We don't really live 'on dry land'

We inhabit a watery world of many wetnesses: puddle, cloud, rain, stream, sea, fog, dew, aquifer, in a watery reality that penetrates our own bodies and minds.

Silvery autumn light over the loch this morning

Hello friends

If you follow me on social media you’ll already know I had some big news this week. I am excited to be able to share that I’ve been awarded the inaugural RSA MacRobert Trust Art Award in Painting. This is a major boost for me, a significant sum of money that will allow me to spend much more time in the studio over the next year, researching and developing new work.

In a wider funding landscape that, after the Scottish Governments recent U-turn on budget cuts to the arts, looks like increasingly slim pickings, this new annual award will offer invaluable support to painters working in Scotland. While my own news is good, I am aware that for many others who work in the arts in Scotland, these are increasingly trying times. If you want to support public funding for the arts in the UK consider joining the Campaign for the Arts who work to champion, defend and expand access to the arts for everybody.

“A Still Pool with Sky Reflected” Samantha Clark, 2022, acrylic and chrome ink on aluminium panel, 90cm x 110cm, on show at Brown’s Gallery 14 Oct to 11 Nov.

So what’s ahead for me? Where will this little Life Boat be voyaging?

My intention is to use the support of the MacRobert Award to enable a creative immersion in the waters right here in and around my studio in Orkney. I’ll be exploring how a practice of observing and painting can sensitively respond to our beleaguered watery world.

Because this is a watery world. We don’t really live ‘on dry land’. We move between degrees of wetness in a world of water, cloud, rain, stream, sea, fog, dew, aquifer; swimming through a liquid reality that penetrates our own bodies and minds. The liquid we see in rivers, seas or drinking bottles is only the most visible aspect of water’s diffuse presence. In the context of the climate emergency, with increasing floods and persistent droughts, water is becoming ever more contentious and ambivalent. As if this weren’t enough, pollution, over-extraction, ocean acidification and sea level rise all bring into question our exploitative relationship with this most vital of elements.

Haar over Boardhouse Loch, Orkney

Water is at once global and local, universal and specific. Wherever we live, whether that’s an arid desert or a rainy coast, we have a relationship with our own waters. Water is what defines Orkney as an archipelago, with our histories of Norse settlement, fishing and naval warfare, the current threat of sea level rise to our coastal archaeology, and, more hopefully perhaps, our future in marine renewable energy developments. My plan is to take time observing and drawing the waterscapes of Orkney and to bring this material back into my Birsay studio to develop a new sequence of paintings that aim to convey this reality of water as complex, diffuse and ambiguous.

“Immerse” Samantha Clark, 2022, Acrylic, gouache and aluminium leaf on aluminium panel, 90cm x 110cm, on show at Brown’s Gallery 14 Oct to 11 Nov

I like to use water-based media like gouache, acrylic or watercolour, using flow, evaporation and layering to form a ground over which I then develop intricate patternings of rhythmic line and mark-making that suggest the movements and structures of water. I also like to use translucent, reflective and iridescent media to explore the play between surface and pictorial depth that water’s appearance suggests.

A blank aluminium panel and two boards with first washes, in my studio.

Here’s what’s on my studio wall right now. Blank canvases, literally. Well, blank aluminium panels and boards with some quick early washes to cover the white primer. They have a long road ahead of them, and so do I. But the MacRobert Award means that I will be able to focus mostly on this work over the next year. I’ll be documenting the journey ahead in this newsletter and I do hope you’ll continue to follow along.

This means that although I will keep working with my existing coaching clients, I won’t be taking on any new long-term clients for a while. However, I do have plans to offer some less intensive ways to work with me over the next year. So if you’ve been considering coaching or mentoring with me, but have not been in a position to commit to a my long term or intensive options, I’ll be launching some new ‘light-touch’ coaching packages very soon, so watch this space.

Thank you for being here and for reading. I’ll be documenting the creative journey ahead in this newsletter, alongside more interviews, essays and book recommendations, and I do hope you’ll continue with me on this voyage.

warmly

Sam

If you’d like to read more about the idea of a ‘world of wetness’ I drew it from Dilip da Cunha’s wonderful book “The Invention of Rivers”. Here’s a post from earlier this year about it that you might enjoy…