Rising Tides at the Towner

The Rising Tides exhibition at the Toner Gallery in Eastbourne showcases the work of Emma Stibbon. It showcased work she has done in Antarctica and on a sea voyage to Svalbard in the Arctic Circle, but also on the chalk cliffs on the English south coast of which Beachy Head, just outside Eastbourne, is a prominent example. The theme was climate change: it is causing not only melting ice and consequently rising sea levels (shown by the paintings of ice in Antarctica and Svalbard) but also that these higher sea levels are accelerating coastal erosion.

The stunning centrepiece of the exhibition is this wall-sized painted backdrop in front of chalk rocks. It certainly caught the attention of every visitor. But for me, the most interesting paintings were those of icebergs. Here is one of a tabular berg:

One feature of this painting is the composition. It's the position of the horizon. In Spielberg's autobiographical film The Fabelmans, protagonist Sammy, a wannabe filmmaker, has a meeting with John Ford who says that to make a landscape interesting the horizon has to be either towards the top of the frame or towards the bottom. Here the horizon is almost at the top of the picture. Above is a black night, illuminated only by stars. Below is the reflection of the berg and a lot of horizontally choppy water. Conventional wisdom in the art world has it that the eye is drawn to the centre of a picture and that should be the focus ... and at the centre of this picture we have NOT the berg but the largest disturbance of the water. That's an interesting composition.

A similar berg picture which appeared to flout compositional guidelines was this one:

This iceberg is towards the top of the frame, again, and even the horizon doesn't seem horizontal. But here the point of interest is the reflections in the water. Note that the bulk of the berg is reflected in the top third of the reflection but that there are still reflections going down almost to the bottom of the frame.

Another interesting feature of this exhibition is that there were a sequence of ink sketches done on the voyage from northern Norway to Svalbard and, on the accompanying film, Stibbon had noted that as the temperatures grew colder the ink began to crystallise on the paper. Here is one of the later pictures in which you can see this happening.