Art: Beside the Seaside
Landscape artist Oliver Akers Douglas discusses the process of painting Devon's beaches
If, to be a great writer of fiction, you are first required to do a bit of living, to be a good visual artist you must at least do your fair share of eyeballing. This requires me to endlessly gaze, apparently inanely, at innocuous things. In actuality, this is the rarefied business of pondering the way things look. It's what I do.
The problem is that such an open-ended pursuit can quickly develop into procrastination and ultimately inactivity. Yes, trying to produce decent paintings requires some philosophical reflection, but ultimately one is judged by what one produces, by one's deployment of oily pigment. Recently I have been working on some rocky beach scenes in a favourite part of South Devon on the Erme estuary at Mothecombe. I have found a sandy promontory between two areas of beach that provides me both with a morning view looking west and a warmdown scene looking eastwards at late afternoon. By late summer, I have grown tired of foliage and have found that, combined with beach and sea, the colourful angularity of rocks particularly suits my method of painting with a palette knife.
Apart from the scenes themselves, the beauty of the location is that I am frequently stranded by high tide on my promontory of sand, with nowhere to go and, as one might say, nowhere to hide. There is nothing to do but paint.
Oliver Akers Douglas will be exhibiting at Portland Gallery, SW1 from November 17 to December 2
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Artist's Diary: Oliver Akers Douglas
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