“Coastal workshop” drawings and prints

Last weekend I participated in a workshop led by the artist and printmaker Fiona Fouhy. We worked on the beach and cliffs around Botany Bay, between Margate and Broadstairs in Kent, UK

Here is a selection of the pictures I made during the workshop.

This a drawing done using a piece of white chalk from the cliffs, plus some work-in-progress pictures.

Here is a drawing of the white cliffs, done in white cliff chalk.

We made some monoprints, using a portable printing press, perched outdoors on the cliff top at Botany Bay.

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Back in the garden, we made more monoprints, this time using colour. Here is my series called “The grass will grow over your cities”.

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A long time ago I first heard this expression in an exhibition in Berlin. “Over your cities the grass will grow”is the title of a 2010 documentary film by Sophie Fiennes about the artist Anselm Keifer. At the end of the film the artist says “Over your cities grass will grow”.

According to Daniel K Brown (http://cargocollective.com/danielkbrown/Over-Your-Cities-Grass-Will-Grow) “He is paraphrasing line 34:13 from the Book of Isaiah: “Thistles will take over, covering the castles, / fortresses conquered by weeds and thornbushes””.

My St James’ Bible has it as “And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and thistles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be a habitation of jackals, a court for ostriches.” This is by way of a description of the “day of the Lord’s vengeance”.

My late father, the plant biochemist Prof. Don H Northcote, had a more positive view. He looked at paving stones and saw the plants growing in the cracks. “The plants will win in the end,” he asserted. I think he meant that as a good thing.