‘Through my painting I aim to express something of being in the landscape… an emotional response to the natural environment and to communicate a sense of the ebb and flow of nature. The far west of Cornwall is uniquely inspirational’.
David Mankin lives in the village of Perranuthnoe, between the cliffs and the sea, and he preserves sketches from coastal walks, beachcombing fragments, literary quotes and designs in collage sourcebooks to inspire his creative process.
Interlude: an interval, pause, change of tempo, a moment for reflection.
With atmospheric vibrancy, Another Day Leaves the Cove highlights the shifting mood of the seashore, the geometric pattern of ad hoc shapes in a swirl of cerulean and azure, blended with earthy shadows. A last glimmer of dusky light fades over the curving contour of the cove, edged in a flurry of white, foaming waves. The sea is portrayed not just as a natural environment but as a metaphor for change – the constant push and pull, ending and renewal. Through textured layers of colour, streaked, repainted and partly submerged, Mankin captures the echo of permanence and transition along the coastline: a graceful meditation on the serene, silent experience of gazing out to sea.
With the artist’s love of literature, A splash of sun, the shouting wind may be a line borrowed from High Flight by John Gillespie Magee Jr. which describes the exhilaration of flying an aircraft, ‘…and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.’
The textured surface, in warm tones – ochre, terracotta, scarlet, teal – decorates a patchwork of interconnecting shapes, akin to a bird or pilot’s view of fields, lake, hills below. Amidst a whirl of brushstrokes are fine charcoal scribbles, like the scratched technique of sgraffito, which suggest wind-blown grasses, a tangle of branches or boundary fences. Overall, a dreamlike, distilled vision of being immersed, physically and emotionally in this broad perspective of an open rural landscape that refuses to stand still.
Like a fierce, frenetic whirlwind, Fly Closer to the Sea is a vivid, visceral impression of the restless meeting of air and water – a dripping wash of turquoise, indigo and smoky grey evoking surging tides and billowing clouds, dissolving into the horizon. The small separate square with a flash of orange-red inset into the painting, becomes a focal spark, a waving flag as if to denote danger of the vast ocean: in the Greek myth, Icarus was warned not to fly too low because the damp air of the sea would weigh down his wings. The rhythmic fluidity of luminous colour captures the tension between gravity and flight, risk and freedom.
‘…the rough waves as daylight faded, the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach.’ – from To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (an inspirational quote from Mankin’s collage sourcebook)
The radiant, warm burst of ochre and gold in Ember of Time glows like scorched earth, as thin threads crisscross through the space like the faint trace of footprints and pathways. An image of sunset, the final shimmer of light, is suspended by the black wedge of rock, while multi-layers of striped, stripped, peeled and peppered paint delineate the textured terrain. Shapes hover between architectural and organic, balancing structure with the fleeting yet enduring nature of time – the ember as a quiet reminder of cycles that burn, fade and return.
‘I remember well
That, as the balmy darkness fell,
We bath’d our hands, with speechless glee,
That night, in the wide glimmering Sea’.
Matthew Arnold’s poem Resignation is in the form of a letter to his sister, recalling happier times together, to give her a sense of hope. Likewise, In the wide-glimmering sea is perhaps an improvised response to a re-imagined moment. The cool composition of glistening aqua and white is a tactile tapestry of gestural mark-making – a flow of hoops and ovals mirroring geological lines, erosion and flux with loose, lyrical movement and energy.
The poetic title reflects a personal ‘remembrance in paint’ where a flood of Mankin’s sensory experiences – harbour life, the song of the sea, salty breeze, whirl of cloud – are transmuted into a vibrant visual language.
Again, with the mood of recollection, Breath of Sea expresses an impressionistic panorama across the smooth sweep of shoreline, leading the eye to the distant storm-tossed sea and sky. Brash, horizontal brushstrokes race like the raw force of wind and a scumbled band of surf, switching to long vertical stripes stretching down the beach. As an elegy to elemental movement, the linear layering is decisive and deliberate with a smeared blend of buttercream where the sand is swallowed by the seaspray.
The streaked surface is worked and reworked through translucent glazed strokes, a splash of coral creating a weathered effect through the silent abrasion of time and tide, the relentless rhythm of waves pulling back, leaving traces.
These lush, lyrical paintings by David Mankin create an evocative journey of interludes and reminiscences of moments, shimmering through the liminal space between land, sea and memory.
The book David Mankin – Remembering in Paint is published by Sansom & Company, and David Mankin — Language of Paint will be published in 2026.
With thanks to Vivien Devlin for this review.
