I feel it in my bones...

... drawing the sea in Cornwall

I drew this last week, sitting in beautiful Mevagissey, listening to people talk to the harbour master and walk by with their dogs. I love the water in this picture, and the sky. The sea and the sky, their colours and their movement are so connected.

We are just back from a month of dog-sitting in beautiful Cornwall. A place I find overwhelmingly beautiful, so rich with story and atmosphere, a place I am always so sad to leave. And I started thinking (again) about the power of place and why some places have such a pull.

There’s a song which you won’t know unless you have some association with Cornwall or are particularly into sea shanties. It’s called “Cornwall, my home” written, I think, by Imelda May and performed to acclaim by Fisherman’s Friends. A couple of weeks ago, just after arriving in Cornwall, we could hear music coming from the general store that is the heart of this village. There was a big crowd listening. Dancing, drinking and catching up with friends and family. It was all noisy and social until the final song. When the band started singing “Cornwall, my home”, everyone went silent. The socialising stopped and everyone focused on the music. Then they all slowly started singing along. It was reverential. I could feel in the air the love those singing had for their place in the world, and the companionship they found in others who felt the same. I said to one of Dave’s extended family members, who was born down here as was her father, that I could really feel the love everyone there had for Cornwall. She said “I can feel it in my bones”.

I said to her that I wished I felt like that about somewhere. She said her husband used to say that to her too.

I kept thinking about it and then just yesterday read a beautiful piece on here written by one of my illustrator heroes, Carson Ellis, reflecting on her love for Montana. Carson writes too, about ‘feeling it in her bones’ -

“I loved Missoula from the moment I stepped off the plane. I felt happy there in a way I don’t think I ever did in New York. And thirty years later my love for Montana remains profound, bottomless; I feel it in my bones. I refer to it unabashedly as my spiritual home…”

I’ve always wanted this feeling, but don’t think I have ever had it. I have had friends who’ve had it. One went to visit Prince Edward Island on a whim, and the moment she arrived, knew she’d never leave. And she hasn’t. Another couple we knew in central Victoria where we lived in Australia, visited once for a weekend and went home having bought a house. Something they hadn’t planned and something incredibly inconvenient for their lives, but that they just knew they had to do, and they did. They place resonated in their bones. And they stayed. The wonderful Misa Hay writes about her love affair with Shetland - beginning from a short visit from her home in the Czech Republic as a teenager on a school exchange, to living there as soon as she graduated. She describes it as a magnet, a place she can’t leave. And she hasn’t. I can’t imagine being that brave or that sure about anywhere.

Drawing Cornwall… sketches from when we lived down here. The left is drawn Mevagissey. The middle one is St Ives and the right hands side is Mousehole.

Learning to draw the sea

The idea of belonging somewhere with such love and intensity is foreign to me. It is something I think I long for, but also something I’m not sure I’ll ever have.

My first visit to Cornwall was in 2018. It was to meet Dave’s mum and see where her brother had a house and see where her parents - and before them her grandparents - ran a pub and where she went to primary school. I hadn’t thought much about it until we began the drive from the train station down towards the sea. The hedgerows were so narrow. The trees bending over them so gnarly and windswept, and the fields so lush. We then got to the village and just kept driving down, twisting around until we were right down by the water. I was totally enchanted and couldn’t believe I hadn’t been warned about how magical this place was.

I felt like I’d arrived in my childhood. All the stories I had read when I was a kid, in my distant world in far away Australia - stories of smugglers and coves, and villages and clifftops, farms and fields and stone walls and adventure - all suddenly seemed to be real.

The wild windswept cliffs and waters of this little bit of Cornwall.

I was overwhelmed with the beauty and started a long journey of trying to draw it. When I first tried to draw the sea, I really struggled. It felt hard. It felt foreign. Until this point, I never really drew landscapes either. I mostly drew people or urban worlds, or at least had something in the foreground to be at the heart of the image and the story. One of my earliest attempts to draw more of a ‘beach’ scene is the piece below. The water is there, but the people are the focus and the sea is blue.

I think perhaps my first attempt at drawing the sea and surrounds in the village we stay in in Cornwall. Nice and simple, but I felt very far from feeling like I’d developed a visual language for the sea.

I think the first time the watery part of my picture actually felt inspired was an image I drew in the middle of winter at our first Christmas down in Cornwall. It was freezing, and I wasn’t going to draw, but I had a little bit of time and I sat by the sea’s edge in Mevagissey. It started to rain and I almost put my book away, ready to hide it and not let my drawing or book get wet. But I had Helen Stephen’s voice in my head (she writes the wonderful newsletter Pencil Pals here on substack) who has a badge with the words “drawing in the rain” on it and celebrates this activity. I always find it amazing how much coining a term can change the world. I think because I thought of “drawing in the rain” as a thing, I decided to let the rain be and continued on with my drawing. I got wet and so did my paper, but in front of me was a far more interesting ‘sea’ and waterscape than I had made before. I really loved it.

The first drawing where I liked the sea…

I think it helped that the sea was green. Not blue. The sea in Mevagissey is definitely far more green and for the first time I had identified that. And then, the raindrops added depth and sense of place to the picture. I realised then that there was such a beauty to letting the landscape play a part in the painting, and also, that the sea was a thing of layers. It’s depth and movement was what made it beautiful and so layers of paint were what was necessary. 

I kept going, and tried to start getting looser and try to allow the feeling of the landscape get into the drawing. When I drew the picture above I didn’t really like it. But now, when I look back, there’s something about it I enjoy. The ink bled a bit into the paper and the green of the land into the blues of the sea, and the rain spread a little out of the cloud, and I quite like that.

This one above is not a picture I like. The people and the quay are super awkward, but the water I love. It is quite abstract, but feels alive. The layers and depths and reflections started to appear.

My favourite drawing I have managed to do of the sea is below. The sea is rich and alive, smudgy and moving, light and dark, watery - just like it is. I was also lucky that it rained too on this one, but just lightly. When you zoom in you can see the lovely rain drops landing on the sea.

This one is available to buy as a print from the beautiful Old School Gallery in Alnmouth

Into the sea…

As a teenager and into my early twenties I tried to surf. I was never much good (I was so scared when the waves got big), but I adored it. I loved how time would disappear while out in the water… paddling out and riding back in, over and over and over again until I’d be overcome with hunger and then suddenly realise that I’d been in the sea for 5 hours. When we moved to Cornwall I got back in the sea - I didn’t surf, but I swam, right through the winter, and I remembered how much I love being in the water.

Perhaps this drawing is a little cliche, but I really like it. It captured for me something of what it feels like to float around in the sea, either waiting for a wave or just swimming.

I drew the picture above after watching surfers on a big wave day at a nearby beach. Watching them made me remember my own time surfing and also the feeling of floating around in a big sea. I liked how the blues and greens worked in this one, and the light, and I realised that when I’m in the wild and cold sea I feel a bit like I’ve come home.

The other moment where I feel deeply at home is when I draw. While I sat and made these drawings of this beautiful place that I love and the sea, everything felt so completely right. It feels strange to forget this, but I was reminded by how deeply this feeling sits while I chatted to the lovely Ping He on the Thriving Women’s Artists podcast she runs with Dorien Bellaar and Sarah van Dongen in the Netherlands.

Ping asked me about drawing, about my journey, about making books, about drawing from life. And I could feel myself coming alive. I think Ping commented at one point that my face had lit right up and I realised it had. When I draw, and when I talk about drawing, and when I share this with others, I also feel at home.

At home in my own bones…

I wonder if the more I wander, the more addicted to that I become. Antony Doerr writes in his beautiful book about a year he spent in Rome: “Not-knowing is always more thrilling than knowing. Not-knowing is where hope and art and possibility and invention come from.” I wonder if perhaps discovering new places is maybe so inspiring for me that I am destined never to belong to any as that would require me to give up the thrill that is wandering and surrender to a single place. Maybe commitment in this way is not for me.

I may not belong to, or in, Cornwall, but the beauty of this magical place, inspires me to both draw and swim - and in doing these things I feel so happily at home in my own body, peacefully and happily alive.

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I’ll leave you with some sketchy drawings that I rarely share but I liked trying to capture the moment as a little story. Whe we moved away from Cornwall to Edinburgh in January 2022 we went down to the sea to say a last goodbye and a seal popped its little grey head up to look at us. We sat in this same spot most mornings during our year there and drank tea. And had only ever seen a few seals right in the harbour. It felt like it was saying goodbye.

Last week when we were swimming out of the harbour we had another seal encounter. We were floating around in the water and up popped a grey head. It disappeared and then popped up again closer. I was slightly terrified and also enraptured. It came closer again and then dived under and then we could see a grey shape swimming straight towards us. It got closer and closer and passed right underneath us. We were definitely in it’s world out here in the sea. The seal was at home. We were very foreign. But in the encounter there was so much life.

“The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.”

Mary Oliver, A thousand mornings