Winter Sea, Porthtowan

By Hayden Price
 
Original painting
Oil on board
Image size: H: 84cm x W: 64cm 
Framed size: H: 100.5cm x W: 81.5cm
 
This work depicts a famous, exposed stretch of beach on the coast of Cornwall. A moody and dramatic record of our coastline and its tidal flow, looking out to sea. It's also much more than that...
 
It's an astonishing feat of photo-realist-style landscape painting - except, however, that it's not just  painted from a photograph: Hayden visits these places and sketches and paints in situ, before completing each work in the studio, based on his drawings, artworks and photographs. Nor does he try to simulate a photograph in full - he wants you to see those tiny brush marks when you get up close - some of them made by brushes of a single strand that he makes himself.
 
This bravura piece is many months of work, rendering each surface - each frothy wave, each area of breaking water frothing onto the sand, each section of foreground grassy bank - and giving us the illusion of perspective, as if we could walk to the bank edge and peer over the top.
 
Typical of this artist, there is daring and confidence, both in the perspective we witness and in the confidence of an artist willing to take on such