Inspired by the paintings of John Constable RA (1776-1837), who created studies in oil and watercolour in which the landscape beneath the ever-changing sky eventually becomes completely absent.
His motivation for creating his ‘Cloud Studies’ was explained when he wrote to his friend Dr. Fisher: ‘It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment’ (Beckett VI, pp.76-77).
Exhaustively photographed, Dungeness is a surreal landscape where the largest single entity is not the expanse of shingle, but the sky which expressively rolls above it. As part of an ongoing study of skyscapes, these images focus on the pattern, light, and texture of the sky, throwing the objects dotted along the shingle beach into miniature and further enhancing the surreal nature of the place.
