163. Coastal creativity
Friends and other features of a Sussex shingle beach.
In which Rebecca plays a game of rock, paper, scissors, and imagines swimsuits made with strawberries.
Dear Reader,
The British summer is unpredictable, but when in April our friends invited us to spend some time at the beach with them in mid July we felt confident that the weather would deliver a marvellous specimen of a day.
And golly, it did!
We arrived in sunshine at the white-painted beach hut which our friends had hired and furnished with chairs, coolers of chilled drinks and an array of delicious snacks – the perfect beachy base camp for a day of fresh air catching up with a group of wonderful people and exploring what the beach had to offer.
During my strawberry-drenched experimentation for last month’s Art & Treasures post I had been tickled when Jim pointed out that two of my paint-printed strawberries on paper were the shape of swimsuits.
‘Really?’ I asked him, but when I looked closer, I couldn’t unsee it. I knew that our trip to the beach was coming up, and wondered if I should make some seaside-‘spired art in tribute to those funny strawberries.
I’d decided against packing a swimsuit in the end, feeling that with the day’s keen wind it was unlikely that I should fancy launching myself into the waves, and was glad that I hadn’t when one of our hosts – an accomplished open-water swimmer who has swum both the Serpentine and Lake Windermere – cautioned that going into the sea wouldn’t be a great idea due to a report of another recent dump of – erm – waste by Southern Water.
I was impressed to see that some people had braved the lapping water, though, and I wondered how warm it was. Knowing that I’d topped up my hand sanitiser before I’d left home, and that there were really good handwashing facilities available just a short walk away, I risked dipping my hand in. The almost-bathtub temperature surprised me at first, but the tide was fully out and the beach so gently sloping that the water was shallow, and the sun had been heating it up all morning.
I’d brought an empty bottle with me in which to transport home some seawater, thinking it might be fun to use some in an art project. These are the ideas I’d had:
To use it instead of tap water with watercolour paints;
To let the water evaporate, leaving me with crystals of salt to sprinkle onto a watercolour wash to attract its pigment and create granulation and texture;
To use it in combination with newspaper for some 3D papier-maché art.
I made my way slowly back up the beach with the filled bottle. The beaches in our area of the south coast only show their sandy parts at low tide; anything above that point being pebbled with smooth stones. I’d grown up on beaches like these, and drank in no, not the grubby sea water the muted colours and curvy shapes beneath my feet.
Reader, that was it: I was going to make a rock!
Days later at home I broke a flat sheet of polystyrene packaging into pieces and stacked a few on top of each other, wrapping the resulting pile in a large sheet of newspaper. I taped it down, squeezed it a little it to get the shape I wanted, and having diluted some white PVA glue with a little of my harvested sea water, painted that over the papery parcel.
I tore some more newspaper into little pieces and carefully added those in an overlapping layer, squidging and squodging the now damp rock-in-progress to smooth some uncomfortable edges.
Once I’d put it to dry in the airing cupboard overnight I had a panic, wondering quite how unwise I might have been to have included that dirty sea water in this project. I threw my small batch of diluted glue – and its container – away, and washed my hands again.
Next morning the surface of the rock was hard and shiny, and I hoped convinced myself that all germs had been rendered innocuous by the drying process. Yeah, it was fine, I told myself, especially because its subsequent multiple layers would be stuck down with wallpaper paste slaked with good ol’ chlorinated tap water.
I primed my rock with a couple of layers of white gesso and dug out the painted collage paper that had been left over from this project last summer:
I decided to cut out the pebble shapes I’d drawn onto it back then to get them out of the way, as I wanted to use the rest of the paper as papier maché pieces. In a little while I had a pile of tiny torn squares and an unanticipated bonus stack of 2D rocks. Hey, I might make a collage out of those!
Tearing up paper, although fun, was time-consuming, and I was wasting a sunny afternoon indoors. Deciding to come back to my pet rock later – and, in my haste, leaving my pile of torn squares rather too close to an open window – I headed outside to harness the sun for artistic purposes.
In my saunter on the beach I had found all sorts of goodies: dried seaweed, broken shells, a couple of pieces of driftwood, some sea-and-sand-weathered nylon rope, and the egg case of a dogfish – also called a mermaid’s purse. I’d collected them, along with some pebbles, feeling that I’d like to record elements of that lovely day by making a cyanoprint.
First I made a flatlay of my treasures.
I edited my selection and arranged the elements on a piece of cyanotype paper before taking the whole lot outside to expose it to the sun.
The results surprised me. The image of the mermaid’s purse looks like a snail to me, and the broken shell, well, isn’t that a Dorito?! I much preferred the look of the exposed paper before the print was developed by rinsing it, but still, it was a fun exercise.
Back inside, after spending far too long picking up tiny squares of torn paper from the floor of the conservatory, I closed the window and settled down with a tub of wallpaper paste and an old paintbrush to layer the pieces onto my pet rock.
Next day I sat down with my artbook and primed a double-page spread with gesso on which to stick my favourites of the paper rocks I’d cut out.
I didn’t want to be too careful with my approach to these rocks: I was going back to basics with fingerpainting!
I dug out two tubes of acrylic paint – Payne’s grey and white – and squeezed a tiny blob of each in turn onto my finger. I dabbed and rubbed and wiped, and although my rocks were soon looking rockier, my hands were in a heck of a mess. While I was hunting for my damp rag, papier maché pet rock Rocky caught my eye. He was asking for similar embellishment.
Reader, who was I to argue with a rock?
Thinking back to that lovely day I’m grateful for the creative inspiration I took from my surroundings, but what I loved more than the beauty of the beach was fellowship with friends. Happy times indeed. 😊
I’m just relieved that I hadn’t put on my strawberry-print swimsuit to dive into those murky waves.
🫣
Love,
Rebecca
📚 Reading 📚
📚 Speaking of the manifold uses for strawberries,
of delighted me with this post. Thank you of for drawing it to my attention.
📚 I loved this post
about cyanotype printing. It’s such an exciting medium!
📚 Regular readers of ‘Dear Reader, I’m Lost' will be no strangers to my ongoing light-hearted correspondence with fellow Brit
of . Terry illustrates his posts with his own art, too, and it’s his turn to reply to me next Wednesday!If you’ve enjoyed reading this post,please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you! You’ll find all the posts in this ‘Art & Treasures’ series here.
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Who'd have thought? Creating rocks? And they look wonderful. I rather like the swimwear too - very pretty. I'd wear them!
Do I see rocks with holes in them as well? Did you know they're called Hag stones and are reputed to have magical properties.
Such creative artwork as always.
Rocky Holden has a great ring to it. What a fun afternoon and clearly inspired you xxx