Seaford Head to Newhaven Walk Hand in Hand

Print description

View from Seaford Head of Seaford Town, Newhaven, Brighton and Shoreham with two figures on a countryside walk. I created this print towards the end of winter 2021. I went for a walk over Seaford Head. It was bitterly cold but the day was clear with a blue sky. I was kind of after the steps of the artists Arthur Rigden Read and Eric Slater. I thought the view has so much interest in terms of the landscape lines of movement and how the land from cliffs to beach and beyond, frames the water and the sky.

Print details

I created this print from my original ink drawing to which I apply colour digitally. Printed on fine art paper using archival inks. From a limited edition of 100. I individually sign and number each print.

About this print

The sinuous marks of the parallel paths of grass and earth with fragments of white chalk conveys an emotional response. The earth paths somehow relate with the shape of the lifelines of a hand that a fortune teller might read into the future or the unanswered questions of life.

The two figures walking down the slope are my partner and me during a walk on a clear winter afternoon. We are holding hands in a gesture in remembrance of the missing arm from the 1966 painting ‘Aldeburgh’s Double Concerto’ of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears by Maxwell Ashby Armfield.  Back in 2018 I visited The Red House in Suffolk. This house was the residence of Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears. They are the most iconic same sex couple in the UK. At the Red house I learnt about a portrait of them that initially, in a gesture of affection, showed Pear’s arm over Benjamin’s shoulders. But Benjamin asked the artist to remove Pear’s arm to avoid possible negative repercussions. Fortunately, those days are gone and that is why I chose to show in my print my partner and I holding hands, going for a walk in the countryside.

Seaford Head and Seaford Town and Newhaven

Newhaven lies at the mouth of the River Ouse, in the valley the river has cut through the South Downs. There was a Bronze Age fort on what is now Castle Hill and in about 480 AD, the Saxon people established a village near where Newhaven now stands, which they named “Meeching”

Seaford is a coastal town in East Sussex, on the south coast of England.  Its history started in the Middle Ages as one of the main ports serving Southern England. But the changes in the coast line lead to its decline, and it was not until the 19th century with the arrival of the railway connecting the town to Lewes and London when it became a small seaside resort town.

Seaford Head is a local Nature Reserve east of Seaford in East Sussex.  Owned by Seaford Town Council and managed by the Sussex Wildlife Trust. The site has diverse habitats with chalk grassland, chalk cliffs, scrub, vegetated shingle, wet grassland, saltmarsh and rockpools. Grassland flora include kidney vetch, squinancywort, moon carrot and clustered bellflower. In season you can spot butterflies such as silver-spotted skipper, chalkhill blue and adonis blue.

Eric Slater,Arthur Rigden Read,  Seaford Head and Newhaven

This print echoes the work two artists that lived in Seaford and nearby and created a series of Japanese style woodcuts depicting Seaford and its surrounds.  Friend and teacher to Eric Slater, Authur Rigden Read (1879-1955) was an internationally acclaimed woodcut artist who used colour to produce this artwork from his studio in Winchelsea. The Society of California Printmakers awarded He and Slater gold medals.