But does it still count if nobody wants it?
I have been trying to pin down this thing I have about water. Thing doesn't quite do it either. Obsession is closer. Except it isn’t water, not really. I don't get particularly excited by fountains. Or swimming pools. I hate jacuzzis with a passion second only to organised 'fun'. Or people who clap when the plane lands. It has to be the ocean. But, actually, not just any old ocean.
The Med is too sociable.
The perfect turquoise of the Caribbean – just a little bit too pleased with itself.
The English Channel — I know it well — too sullen
The Sargasso Sea is too weird – floating about in the middle with no coastline, like that's perfectly normal.
No. It has to be the Atlantic. Once, perhaps, any Atlantic would have done; now it is this particular stretch of it, the Silver Coast Atlantic, more or less at the bottom of the garden.
I grew up in Jersey, an island of stunning beaches, mostly surrounded by the English Channel. And truthfully, it wasn't always sullen. In the summer, which back in the 1960's obviously went on forever, it was really rather lovely.
Occasionally, when the tides and weather and whatever other mysterious adult considerations aligned, we went to St Ouen’s. The drive to the other side of the island took no time at all, but to an eight-year-old it had the air of a major expedition. And every time the great sweep of St Ouen’s Bay appeared below us, my father would announce, in the grave tones of a man passing on important geopolitical intelligence:
It’s the Atlantic, you know.
As a child, I had no frame of reference whatsoever. The sea was the sea, as far as I was concerned. I noticed slightly bigger waves, certainly. A few surfboards. Other than that, it was wet. It was salty. It was cold.
My parents eventually moved across the island to a house in St Ouen's, just a stone's throw from the Atlantic. Now I come to think about it, my mother was only a few years older than I am now when she made the move. My father died about seven months later, and she walked St Ouen's beach alone for the next twenty years.
Although my father announced it with such reverence, I think my mother loved it in a much more fundamental way. We spoke most days, and she was full of adjectives to describe the experience; some more poetic than others. Invariably, I got a shipping forecast whether I wanted one or not.
I wonder what she would have made of this. Where we have ended up. I think she would have been amazed by our audacity. Deciding on a whim to go and live in a country I had previously never visited. The truth is, it was an idea that I had been quietly fleshing out in my head for several years. Probably since she died, actually. Of course, there then followed the delicate business of arranging for my husband to realise it was his idea.
We watch the horizon every night. Straight out it goes, all the way to North America. Two beanbags at the bottom of the garden on an elevated platform. We look down on the tiny footprints in the sand, and the seagulls and swifts beneath us. That alone seems wrong. They should be above us. Or possibly even beside us, trying to nick our chips.
Night after night with a G&T in one hand, iPhone in the other, taking photos as the sun goes down. I have spent a professional lifetime becoming sophisticated enough to sneer at sunset photographs, only to arrive at the Atlantic and discover myself sitting on a beanbag every evening, doing exactly that. On an iPhone, if you please. I haven't even got my proper camera out of the bag.
Unsurprisingly, I now have several hundred studies of this tiny stretch of Portuguese coastline. If I could reach the point where I had made the perfect image, would I stop? Well, no, actually, because I seem to be having a mostly agreeable conversation with the ocean. Neither of us has reached a conclusion. Yet I can't quite get comfortable with my aimlessness. Not everything has to become a project. I tell people this all the time. It seems to be a principle I find considerably easier to apply to other people's work than my own.
The images aren't going to make it into a gallery anytime soon. Nobody would publish them. And that is perfectly fine. So why do I feel the need to question what I am doing?
My mother took up painting in her forties. At eighty, she won the Channel Islands JJ Fox exhibition, the oldest person ever to do so. Then she won it again a couple of years later, with a different judge.
She didn't do calendar fodder or chocolate box perfection. There was nothing in them that looked likely to end up as February. Her paintings were closer to Diebenkorn: slabs of colour, the sea appearing again and again. She honed her skills tirelessly over many decades. A sunset made on a phone is another matter. It costs almost nothing, and maybe it is that some part of me doesn’t trust anything that arrived that cheaply. And that, of course, is an essay waiting to be written.
As far as I am aware, she never once asked me what a picture was for. She just went out and painted the sea.
I haven't done due diligence. I ask my Knotty Pated Fool about my mum, and he knew more about her than I did. He says:
The strongest independent record is the Fox Open Art Competition itself. Fox International's official history lists Billie Newey as the winner in both 2009 and 2010. So your memory was essentially right, but it's even cleaner than “a year or two later”: she won it in consecutive years. foxinternational.co.uk
And this wasn't a negligible little local prize. The competition began in 1983, expanded into a Channel Islands competition in 1990, attracted 200+ entries, and deliberately brought in established outside artists to judge it. Past judges included Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, Ken Howard and Leonard Rosoman