Sarah Hutchinson - John Busby Seabird Drawing Course 2023 Bursary Report
Friday dawned bright & breezy, but with a definite hint of rain in the air – it’s Scotland after all. After our morning pep-talk/sandwich-grab, we set off, knowing it would be our final trip to St Abbs. Sadly, the Island boat trips evaded me this year due to poor weather and boat trouble. But another day at St Abbs was a gift; with its dramatic cliffs rising from the sea, their colour and tone changing every second with the conditions. The whole scene crowned by a myriad of circling kittiwakes, guillemots, razorbills and a small but growing colony of gannets.
When I was awarded the bursary, I was so delighted to be able to return to East Lothian for a second Seabird Drawing week. It had been a week of ups and downs, but as it was the last day (no pressure, but lots of pressure) I was determined to capture something of the essence of this amazing place before I had to leave it again.
After the half-hour warm up of fast drawing with a focus on composition, we drifted away to our favourite places. I found a little dip in the cliff top where I could look down past the steep cliffs into the cool blues and greens of an inlet, hoping it might be a little sheltered should it rain. I tried a few compositional pen and ink thumbnails as the clouds began to roll over the hill. A Ranger stopped for a brief chat about art and birds and midway through discussing the decline in the seabird population, he excitedly pointed out a pod of dolphins cruising round the base of the cliff – binoculars at the ready I had such a fantastic view.
Slowly, droplets of rain started to add ‘interest’ and then ‘destruction’ to my thumbnail sketches (oh why hadn’t I primed the paper?!). Undeterred – you don’t stop for the weather on this course – I carried on with pen, pencil, pastel and then conte to try to get something of the cliffs and birds down on a larger piece of primed paper, before it really threw it down.
Stopping to put waterproofs on and to eat what was left of my slightly rain-sodden sandwich, I hunkered down in my cliff-top hollow and carried on using the pastels as paint and conte as line. I enjoyed the unpredictability of it all, but began to wonder how I was going to get anything that looked remotely like a drawing done without the paper turning to pulp.
The clouds eventually cleared and in the drying late afternoon I was able to work into my drawing and capture some of the colour and noise of my surroundings. Times up! 5 o’clock already and time to pack up and return to Winterfield for a meal, debrief and a display of all the work made through the week. But wait, what was that? “Minke!” someone shouted, you have never seen such a collection of wet and windblown artists move so fast, all scrabbling for binoculars. There it was, a minke whale feeding amidst a large raft of seabirds, a beautiful reward at the end of an intense drawing week.
It’s hard to express how much this drawing course challenges and changes you, whilst enabling your art to grow and flourish. I believe at its core is the unpredictability of working from life, regardless of where you are, who you are with and what your surroundings are, the Seabird course is a complete adventure, one which, given the opportunity, you must throw yourself into.
