Alan Rankle : Further Tales from the Beach House
the blackShed gallery

By Judy Parkinson

While most of mankind flicks on the air con, fills up with petrol and turbo-
charges off into the sunset in a cloud of carbon monoxide, the fate of the
natural world has been a core theme in Alan Rankle’s work for over 30
years. So switch off, step on the brakes, take a few moments and check out
what’s reflected in Rankle’s beguilingly apocalyptic landscapes.
The new works created for this solo exhibition at the blackShed gallery cast
a golden light on the complex fragility of global ecological balance. Rankle
uses precious metals for a precious coastline in a precarious world. But
beware, how do we know that Rankle’s shimmering golden paintings don’t
depict the last glow of the last magic hour of the last dusk?

Rankle first began the series Further Tales from the Beach House nearly
two decades ago when he rented a modernist house in Pett Level, a few
miles east of Hastings, with panoramic views of the English Channel and
cliffs during a particularly storm ravaged winter. This year he has returned
to inspect and comment on the damage wrought in the intervening
seasons. How has the coastline coped with rising sea levels, global
warming and this winter’s torrential storms?

Rankle uses his signature painterly style, and with the skills of a master
apothecary, combines gold leaf with oil colour on uneven textured surfaces,
which allow the works to develop and change in time.
“I used gold leaf and I mixed gold leaf with copper (which turns to verdigris
when exposed by air and sea water) as painting media. Following the 19 th
century tradition of sepia landscape sketches to create specific picturesque
views, I used sodium hypochlorite, otherwise known as bleach, which
eroded the gold-copper amalgam, just like the salt spray and coastal
landfalls erode the landscape.”

 

This is a conscious technique of the artist’s method matching the meaning.
These corrosive chemical reactions combine to suggest crumbling cliff
profiles that could just as well be at Pett Level, Cape Cod, Martha’s
Vineyard or Rørvig in Denmark, all of which feature in the new works. It’s
global.

Pett Level is a small seaside village between Hastings and Rye – with a
history. At low tide you can see the stumps of ancient trees that are part of
a fossilised forest dating back to the last Ice Age. Sea defences were built in
the 1940s against the natural west to east coastal drift. Each year the
beach is replenished with tons of flint pebbles transported from Rye.
Coastal erosion is not exactly new to Britain. The sea has robbed the
Holderness coast in Humberside of about 32 villages since Roman times.
Currently the sea claims about 2 metres of land every year. But after this
winter’s storms some of Britain’s most famous sections of coastline have
suffered years of erosion and damage in just a few weeks, or in some cases
hours.

Rankle always alludes to history in some way and with this collection he
wanted to make paintings that related to the work of the many great
English 18th and 19th century watercolourists who stayed along the coast
in order to paint seascapes. He has made new works that relate to the
history of his genre, while simultaneously addressing the ongoing erosion
of the land by the force of the sea.

With the catastrophic forces of industrial pollution and human fuel
consumption in mind, the fate of our precious coastline, he says “is a
metaphor for something altogether more foreboding.”

END