SQUEAKY BINDERS
A Radiance from the Sea
ATLANTIC
6 Designs
Godrevy, Bosigran, Porthmeor Cove, Trebarwith Strand, Pedn Vounder, Trevaunance.
Available as
Squeaky’s Special Edition Illustrated Notebook
Our Special Edition handmade Notebook has a truly distinctive hard case cover containing all the illustrations and pages inside ready to be filled with all your lovely words.
Art Cards and Postcards
6 artfully abstract ‘Atlantic’ designs available as individual Art Cards with envelopes. Postcards available too.
Art Cards Wallet Gift Set
Complete set of 6 Art Cards presented in a beautiful folding Wallet - ideal for someone who loves the Cornish Atlantic coastline.
Prints
Box framed prints available individually or as a set of all 6 designs.
Mini Journal, Art Card and Pencil Set
Inspiration and technique
Few who come to Cornwall fail to leave their mark in one way or another and fewer still return home un-touched by their encounter.
Some, like Dame Barbara Hepworth, have stayed to carve out their marks internationally, inspired as she put it, by “a strong sunlight and radiance from the sea which almost surrounds this spit of land”.
The ‘Atlantic’ series of images are inspired by the colours of a restless ocean and the tool marks of the artists and other mark makers found on the north coast of Cornwall ‘in the margin ‘tween the land and sky, where the blue green ocean pounds its restless cry’
So I’m minding my own business in a garden in St Ives admiring a bronze sculpture when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and does this to an internationally renown piece of art. It’s there for a moment and then it’s gone - the colour and the detail that is, not the sculpture - that was still there in all its deep copper-bronze magnificence but somehow not quite what it was a moment ago.
I wait, and when it happens again I record this view with my phone but it really doesn’t do justice to what I saw - the colours of the ocean in St Ives Bay were splashed so lavishly across the surface of the bronze that you might imagine you heard the sound of the surf in the rhythm of their dancing.
And in that moment the marks of its creation are also laid bare, along with a history of the ‘changes and chances of this fleeting world’ that have left their marks upon its surface too.
I’m a Cornishman, a toolmaker and a tool user; I like making marks and I enjoy looking at the marks other people make, whatever the intention that lies behind them. I’m also a photographer so I understand how central light is to the art and craft of my work but this light show certainly left its mark on me.
We all make marks and those carvings, writings, paintings, hammerings or scratches all carry our distinctive signature for the use of any tool reveals something of our character and temperament just as we do when we sign our name.
The Atlantic has its own temperament and character, making its own marks on the land, carving out coves and inlets, leaving headlands and beaches along with ripples in the sand.
And ‘…the call of a running tide is a strong call and fierce call that may not be denied’ as John Masefield wrote so eloquently. Favourite haunts are soon found and treasured for a lifetime; places where in winter the ferocity of an Atlantic gale might be experienced or where in summer the tide tickles the toes in an invitation to come swimming.
My ‘Atlantic’ images are a fusion of these thoughts and impressions with the colours coming only from these inherent in each image and my own digital scratchings added for good measure.
They are not a record of where marks may be found but a celebration of my native Cornwall, Land of the Far West, a little spit of land pointing proudly out into the setting sun and facing every day the blue green might of the unfettered Atlantic.
We all have our own favourite places on Cornwall’s Atlantic Coast, these six images from the Atlantic series are named after some of mine.
