (my viewpoint) would have been impossible; and anyway the water was now rough, and nothing like as clear. So I set myself up in a sheltered garden corner and worked from memory, glad of all those colour notes mostly still discernible through the earlier underpainting stages, the previous day. Does the composition now nee figures? Swimmers? I’m mulling this over.
Oil on panel June 2025
Nominal 14” x 14”

The Determined Angler

The painting I donated to the 2024 St Brides fete. Painted on location (to get the colours right), based on a Musselwick Mouth sketch from May 2023. As you can see, the sketch was a mother & daughter composition, but I decided that the girl on her own would work very well as a subject for the oil painting.

Rising Tide, Musselwick Mouth

I painted this picture on location just before the Summer solstice in 2022; this is later afternoon, with Musselwick Sands already cut off. I was looking south-east so the sun was on my right, usually a difficult arrangement; but in mid June it was still very high so firstly, I wasn’t bothered by brush shadows and secondly, I could see those underwater colours clearly through the sea surface.

Mother and Daughter

Yesterday (Easter Sunday) I went down to Musselwick Mouth for a swim at the end of the afternoon. There were very few people there: this lady and her daughter were happy to just sit on the dark rocks, enjoy the view, and watch out for gannets diving. And chat, of course!
Having dried and dressed after my dip, there and then I could only dash down in sanguine Conte the briefest indication of how strongly their close-sitting to converse looked from my viewpoint, thanks to foreshortening. So I did a lot more work, mostly in pencil, much later in the evening.