West Bay – Beatitudes

Mary Talbot met David Inshaw to discuss his paintings of West Bay, paintings which are intensely surreal and heavy with meaning.

I don’t mind if I never see those cliffs again!” David Inshaw laughs. Hardly surprising after a winter spent painting thirteen new West Bay paintings, the culmination of nearly twenty years of fascination with the subject. His exhibition West Bay – Beatitudes, which opens at Sladers Yard in West Bay on Sunday 27th May, includes nearly thirty astonishingly different paintings mostly featuring the East cliffs and beach at West Bay.
I’m sitting in the cafe at Sladers Yard with David Inshaw, a lively bearded man full of fun and interesting ideas. I’m surprised to realise he is in his sixties. What is it about our cliffs that draws him so powerfully? “The first book I read as a boy was Moonfleet. That sowed the seed. And then there was Thomas Hardy, who has always been a key figure for me. He brought me to Dorset really. I first came to West Bay with Alf Stockham. He had a girlfriend from Burton Bradstock and I had just learnt to drive so we came. It was a freezing cold wet windy miserable winter’s day. There was nothing here in those days. The only place to eat was the fish and chips kiosk right round the other side of the harbour. Then we went up on the cliff and there was nothing but the harbour and the wind. It’s a magical place. It just took my imagination. Later I came again with girlfriends and it began to build up associations, to have meaning. It’s a dramatic place, a setting for things to happen.”
Is it these associations which give such force to his West Bay paintings? They are imbued with a dreamlike surreal intensity. Many of the images have been explored in other paintings: the red hut; the leaping cat; the helicopter; even the purposeful-looking fairy with iridescent butterfly wings, all seem heavy with meaning. As if Inshaw, like Prospero, has assembled them here by the sea for some kind of resolution. Perhaps his title gives us a clue, here are the memories and significant moments of a lifetime, the paintings are his beatitudes.
For they are blessings. To refer too much to the symbolism behind the imagery or to each individual part belies the balance and intuitive cohesion of the whole painting. In the West Bay series he has been able to express his humour as well as his humanity. David Inshaw laughs a lot. He is a very funny man. He says he relates to the cartoon character Felix who appears, often on a rucksack, looking appreciatively at the well endowed women in the paintings. One of his favourite paintings, West Bay II, reminds him of a saucy postcard from the beach. Felix is there, yet the naked pregnant woman blissfully sunning herself seems unaware of the smoking fire at the top of the cliffs, the looming clouds and the WWII bomber overhead. A child like an emanation of her mind runs out from behind her and she sits heavy at the centre, a lodestone, protected by rucksacks.
Women are what much of it is about. They walk the beach, they turn their backs, they look out to sea, busy in their own minds, painted with an unflinching and yet affectionate eye. Stanley Spencer is one of David Inshaw’s heroes and his series of paintings The Beatitudes of Love is referred to in Inshaw’s title.
David Inshaw is one of this country’s leading painters. His work is in public and private collections all over the world including the Tate Gallery in London, who used his moody The Badminton Game as the publicity image for their major ‘Art of the Garden’ exhibition in 2004. Another very well known work from this area is The Cricket Game at Little Bredy which he has painted three times, first in 1976 like an elegiac beautiful memory and most recently in 2004, still wonderful but subtly more edgy with looming clouds and long shadows.
He is famous for painting quintessential Englishness. “People are endlessly trying to define Englishness,” David says, “but it is something that lives within you. It is in your response to the countryside.”
David was born in Staffordshire in 1943. He studied painting at the Beckenham School of Art in the early sixties, moving on to three more years at the Royal Academy Schools in London from 1963-6. After a six month scholarship to study in Paris, he moved west to teach painting and print making at the West of England College of Art in Bristol where he stayed for nine years, going to live in Devizes in 1971.
At the end of this time, in 1975, he and a group of friends founded the Ruralists. The word means to become rural, which was what they had all done. “Then, as now actually,” David explains, “the art world was moving in directions we didn’t find very interesting. We were all figurative painters and we thought if we did things together as a defined group we would give power to our way of working. We painted the landscape but all in different ways. So much has changed since then, the elm trees were alive when we started the Ruralists, and they’re gone now. I left the group [in 1983] because I wanted to continue to develop as an individual.”
“I am a Romantic,” he says. “I use landscape to express meaning. It’s hard to be a Romantic in a cruel world, but there you are” and he laughs.