Elinor looked across to Treyarnon Bay and fondled the camera in her hands. Her camera was like a security blanket to her because she felt she could hide behind it.
This particular camera was a by-product of her previous vocation when she’d worked as an artist. Two years ago, Elinor had been a successful artist and had used this camera extensively in her work.
It seemed to her a very long time ago.
Unfortunately, since Mark, her fiancé, had died, she hadn’t been able to express herself creatively on canvas at all. She hadn’t lifted a single paintbrush, despite desperately needing the income, so it was no wonder her mother utterly despaired of her.
She knew countless artists who recreated their emotional traumas on canvas but she wasn’t one of them. She didn’t want to open the door to what was inside of her head because she was fully aware it was too repugnant and dark to look at. Who would want to buy something born out of the ugliness of despair? Just as they did with conversation, people appreciated the inconsequential and the light-hearted, not the depressed and dreary.
In the days when she’d been actively working as an artist, her Canon camera was her much-valued personal assistant.
Despite how much she liked to draw and paint from life, it was often impossible to capture an entire scene on canvas before the light changed. She often found that within a short time frame, clouds would cover the sun, or the sun would change position, redirecting all the shadows to a different place.
Inevitably, the light changed as the day progressed. A multitude of weather idiosyncrasies could utterly change the landscape in front of her. At times, this could happen, literally, within minutes. By capturing a scene on camera, Elinor found she could finish off a canvas in her studio at her leisure and without losing the essentials of the light on that particular day.
Elinor felt light had affected every part of her paintings. She didn’t really see colour, just light and shadow. Brought up in Glasgow, she was used to the lack of sunlight in the winter and the heavy, grey skies, and maybe that was why light was immensely important to her.
She thought it was unsurprising Scotland had produced so many renowned colourist painters: Peploe, Cadell, Fergusson and Hunter. Its harsh climate inevitably created a yearning for colour and light. She remembered how she’d felt during the Scottish winters, when the sun, if it appeared, started to sink rapidly down to the horizon at half past three in the afternoon. The darkness stifled her creativity.
It was then that she relied on her treasured photographs for her artwork. All those images she’d taken in the brighter seasons of spring and summer.
And here in Cornwall she was falling in love with light once more. More than anything she loved the effect of the sky on the seawater. The palette that nature used in the water entranced her. The colours could change radically, depending on the weather and on what lay beneath the surface of the ocean.
On a sunny day, with white sand beneath the ocean, the water turned a bright turquoise blue. If there was seaweed under the water, the sunlight turned the water into a deep blue-green oasis, with tinges of indigo. Cloudy skies could turn it into a range of colours: from a dull slate blue to purple black, from a metallic Prussian blue to a threatening, dark, olive brown.
Sunsets viewed from Leo’s little house were also stunning. Then, nature’s palette turned to a range of warmer colours to depict the falling sun’s demise: from pumpkin orange to coral pink, rose red to buttercup yellow. The clouds would become infused with colour as they captured the sun’s dying rays. Elinor would never tire of viewing sunsets from the mound of their Cornish hedge.
Today, as she looked across to Treyarnon Bay, she saw there were a few surfers attempting to make use of the waves curling towards the shoreline. Surfers here fascinated her too and she wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe it was the reckless abandon with which they seemed to harness themselves to the thundering waves. The surfers she’d watched so far seemed to have no fear and she envied that.
She decided to walk across Treyarnon Bay, making her way to the rocks straddling Treyarnon Bay and Constantine Bay. From there she’d be able to watch the surfers more closely.