The Whisper Before the Storm
Listening to the Light
The Whisper Before the Storm - 29 x 23 in - Medium: Painted Digitally
“This is a reflection from From London to Mexico, a book in progress about the quiet signs that guide us into unexpected change.”
In the early 1990s, I studied sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art, back when it clung to that name (rather earnestly) and was known for its figurative tradition, where often monumental sculpture was made out of stone, wood, metal, clay, and plaster. At the time (that’s the reason I chose this wonderful place, harking back to the 19th-century ateliers) I had the quiet but determined ambition to make it as a full-time artist. Sculpture was my love, my discipline, and I had every intention, however idealistic, of making it my future.
Despite my being somewhat resistant to the idea of becoming a teacher (my own experience of school was bittersweet), I come from a family where art and education were already quietly entangled. My grandparents on my father’s side were both lifelong educators. My grandfather, a head of art and a devoted amateur painter, was perhaps my earliest mentor. I spent many school holidays with him on short trips to St Ives, Cornwall, where we would stay for a week or two at a time.
St Ives was the perfect retreat for abstract and modernist artists like Barbara Hepworth, Patrick Heron, and Ben Nicholson, who were won over by the raw forms of the landscape they experienced around them.
Every morning or evening, when the shadows were at their best, my grandfather would grab his easel, paints, palette and brushes, and power off for a brisk stroll in search of a suitable spot to paint en plein air—most always satisfied that he had found that special view with a distant hint of turquoise, trapped through a gap between two granite walls, and containing the perfect balance of spatial challenges, colour opposites, and textural contrasts. I would always join him. Watching and soaking up his fast process, totally absorbed in each moment, each brushstroke, sharing that quiet space (well, not always. Often people stopped to ask questions, or if we were fortunate, just silently admired). I’m almost brought to tears when I remember those precious times: moments that left a lasting impression on me.
What impacted me most was the light. St Ives, almost a peninsula jutting into the Atlantic, was surrounded by powder beaches on nearly every side, and there was something about the fine, silicone-rich sand that caught and amplified the light in an astonishing way. The paintings that we made there were vivid and intense under the St Ives sky. They could feel almost too saturated, slightly fluorescent and out of place, when returned to the softer, smoggy hues and shadows of London. That clarity, that luminous sharpness, entered my senses without me knowing how deeply it would stay.
I remember too the old, damp studios: oak floors soaked in strange alchemical mediums and layered glazes of oil paint and turpentine. There were tea and biscuit breaks in the middle of long, trance-like sessions of making, when the hum of human voices and the faint cries of seagulls would once again break the silence… small rituals that felt timeless.
We would walk through a landscape that shifted constantly: rocky coves, open beaches, narrow streets winding between whitewashed houses. Oh, and of course, how can I forget the ancient mustard-yellow, lichen-covered roofs? Incidentally, the perfect complementary colour to turquoise blue on Isaac Newton’s famous colour wheel; a technique used by painters to create a sense of three-dimensional space on a flat canvas. All of this magnificence under that relentless, ethereal glow.
Now, reminiscing, I know I was picking up more than technique. I was learning how to be present enough to truly see… to notice the atmosphere around a subject, the way a shadow breathed against a wall, the way colour could burn into memory.
Much later, long after I had let go of art school ideals and left London behind, it was those early memories that quietly returned to guide my hand again. This time under the wide skies of the Mexican Caribbean, where a different—yet just as powerful—light would once more reshape not only the way I painted, but the way I lived.
In each new light, the old ones return: silent mentors of the soul, reminding us how to see, how to feel, how to begin again.