The scratch on the car-creche-studio bumper maintained while trying to make a tight turn after a night of questionable amount of sleep due to teething/shouting child *is* actually a far more interesting moody seascape than the one recorded in your sketchbook. Mea culpa.
Today I just wanted to draw the sea. Up at the hillock at the ruins of the old castle, you get a good big viewful of it, right across the Clyde and down the coast. Often the patterns on the surface look like proto-writing, as if they’re trying to form a language that we could communicate with – a human-and-sea interface.
Now a coffee kiosk. Perched on two brick legs while the full sea heaves around it. Half an hour of fighting blue/green/yellow/grey in an icy wind.
Dunoon pier. Restricted palette due to forgetfulness. Biro, kid’s pencil, fortuitous charcoal, and two pastels I found under the seat. The sea was dirty green, really. Paper tending to disintegrate in this rain.
…and the weather was *minging*.
…
Reaches 200ft out into the water, feet deep in soft mud, nibbled by marine worms, with a locked gate and nobody walking along its back. Unused, it is gently rotting away. There’s a buried pipe in the bottom left, where the seaweed seems to grow much thicker, and the silt is a golden puddle close to the shelter of the pier.
In between pushes on the swings. Ice-cold edge to the wind today. The sea bottle-green, lemonade yellow, palest turquoise. It’s almost never blue.
Opacity, translucency, reflectivity, wind-sweptery, sunglassery, mussel-shell scratchery. The sea is a fidget.
Oh, I don’t know. Paper too thin, blue too blue, paint too chalky, chalk too dry. Pier not black enough, sky not white enough.This is a beast that will take a while to hunt.
Dunoon’s beautiful, rotting pier is – at last – going to be getting some renovations done. It’s a fabulously complex structure, all the criss-crossing piles and their criss-crossing shadows layering over each other. I drew this from Castle Hill, a wonderful viewpoint from where you can see a wide vista of the Firth and all the shores that surround it.
Crinan sea-lock
Anoushka Havinden