RICHARD SWANN ART

There’s a lot of boats on Hastings fishing beach, posing heroically against the sunset and rusting mightily.  Sometimes they go for a bit of a float in the sea, but mostly they sit on the pebbles and leak stuff.  The boats are what you notice, they are after all identifiable.  Until you try and paint them, when the background demands to be put in as well, at which point the question arises, what is all that clutter exactly?  There’s loads of it, strewn about, piled up, stacked in blocks, it’s like New York in a seventies movie, or the front lawn of someone with a lot of children.  No idea what any of it is.  Boxes, cages, machinery, netting, tarpaulins, it looks sort of maritime, but not so much that you could name it or guess its function.  My ignorance tends to show – next to something that is clearly a boat or a bulldozer for pushing the boat into the water will be a series of marks that are trying to give the impression of a stack of things, things that have every right to be where they are, but just look like a lot of hopeful brushstrokes.

At least I gave up on trying to paint all the pebbles a long time ago.

Sunset, Hastings

Hastings Fishing Beach at night