Meditations on the sea by ten British artists

It is our ability to see a single thing in various ways that Lily Le Brun celebrates in Looking to Sea: Britain Through the Eyes of its Artists. Over the course of ten chapters dedicated to individual artworks, one for each decade of the past century, she explores our shifting relationship with the shoreline through a carefully considered and enjoy-able mix of biography, art criticism and personal reflection. Up first is ‘Studland Beach’ (c. 1912) by Vanessa Bell, a melancholy painting that paved the way for modernism: ‘It is her attempt to distil an experience of sitting on the beach, looking out to sea, down to its visual essentials.’ More paintings follow, from Stanley Spencer’s optimistic ode to shipbuilding to a bold black-and-white abstraction by Bridget Riley, as well as a couple of photographs, a film and even a coast-to-coast hike by the English ‘walking artist’ Hamish Fulton.

Paul Nash returned to the sea again and again after the first world war. He’d volunteered to fight almost immediately; injured in 1917 and sent home from the front, he became a war artist. Later, living in Dymchurch, a small town on Kent’s coastline, he painted pictures of a ‘quietly terrifying sea, predictable and relentless’. ‘Winter Sea’ (1925-37) is perhaps ‘more than a metaphor for war’, writes Le Brun, who describes the time Nash spent on the waterlogged battlefields at Passchendaele:

Now you know of Nash’s experiences at the front, do you, like me, find it difficult not to notice the way the waves in ‘Winter Sea’ resemble lines of trenches, or how the sky is the colour of khaki uniforms, or the way the sea-wall defends against continual bombardment?