Quay Art is a small gallery and shop in Blakeney, north Norfolk. It specialises in printmaking techniques including linocuts, etchings, collagraphs and woodcuts, but also showcases other formats including painting, ceramics, fused and kiln-formed glass, sculpture and artisan jewellery. What unifies all the works is that they are made by local artists and inspired by the Norfolk coast and countryside. I spent a happy half hour browsing round the pictures and prints and was taken by the work of three artists in particular:
Chrissy Norman
In the words of her website:
Chrissy is a Suffolk printmaker and works using the traditional method of etching copper or zinc plate in acid to achieve an image. Once the etching plate is complete she starts to print the edition and hand inks each one in small batches.
This summary doesn’t begin to do justice to the beautiful precision and accuracy of Norman’s etchings. They all depict either landscapes from the Norfolk coastline or details of specific flora, sometimes flowers, but it was her portraits of trees which floored me with their precision of outline, detail, light and colour, wonderfully evocative outlines of plane trees, oaks or, as in this instance, a soaring, sunlit, spiky Scots pine such as form the forest cover around the vast expanse of Holkham Beach. You can smell the hot sunlight, the crumbly sand underfoot, the powerful scent of hot pinewood, and the occasional salty waft of sea breeze rustling the branches.
Looking Up by Chrissy Norman
There was also a subterranean Winnie the Pooh vibe going on, some of these trees reminding me of the vivid and timeless illustrations of Pooh or, more precisely, of the trees in the Hundred Acres Wood drawn by E.H. Shepard.
Rob Barnes
On Rob’s website he tells us that he taught etching, screen-printing, lino and related surface printmaking at Keswick Hall College and then the University of East Anglia, Norwich until 2006.
Whereas Norman uses lines which are so fine and precise they sometimes create the slight blurriness of actual vision before you’ve focused on something, or the softness of sea fogs, morning mist, summer haze, Barnes’s linocuts achieve the exact opposite effect. The lines are clear, thick and black, the colours bolder and simpler, and deployed to create strikingly simplified and vivid images. And whereas Norman focuses on the fine detail of one tree, or spray of blossom, or haystack, Barnes steps back to give us clear vibrant perspectives across entire landscapes.
I particularly liked this one, Over the fields, which, when you study it, you realise is composed of 4 parts. In the foreground is a flurry of wild flowers, including (I think) teasel, honeysuckle and poppies. In the middle ground four or so deeply rolling fields folding into each other. Beyond these and the barns (pun) on the immediate horizon, an entire secondary country disappearing into the hazy far-beyond. And fourthly, of course, the murmuration of stark black starlings in the sky, arranged in an artfully artless pattern which creates and defines the space of the sky, clinches and crystallises the landscape.
Some of his other works depict hares bounding across lanes or pheasants pottering over fields. They, also, are crisply conceived with thick black, defining lines but, in my opinion, lack the fourth dimension which makes this particular image so compelling to me, the sense of enormous space and openness created by the flock of free-flying birds and which, when you really look at it, I think, invites you into their ever-changing freedom of flight.
Over the Fields by Rob Barnes
Colin Moore
Colin Moore’s work is semi-abstract but in an interestingly different way from Barnes’s. Whereas Barnes simplifies the detail of his images in order to create a kind of storybook clarity, Moore sees more complex, abstract shapes continually emerging from the world around him.
He also, more consistently than the previous two artists, depicts not trees or country but the coast, the sea, the estuaries and inlets and marshes and cliffs and beaches of this part of the world, distilling from them images which are both simplified of the untidy clutter of real life but also infused with a kind of semi-abstract, almost baroque imagery.
The day before I saw this painting I had gone for a swim in the sea off Holkham, and you can trust me that neither the tidepools nor the sky there looked anything like they do in this painting. Moore has taken the original elements and distorted them with the aim of creating something new and otherworldly out of the familiar. Look at the ‘clouds’ at the top right. They look like ice floes in the Arctic Ocean. And the pools themselves look like patterns on a psychedelic t-shirt. The overall composition is recognisably ‘realistic’ but the individual elements have been stylised and colorised to produce a powerful, visionary, and yet precise and very controlled effect.
Holkham Tidepools by Colin Moore
Books & Boots 