Sketchbooks, salt air, and stillness: a week of creative reconnection

The coast gives more than views—it offers rhythm, song and a way to draw ourselves back into balance.

For extra tranquility, try listening to this — I record outdoors so you get to feel this place.

This week’s audio includes a bonus—a listen-only Postscript beginning at 11m47s which has ended up being as long as the letter itself!

What might happen if you gave yourself the thing we always claim not to have—time? Recently, I stepped away from the usual for a week of walking, art and solitude on the Moray coast. No formal plan, no funded residency—just some self-given space to see what emerged. Sketching by the sea brought unexpected clarity, joy, and something quietly essential: the freedom of simply being outdoors, noticing, and responding to nature’s rhythm. This is some of what I took home.

For a first time, the gift of exactly that—time. A self-directed ‘artist’s residency’. Having failed in an application for one (I expected to: as a funded residency it was greatly over-subscribed and I considered myself dressed in an imposter’s cloak) it occurred to me that I could simply go away and challenge myself. Here are some fragments from that application:

I am curious to see how I would respond to being in a new and very different environment with a limited time to adapt, absorb and respond to it. My photography practice is ordinarily slow, contemplative and considered, yet in art I am drawn to mark-making that is spontaneous, instinctive and reactive to its place of origin.

…

…daily walks. A slow exploration of place and time; not necessarily exhaustive but intensive. It is likely that I will make images in some form, but I would like the opportunity, as far as the week allows, to let place seep into me, and let the words lead. There is a value in taking things slowly - waiting, writing, noticing - before photographing, drawing or painting.

If my beginning was an ambition to challenge myself to write about a new place, I didn’t allow for the dominance of sight, and the inevitability of visual sense taking ascendance.

I also couldn’t have anticipated that during the last few months I would settle on a medium and a way of working that complements my photographic practice. ‘En plein air’ sounds grand; it isn’t, especially in wind and rain, but it is invigorating. In the past I would likely have worked from photos back indoors, but I am beginning to understand the difference in response, in perception. My beginnings here, around the moss, have been invaluable.

Sitting on a headland or a beach took me back to a childhood memory of a favourite place: sitting in a tent (an old bedsheet thrown over the washing line between two trees) and drawing. I couldn’t tell you what, I just remember it was something I enjoyed doing, and personal space. And so last week I sat, sometimes for a couple of hours at a time (only later remembering that rocks are hard on the derrière) and sketched, and my inner child was happy.

some seating opportunities are more comfortable than others…

I made voice notes and collected observations; coherence was harder. I repeatedly lost myself in the sights and sounds. Part way through the week I wrote:

I’m not sure whether I know how to write this place; it’s shiny and new, and the visual assault is such that the poetic eludes, elides, me. Perhaps you have to become familiar, infuse and inveigle yourself, to find words.

the visual assault is such that the poetic eludes: coastal geology

As weeks do, it flew by. Waking at 5.37am ‘early gifts’ a couple of hours to go and sit on the seawall for a last morning, watch the waves, make a few final sketches. Until then I’d been out with multiple sketchbooks, so while one dries, I’m working in another. This one is just a small square book; it teaches me patience—I have to stop while each page dries. It gives me time to notice, to reflect, that so much of what I do has an impatience to it: perhaps the next the next the next. Even on a sunny morning in May when liquid dries more quickly I have to slow down, and then the gift is the time watching the waves roll in, seeing new patterns in the sand, the worm casts that are now disappearing beneath the waves, the oystercatcher working the strandline, that blue is never just blue. The waves have a different rhythm, answer a different clock. I wonder what it would be like to simply tune yourself into that.

I leave footprints on the shore and depart with salt water under my fingernails.

Sunday transitions from the sound of the sea to my cat purring. I collect thoughts, look through sketchbooks, select what to share with you, and reflect. Outdoors—the bulk of it—is better even when they don’t work. Cropping down I find compositions I like—so my next challenge is to make more loose, bigger, work with this aim. Effectively to free myself from the composition, and from the literal.

Other learnings:

• I have, decidedly, overcome my sketchbook hesitancy, even the first page, by simply doing.

• That I still like the square format that was part of the signature of my “breakthrough” (for me) series of water abstracts: Liquid Light.

• That isolating—cropping—helps to see the potential.

• To think about negative space too, not necessarily filling a page, and again when cropping—what isn’t there, what to leave to the imagination.

I have returned with new memories. Beyond anything hoped for:

Vibrancy of colour. Blue in every shade: sea once grey green skin is shed, and sky after rain and cloud withdraw the grey. Green yes, but a supporting act for the flowering. Bluebells, pink campion, purple orchids and everywhere a smothering of yellow as if gorse has just this one last year to flower. Shoreline a more delicate pointillism of pink, yellow and white.

Birdsong. Each bush, each skeletal branch from amid grass, seems to wear a bird, singing. A fleshed out feathered version of the inherited glass ornaments with silvered soft tails that we placed on the Christmas tree.

Air so fresh that I notice the vacuum cocoon of the car on the way back, the home smell of furniture and finishes, the separation of it all: manufactured life, comfort, away from being weathered, warmed, rinsed with salt. The way we retreat inside and somehow see this as natural, and yet it is a progressive exile. I have already committed to another week of reminding myself that outdoors is best.

I also wrote in that application:

I have it in mind to use my experiences… to create another book.

I have a working title, and subtitle:

Tidal Reach:
A small book of coastal fragments

Not the moss, and yet this place too was borne of water, waves of glaciation, tides of fluvial deposition. Its echo lingers in the landform.

Have you ever gifted yourself time like this? I’d love to hear how changing pace, and place, has helped you.

Until next week,

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PostScript

I wasn’t sure what to include for this week’s postscript. Part of taking a break means that I have fallen behind with my usual reading, but at least I know it’s there, safely nested inside my inbox. Instead, more fragments, out for a walk to record the voiceover for you. They don’t appear here in the text, but I hope you’ll enjoy them. If you don’t ordinarily listen, perhaps you’ll be tempted to learn what sights and sounds I found on my first home walk. You’ll find the audio link at the top.

Copyright © Michela Griffith 2025 except where otherwise credited