“HERE” : A JOURNEY ALONG THE HUMBER ESTUARY

 “HERE” : A JOURNEY ALONG THE HUMBER ESTUARY

       Rich Industrial Shadows, oil on canvas, 41cm x 51cm 

NEW SERIES

As I have said in my Artist's Statement, I am interested in the cultural landscape of my area; the way human activity and the environment interact and develop. Industry, housing, and leisure impose themselves onto an evolving landscape, and where human intervention has taken place, it often harmonises with nature. In the Humber Region forces of nature, the power of the sea and the flow of rivers are vital in understanding its evolution. I have been capturing these ideas in photographs, sound and video recordings sketches and paintings as I have travelled around and walked along the banks of the Estuary. My final series of paintings will lead to a solo exhibition.

Ideas about the way geography and a particular “sense of place” affects us reminded me about the poem Here, by Philip Larkin (1922-85). Larkin is one of the most highly respected British poets. He spent much of his career as the chief librarian at the University of Hull, moving to Hull in 1955 and staying for the rest of his life. He came to appreciate the city and the surrounding area, especially its physical location and remoteness. His poetry therefore resonates with my work about the Humber Estuary and its fading industrial heartlands. Larkin's poems have a great sense of “place”. 

Over recent months Here has acted as a source of inspiration for a series of works. The poem envisages a journey which follows a route from the “rich industrial shadows” of West Yorkshire along the banks of the Humber through to Hull and beyond to the North Sea and “unfenced existence”.

I have therefore come to use the poetry of Philip Larkin as part of my toolkit to explore what is fascinating and distinctive about the Humber Region. Some of the titles of the paintings I have made refer to words from the poem and are descriptive of the place, others refer more broadly to concepts expressed in the phraseology.

 HERE, by Philip Larkin, 1961

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows

And traffic all night north; swerving through fields

Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,

And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields

Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude

Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,

And the widening river’s slow presence,

The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

 

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:

Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster

Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,

And residents from raw estates, brought down

The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,

Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires –

Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,

Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –

 

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling

Where only salesmen and relations come

Within a terminate and fishy-smelling

Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,

Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;

And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges

Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,

Isolate villages, where removed lives

 

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands

Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,

Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,

Luminously-peopled air ascends;

And past the poppies bluish neutral distance

Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach

Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:

Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

As I researched Larkin, I read more about his life to place his poetry into context. There are some uncomfortable aspects about Larkin’s  views which should be acknowledged. However, despite the criticism of some of his views,

“His poems – scrupulous, precise and ascendingly lovely – are true and wise: they speak to us of the big things, of birth, marriage and, above all, death.”

(Cooke, 2010)