From Cullipool to Newlyn
It was only five weekdays after leaving the Island of Luing that I arrived in Cornwall. The very next morning – another brisk blue day in May, just like the weather I had left behind around the hills of Luing – I was sketching on the pontoons in Newlyn harbour.
The skiffs there come and go with one man at the helm – small boats - a pleasing human scale, just like the houses in Cullipool. I am drawn to these skiffs. They are like the ones which leave the harbour in the town of Kilkeel in Northern Ireland where I was born. They also resemble the boats which fish the waters around Luing. Their only distinguishing marks are the letters of their port of registration painted on their hull. These betray the origins of the craft.
I draw and paint the paraphernalia of harbour quays and boats, the leading marks and buoys of waterways, images of pilots and figureheads, and I write about them in my songs. These beacons and belongings of nautical idiom are the metaphors of my work. They simulate the challenge of getting to grips with life. Children are often depicted in my pictures, little figures peering through the confusing jumble of stuff.
So there I was, sketching on my knees amongst the gunwales and warps, with thoughts about my stay on Luing coursing through my head.
A fleet of small pleasure boats had mustered at Toberonachy over the time of my visit and I sketched, kneeling on the slate stones of the beach. In Newlyn I thought of the peregrinations about which we have read in the past. I read on a plaque outside the visitors’ centre of a tin mine in Cornwall that, around the year 325BC, Pytheas journeyed from his home in Massalia around Spain to Cornwall and found a flourishing tin mining industry there. He eventually left the Cornish coast and journeyed by sea north, passing Wales and up to Scotland. It is very likely he passed Luing on his way further north.
My train of thought was broken by a surprising gust of wind which clattered across the pontoons and knocked over my jar of Indian ink. It trailed its jet blackness over the boards of the pontoon. I asked a fisherman for the loan of a bucket and swilled down the lot leaving only a greyish stain, and then fell into conversation with him. He was a ship’s carpenter and was re-caulking the deck of a trawler. He was using the ancient system of crimping oakum into the seam and sealing it with hot pitch. I begged a handful of oakum and a slice of cold pitch. Later, at home in my studio on Loch Long in Scotland, with these I made a series of prints, using the fibres of the oakum and the flat cut cross-section of the nugget of pitch.
In a pub in Cornwall – a singularly unimpressive pub which we left after a quick half pint and not a backward glance – I casually picked up a cluster of stapled pages entitled: The Zennor Community Survey Results. Later in my studio I incorporated into my prints, fragments gleaned from this gem of a find.
The Zennor community is a small township on the coast of Cornwall with a strong sense of community. I visited it and its superior pub, The Tinner’s Arms, and was struck with echoes of Culliport on Luing. The people of Zennor were struggling to make a go of their place - to kindle its glow, to survive and thrive. In the community they run a publication called The Mermaid’s Echo. The people love this publication.
So, in order to send the heartbeat of an echo to the communities on Luing, I quoted from the Zennor Community Survey Results where it was reported that: 4% of people liked the old codgers’ stories from the magazine; and 56% of respondents commented on the content of The Mermaid’s Echo. These quotes I incorporated into my prints made using the oakum and pitch and several other more abstract prints. These echoes from Zennor are my salute to Luing.
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