Take One Painting
Hush Before the Tide
Where the marshland waits in stillness beneath a softening sky
Hush Before the Tide
Sometimes a painting begins with a particular place, but sometimes, what stays with you isn't necessarily the place itself.
Sometimes it's a moment.
We had gone to Norfolk for the weekend and the weather was changeable, as is often the case there. Clouds scudded quickly across those enormous skies, birds seemed to be everywhere, their calls swirling around us, and the creeks and inlets were trickling with water.
I felt a little battered by the wind.
We eventually sat looking out across the marsh with our coffee, watching the weather continue to move across the landscape.
And then, as evening approached, something changed.
The wind dropped.
The noise seemed to fall away and a hush descended across the marsh.
It wasn't dramatic. Nothing suddenly happened.
But the stillness made me notice something I hadn't really been noticing before.
The incoming tide.
The water moving through the creeks and inlets seemed suddenly much more present. Perhaps it was simply that, with the wind gone, there was space to hear and see it.
That was the moment that stayed with me.
Looking again
Hush Before the Tide came from that feeling of being held in a moment between things.
The wind had been moving everything — the clouds, the birds, the grasses, the water — and then suddenly it wasn't.
There was just the marsh, the wide sky and the slow movement of the tide returning.
Looking at the painting now, I think I was trying to hold onto that pause.
Not to paint the Norfolk marshland literally, but to remember how it felt to sit there.
The spaciousness.
The softened light.
That feeling of the landscape taking a breath.
And perhaps that's why I called it Hush Before the Tide.
The making
I used watercolour, ink and oil pastel on paper, building the surface through layers of washes, marks and softened edges.
I like the way these different materials behave together.
The watercolour can spread and settle in ways I can't completely control. The ink brings a little more definition, while the oil pastel leaves those softer, more physical marks across the surface.
Close up of the frame…
I wasn't trying to describe every creek or reed bed, or the exact shape of the marsh.
Instead, I wanted the painting to retain something of that feeling of looking out across a wide, open landscape as the light was beginning to change.
There’s quite a lot of space in the painting.
I think that was important.
A quiet moment
There are paintings that announce themselves quite quickly, and there are others that seem to need a little more time.
This is one I find myself returning to.
Perhaps because the thing I remember most about that evening wasn't actually the landscape itself.
It was the change.
The moment when the wind dropped.
The moment when everything became quieter.
And suddenly I could hear the tide.
Hush Before the Tide
Nothing dramatic was happening.
We were simply sitting with our coffee, watching the evening settle over the marsh.
But perhaps those are the moments that stay with us longest.
The ones we might otherwise have missed.
Hush Before the Tide is part of Where Water & Wind Meet, a collection inspired by the tidal landscapes, changing weather and shifting light of the North Norfolk coast and the Isle of Skye.