“And I in this cloud/uncloud I
who can’t settle/when I think of
that cloud of colours on the
sea/then my mind starts sliding
towards them/borne on a wave
of wind…”

Extract from Nobody – a long book poem of the same name by Alice Oswald, Cape Poetry

I began some of these pictures last winter when, if I opened the door, I was confronted by blasts of air that filled the house with the smell and taste of the sea, although the coast was some twenty miles away.

I went back in my mind’s eye to days last autumn when I walked through the grass above a familiar beach watching the mercurial light and the patterns made by the shifting tide. The horizon played hide and seek as I moved. And down below me, I remember, was this huge, restless expanse of blue water. Was it really blue, or grey or green, or tin coloured?

But here was my much-loved, trying-not-to-be- nostalgic, sea that is always and never the same. I will paint it again.
– Wendy McBride, June 2024