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?

The author’s research trips are as richly detailed as the art, and they’re sprinkled with humour too. The day she chooses to visit Dymchurch it rains ‘to an almost comical extent’. In St Ives, seeking out the Cornish fishing industry that Alfred Wallis once knew, she feels deflated: ‘The harbour is thick with holidaymakers; the seagulls have grown fat and fierce on a diet of chips and ice cream.’

Unlike Nash, Wallis depended on the sea: ‘It was his livelihood and an everyday reality.’ The fisherman turned artist, who used household paint on cardboard scraps, was a participant, not a spectator. Fast forward to the 1980s, and the photographer Martin Parr caused a stir when he turned his middle-class gaze on the struggling communities that flocked to New Brighton, a fading seaside resort close to Liverpool, on summer weekends. The artist, who was accused of poking fun at his subjects, said ‘The Last Resort’ (1983-86) was ‘an indictment of Thatcherism’, intended to reveal the damage government policies were doing in the north of England. ‘Ever since they first became a phenomenon in the 19th century,’ writes Le Brun, ‘seaside resorts have reflected the fortunes of the urban areas from which they offered escape.’ Also the misfortunes.

The contemporary art chosen by Le Brun is notable for its chewy themes. The book ends with ‘Vertigo Sea’ (2015) by John Akomfrah, a cinematic triptych of archive material, BBC natural history unit footage and scenes staged by the artist. An ecological and political reckoning, it splices together images of breaking waves and breaching whales, slave killings and drowning migrants. A still shows the artist in the guise of a Romantic wanderer, a figure who typically regarded the sea as a void. The uncomfortable fact, writes Le Brun, is that the sea is where ‘modern history was forged’ and imperial fantasies were facilitated, a site that has been ‘acutely vulnerable to the projection of the priorities of the most powerful humans’.

Violent and gentle, frightening and beautiful, Akomfrah’s film offers a roiling vision of the ocean as, in Le Brun’s words, ‘a deeply complex network of interconnections, an entity that can simultaneously inflict on the human species moments of inspiration and episodes of sheer terror’. Today, the sea is ‘pawing at the land, reclaiming the coast’, hammering home the message that humans and nature cannot be separate. The sea is ‘literally dissolving distinctions that were once unquestioned’, and showing that something can be seen in many ways and still be shared.