Mary Blue

I paint the North Norfolk coast not as scenery, but as a place where water, weather and memory continually reshape one another. My paintings begin with close observation - walking the marshes, watching tides, making studies in gouache and oil - but they become an exploration of movement, uncertainty and resilience. I am interested in the invisible forces that shape both landscape and human experience: currents, wind, time and the shifting edge between land and sea.

I paint water because I'm fascinated by its movement. But perhaps, underneath that, I'm also painting access to possibility. Water is also infrastructure. Who has it? Who carries it? Who controls it? Who has time because water comes through a pipe? Who loses hours because it doesn't?

I once attended a seminar on the ethics of water. Women in countries where fresh water is scarce send the young girls miles to fetch water, and they are excluded from school to provide water for their families. That's one of the many reasons I paint water, although few know about the water politics.

My water paintings don't need to announce the politics. That may actually be more powerful. I paint the sea. The tide. The marsh. The little red sails. The shimmering surface. The enormous forces beneath. And allow the viewer to encounter beauty first, and perhaps, if they stay long enough, begin wondering: who gets to move freely through this world?

My little saltmarsh paintings, with those tiny red sails appearing and disappearing across the marsh, are already saying something about it. The boats are small. The landscape is immense. Yet they are moving.