Dropping my Sketchbook into the Sea

[by Lynne Chapman, from Sheffield, UK, on location at Robin Hood’s Bay]

On Friday night, John and I got back from a lovely week away, on the East Coast of England. We had rented a house with a group of friends, celebrating John’s 60th birthday (!). It was great fun, but our friends went home after a few days and we had the last half of the week on our own. So, when the sun showed up, I wrapped up warm and went down onto the beach to do a bit of sketching.

When ever we visit Robin Hood’s Bay, I always get excited by the shadow shapes created on the cliffs, because of the extreme erosion all along that section of coast. It makes for an interestingly ragged skyline too, where the top and edges sink and crumble. At this time of year, it’s pretty quiet too, just a few dog-walkers in big coats. As I came to the end of my painting, it started to spit with rain. A big cloud was looming, so I retreated back to civilisation for a warming pot of tea and a sandwich.

After lunch, things brightened up, but I had to battle increasingly strong winds, trying to snatch the sketchbook from my hand, especially as I couldn’t resist folding my concertina out so I could work across 3 pages at a time. The disaster struck when I was half way through a painting at the very end of one of my 2 metre long books (I was trying to fill up the final concertina I did in China). While I was waiting for the paint to dry, I thought I’d start another sketch, so I carefully wedged the drying book between my rucksack and the boulder I was sitting on, and got out a new sketchbook.

I had just made the first paint mark, when a particularly violent gust of wind bashed me from behind. I just managed to keep hold of the book in my hand, but the wedged sketchbook wasn’t so lucky. Plus, the leverage of the wind against the book toppled my rucksack forward from the rock. To my horror, both book and rucksack landed in the deep rock pool.

Panic. The trouble was, my hands were full and anything I put down would be flung down the beach in the still crazy wind. I sacrificed the rucksack to the water and managed to grab one end of the sketchbook as it went in, whisking it out again really fast. I was left trying to juggle the madly-flapping, dripping concertina, a loaded paintbrush and paint-filled pallet, as well as the other sketchbook. The wet sketchbook was trying to rip itself in half. Paint, sea and sand were going everywhere.

I yelled ‘HELP! HELP!!!’

It was very lucky for me that John was not far along the beach, poking around, looking for fossils. He leapt to the rescue. He yanked the rucksack out of the water with and then took the wet sketchbook off me. Miraculously, the bulk of the work was unharmed: amazing, given it was all watercolour or watercolour pencil sketches. Some of the paint on the final sketch had still been wet when it was dunked though, so that image got partially washed away, as you can see above.

I was never able to finish it off though, because of what happened next…

While John chivalrously stood holding out the length of unfolded, wet sketchbook, to dry in the wind, I finished off the other painting I’d just started. This is it above: you can see the moment of the drama recorded in the sharp ochre line which runs up into the sky on the far right.

We were just breathing a sigh of relief. The sketchbook was saved, as was the phone, which I had forgotten was in the submerged rucksack, and I’d finished off my painting without quite freezing solid. Then I looked round. The sea had been coming in behind me. The very second I realised how close the water was, it swirled around the boulder I was sitting on and covered my boots!

The panic, the scrambling with paint, sea, sand, rucksack and sketches, trying to lift everything out of the advancing water with our hands already full of my sketchbooks, was an almost exact replica of the first time, except there were two of us yelling this time. We avoided a repeat of the sketchbook dunking, but it was a close thing.

Back on terra-firma, I had to wash sand out of my palette and paint off my face. I was crunching sand between my teeth for the next hour (from putting the brush into my mouth that I’d previously poked into the sand. Duh). We retreated to the house to warm up. No lasting harm done. Phew.