October 2020 - A beach near Port Alfred

We finished up in Port Alfred after a few days, and one morning we went down to the sea to clamber over sand dunes. I have to say that I found it pretty exhausting – a long walk down to the sea from where we parked the car, along a fairly overgrown path, and then the dunes were quite hard to climb around and over. But it was well worth it: the views and the colours were really lovely.

In this photo, I have only made few changes to the original – the colours were as you see it here, and the coastal cliffs in the background were as you see them. I guess the sea mist was making everything slightly vague in the distance.

The picture looks almost as if David Hockney had painted it; it is very much his style with a dreamlike feel to it. His famous painting – The Big Splash – has a lot of the same dreaminess in it (that sounds like he was imitating me! Very far from it, I was consciously trying to imitate him). There’s an awful lot of nothingness in my photo – the expanse of sand, the sky up on the left – but that only makes it more complete in my view. 

There is a lot of benefit for an aspiring photographer to spend time looking at paintings, to see how the painter has expressed themselves and how they manage to make their work interesting to look at. I spend a lot of time going around art galleries partly to learn from the masters but also to enjoy what I see.