Cabin Fever

When you’re feeling cooped up the best thing to do is to get out and blow away some cobwebs. So last Sunday I packed a thermos full of tea, some sandwiches and took a spontaneous bike ride to the beach.

In my last post I mentioned how I was going to focus more on the creative side of things. (Oh yes, and the painting…) That’s all very well of course, but making yourself sit down and ‘be creative’ doesn’t always work. How may times have I sat staring at a blank canvas wondering what on earth to paint? On days like that I find the only way to cultivate ideas and creativity is to take the pressure off and absorb some new surroundings.

And so my ‘inspirational’ bike ride took me to the tiny seaside village of Gurnard. It’s a difficult place to describe. It’s not really a typical seaside place – there’s something a bit special about it. It’s tiny. It has a tiny bay and river with tiny boats and tiny pebble beaches. But what I like most about Gurnard are the groups of higgledy-piggledy wooden beach cabins that sit right along the coast.

What caught my eye about these particular cabins in the photos above is the stretch of open grass in front of them that runs right to the shore. No nonsense holidaying. And from these angles there’s a nice contrast between the flat grey walls of the functional sheds and those little squares of bright green and blue beyond.

Anyway, I quite liked the feel of these photos so in the evening I spent some time cropping and arranging them into composites like this one - which can be a really useful way of exploring possible compositions. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to do anything further with them yet (it’s been a busy week again!) but I hope to get some suitable sized canvases and maybe paint something from them soon.