‘The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.’
‘The Waves’, Virginia Woolf, 1931
The swirl and spread of cratered, lace like surf, its progress marked by low, tumbling bars of foam, is depicted in silvery monochrome; the image is distanced, in its detail no less than its temper, by an effect akin to the softening of photographic focus - the drawing thus acquiring all the visual and cultural resonance of an early daguerreotype. Time and weather and place are indeterminate: dawn, by moonlight, mid-morning or dusk. These drawings (noticeably, made as a large group) of the sea’s edge have the sense of being transmissions through time; equally, they own the dense aesthetic values - Mass Age - of re-mediation.
This single and singular subject - the sea - is as familiar as it is inscrutable, and as charged with gentle, repetitive movement as it is articulate of reverie. Executed in pencil on card, from photographs taken by the artist not far from his home, the images appear at once photographically precise and richly poetic; their presence is both immediate and redolent of memory.
In the subtlety of their execution no less than their obsessive multiplicity, these drawings thus take their place within a nexus of artistic causes - the central tenets of which are drawn from Romanticism, however forensically scientific the end results might appear. The sea shore is an enchanted site - whichever anthropology of the coast one might consult; it is the landscape of transformation, at once a destination and point of farewell: a shrine to the inner self, the mirror of subjectivity no less than destiny.
“And then we went down to the ship,” - wrote Ezra Pound, commencing his ‘Cantos’ - “set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea...” In his mind’s eye, the scene is both ancient and modern; or, rather, ancient and Modernist - for it is the sea, more specifically the froth edge of the repeating tide, on which the visions of literary modernism will fixate their moments of epiphany. Pound sets sail; Eliot’s avatar in a dying civilization, J. Alfred Prufrock, ruminates upon the beach; Wystan Auden, “from the sopping esplanade”, watches the rain fall over the sea. And Virginia Woolf, as she would, is more precise: “And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back.. ...Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”
British Modernism made a job and a calling of memory; and the sea was memory’s pulse, beating the hours of a fading age. (In a spoof of gentility John Betjeman, in 1943, re-casts the title of a fashionable literary journal, ‘Time and Tide’, calling it ‘Tame and Tade’; completing the circuitry, as that publication’s ‘literary advazer’, he asks Eliot to review Pound’s ‘Cantos’, saying - ‘the pay is awful..’ Eliot is not tempted.)
Richard Forster’s drawings are of an instant in the spreading tide line of surf; the swift gliding of the collapsed wave is fully alive; one seems to feel the slippery water, tepid to the touch; the moment is both enshrined and indifferent; the event is endless. The tidal scene is transcribed by the act of drawing in minute, meticulous detail. The white water of approaching waves gives way in middle distance to the delicate, medieval tracery of foam - we might be looking at an old photograph, of a turning tide from decades ago. And somewhere between the early years of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth, the sea seemed to abdicate as monarch of sublimity - becoming instead coldly Freudian. The sea might reveal, in relief, as it were, consciousness and neurasthenia. ‘The ceremony of Innocence was drowned; and in its place an overwhelming awareness that we are indeed just smoke through a key hole.’ (British cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s fixates on coastal melancholy - “a joyous shot at how things ought to be, long fallen wide..” to borrow Philip Larkin’s depressed assessment of home.)
If the universe were to be squeezed into a ball, what might be the elegant solution - with regard to questions of infinity, and the creases in psychology? For an artist, at work in the lobby of the twenty first century, aware of cultural acceleration, there could be in their work an answering stillness. For Forster, within the act of drawing, in such detail, an event of infinite variation, there are two achievements: one artistic, one philosophical, each entwined with the other. In touch, tone and temper, Forster‘s drawings of the sea inspire both contemplation and wonder: their fidelity to nature seems to edify the viewer - Ruskin would applaud. And then, in their relation between subject and technique, these drawings seem also to describe worm holes through time. What’s the date again?
The sea is endlessly changing, yet always the same. There is an aspect to Forster’s drawings of the sea which might be Warholian in concept, like drawing shoes, or Coke bottles, or shadows. In this they connect to both Modernist anxiety and post modern vacuity: that which might be numinous can also be a number.
‘The waves broke on the shore.’ (Virginia Woolf thus ends her novel - this closing line originally published in italics.)
END
Copyright Michael Bracewell