DRAWN TO THE SEA
Through his handmade linocut prints, Melvyn Evans explores the British coastline and its working practices – along with its links to our ancient past
Through his striking linocut prints, Melvyn Evans explores the British coastline and its historical associations
My artworks always start with a sketch,” says artist and printmaker Melvyn Evans, as he walks down to the seashore, just a stone’s throw from his house in Whitstable on the north Kent coast. Picking up his charcoal pencil, he focuses on the light changing on the sea, the outlines of boats and even the shapes of unusual stones, while his cocker spaniel, Bessie, runs over mudflats exposed by the receding tide. Moving on to the nearby harbour, where he sits on the quay wall with his sketchbook, he captures vignettes of the working port, as containers of fish and shellfish are unloaded by the fishermen with a clatter.
These timeless scenes make their way into Melvyn’s linocut prints, which he creates by hand – using an antique press. “If I sit and draw only for five minutes, and I look at the drawing again, it brings the whole scene back,” he explains, adding that the tonal values of charcoal translate into the colourways of his finished work. Fishing towns of the South East, such as Whitstable and Hastings, regularly feature, as do the coastal paths of Pembrokeshire, remembered from childhood holidays, along with historic vessels – ketches or schooners framed by near-abstract landscapes that link to our ancient past.
The influence of the British coast has been there throughout Melvyn’s life. As his father was in the Navy, he and his three siblings were raised in various port towns in southern England, mostly near Portsmouth where he remembers playing on the beaches at Hillhead and Gosport along the Solent. His mother was an artist, so he and his siblings were always encouraged to draw. Although Melvyn initially wanted to pursue a career in art, his father urged him to learn a manual trade to guarantee future employment: “So I went to Portsmouth Dockyard and did a five-year apprenticeship as a fitter and turner.” He then found himself working on aircraft carriers and destroyers, and spent 18 months stationed on submarines. “I hated it at the time,” he laughs, recalling the early starts and the smell of diesel, “but it’s very informative now.”
Once his apprenticeship was over, Melvyn cashed in his pension fund to pay his way
through art school – first doing a foundation course in Carmarthen, near where his parents settled, then gaining a degree in illustration at Exeter College of Art and Design. It was there that he developed an interest in printmaking, and also in the work of mid-century artists such as Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Henry Moore and the St Ives School – whose sculptural lines and fascination with the landscape were to inform his own signature style. Beginning his career as a graphic designer in the capital, Melvyn went on to become a professional illustrator – creating book covers and magazine artwork, packaging designs and museum posters.
By 2011 though, a lot of his output was digital, and Melvyn decided he wanted to return to a simpler way of working, concentrating on traditional printmaking and gallery work: “I like using my hands and being more craft based.” To this end, he converted the garage of the family home he shares with wife Jane and daughter Alice in Sevenoaks, Kent, into a studio big enough to accommodate a printing press. The 1860 model he acquired through a Suffolk collective of makers – ornately decorated with acanthus leaves and lion’s feet – has enabled him to do larger pieces with high-quality colour registration. Through taking part in South East Open Studios, and then being invited to show at Knole Park, a National Trust property near Sevenoaks, his linocut prints began to gain popularity. This then led to exhibitions at the Royal Academy and the Royal College of Art.
His white, timber-clad studio is filled with light from windows on three sides and warmed by a 1930s Scandinavian woodburner. Suspended on lengths of wire by wooden pegs, finished pieces hang up to dry while time-worn cabinets and a plan chest display inspirational touchstones: vintage model boats made by retired
fishermen; reference books on modern art and historic ships; and glass cases lined with beachcombing finds. Many of these were found while staying in the family’s modest ‘home-from-home’ in Whitstable, which Melvyn believes was converted from a former boatyard. It, too, is a weatherboarded building, furnished with model boats and original artworks. For him, scouring the intertidal zone for fragments of history is ‘addictive’, and Whitstable, where they spend weekends and holidays, is an especially rich seam for Roman pottery, ancient flints and clay pipes. His exploration of our pre-industrial past – and how it survives today – is a recurring theme in his art. “I’m interested in our relationship with the landscape, how we’ve affected it over millennia and the things we’ve left behind, like the old monuments and chalk figures,” he says.
Melvyn’s work is filled with familiar sights from the present day: fishermen landing their catch on Hastings beach or the Old Neptune pub at Whitstable surrounded by Thames barges and oyster smacks. Busy ports are rendered in a vibrant mix of red, white and black. Pembrokeshire, meanwhile, is a lusher blend of mainly green and brown. “I think I will work my way around the coast,” he enthuses, “because every area is unique, with different types of boats and working practices.”
No matter how far Melvyn travels, however, Whitstable – with its annual oyster festival, Dickensian pubs and the spectacular sunsets over the bay that so entranced Turner – will always have a pull on him. “There’s a lot of history here,” he says. “It’s probably what keeps drawing me back.”