Clyde Coast Beach in the Sun with Walkers Mixed Media

The canvas is unframed although it can be hung without a frame. A string is already attached. Alternatively it can be framed.

This beach runs parallel to the A78 Irvine Road, looking up the estuary towards Portencross and Little Cumbrae. We’ve had some great weather recently but we’ve not had the complete and fundamental change of climate that would be required to make the beach look like this in reality. I’ve used a great deal of licence. The yacht that you can see on the beach in the distance I invented and the two people in the foreground are also recent additions. They are contextually and compositionally related to the yacht. I’ve also been looking at waves and froth and spray and I’ve sought to make a feature of all this in the painting. Like other paintings of mine, this one has been ‘finished’ more than once. In fact I think this is its 3rd (and final) form. Initially it was painted using acrylic because that is the medium I use most often if I am working outdoors but it's now completely covered in oil paint. Again it is done with mainly thick applications of paint. I used a palette knife on the foreground. I’ve spent a fair time over the years looking at skies and cloud formations. This painting has had 3 entirely different skies, each one of them successful on their own. However, and as I have elsewhere said, a painting should be a unified piece of work. A sky, a person, a boat, successfully articulated, successfully painted, must work with everything else in the picture so if I do return to a painting and that decision is driven by a dissatisfaction in one particular area I often find that my ameliorations in the end apply everywhere in whatever painting it is. I’ve also added birds into the sky. This helps to create depth, movement and energy. You have to be careful when showing birds in flight because they can have the appearance of being stuck-on to the picture and not really integrated with the painting. I tend to paint the bird and also repaint the sky that appears around it at the same time in order to deal with that concern. Clearly there is a lot of energy in the sea and it conveys the idea of a gloriously hot, sunny day on a beach.