In celebration of our current exhibition, Call of the Running Tide, we present the following text written by journalist, author and sailor, Dick Durham, on the occasion of Martyn's 2022 exhibition at David Messum Fine Art.
We ran up the English Channel ploughing a foam path through iridescent green seas, our swelling white sails rolling past purple, mauve and brown-stained chalk cliffs, under grey and black clouds. Such attention to colour had become second nature to me having spent the past three days with marine artist Martyn Mackrill aboard his 1910-built gaff cutter, Nightfall. The Royal Yacht Squadron’s Honorary Painter was on passage to the East Coast from his pontoon berth in Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, to seek out new hues in the waters and big skies of East Anglia which his boat was designed for. Martyn is also Honorary Painter for the Royal Thames Yacht Club and so felt it was high time to come round to the London River.
Originally built on the Norfolk Broads by F. Miller & Co to a design by H. H. Lidstone, Nightfall was rebuilt in the Isle of Wight by former Lallows shipwright Charlie Gladys, who was with us for the passage east. With her double-reefed mainsail and staysail bagging a west-south-west Force 5-6 she rounded Beachy Head after a night in Newhaven, and while Charlie wrestled with the tiller and I trimmed the sheets, Martyn had his sketch pad out and with a few deft pencil lines captured the heave of the swell: a remarkable construct of perspective on flat cartridge paper.
Three grey squares soon arose from the horizon as the ominous pile of Dungeness nuclear power station provided our next day mark. Soon the black and white striped lighthouse on that shingle point came into view, too, reminding Martyn of the Ladybird Book of Lighthouses he pored over as a child. As we approached the South Foreland Martyn, who had never sailed up Channel before, said: ‘I’ve read about how hundreds of ships anchored in The Downs for shelter would suddenly face a wind shift and their anchors would snarl up, they’d drag, they’d hit the beach, and no-one could do anything….wouldn’t it be wonderful if we got round Dover and entered a time-warp with lovely tall ships all at anchor!’
Such is the romance which enthuses this leading British marine artist, who lives and breathes the days of sail, his pungent-smelling studio, sharp with the aroma of oil and turpentine, doubling as a maritime library and model ship room. Once in the muddy Thames Estuary itself, appropriately enough a sailing barge, Orinoco, passed by, a spaniel scampering across her hatches. Martyn noted the sky-width, the soft reflections and, of course, the colour: ‘The sea is blue and yellow, amazing.’
He spent that summer painting the seascapes of Suffolk, Essex and Kent all from the cockpit or sometimes Nightfall’s skiff. I felt like Canaletto’s gondolier as I rowed Martyn from location to location. In the Walton Backwaters, Martyn said: ‘I love this mud, my colours for it are pink, sienna, mauve.’ Back aboard at dusk a cow somewhere moaned like a dying man and Martyn said: ‘This place is not just about boats. The sky…to see those birds lifting, pure beauty, fogs, mists, clouds, grasses, wind blowing through trees, so much beauty. Mud, sky, sea and land all part of the scene.’
After a morning on Suffolk’s River Deben, his easel set up on the shingle entrance, he said: ‘I’m tired, the concentration which goes into the end of that brush! I’m trying to record feeling, atmosphere, not how it looks. I’m trying to look at the past. Is it different? No – it hasn’t changed at all. Barge rudders rotting, cormorants diving, brown water, the popple on the tide, the boat just lifting. I love it. East Anglia has a soul…it’s oozing out of the mud, you can feel the history, even talking to the people….’
Aboard Nightfall, once sailed and owned by the naval architect and editor, Maurice Griffiths, Martyn and his wife Bryony have cruised to Normandy, Brittany, the Channel Islands and the West Country, every passage a search for subjects to paint from Brixham trawlers and Bristol Channel pilot cutters to sardine-fishing boats and tunnymen, not to mention the great yacht races past and present on his home waters of the Solent.
I joined Martyn on another of his painting adventures on this occasion to the German Frisian Islands. We went by road as there was not enough time to spare before the late Maldwin Drummond’s book, The Riddle, was published to sail Nightfall there. Martyn was to provide the illustrations for the book which examined the story behind Erskine Childers’ celebrated novel The Riddle of the Sands.
We visited several of those bleak and mysterious islands with Martyn ever seeking the pigmentation that other, lazier eyes miss. While looking out towards Spiekeroog he said: ‘Look at that colour.’ The cold wind had suddenly increased covering the weak autumn sun with cloud. I looked, I saw only grey and said so.
‘No look down at the edge there: violet, see that? It’s water.’ Nightfall is now sold because Martyn, like his hero, Claud Worth, wants to sail further afield. He is planning painting cruises to the West Coast of Scotland, Ireland, The Isles of Scilly, and South Brittany aboard his new boat, Peregrine, a 39ft Bermudan cutter, built of Burmese teak at William Fife’s Scottish yard in 1936. Martyn and Bryony are currently restoring her under cover at Bembridge, on their native Isle of Wight.
When I visited the boat in the spring the pair had just finished the galley and head and the result is stunning: a clean, unfussy almost spartan interior which put me in mind of the quality but minimalistic finish of a Spirit Yacht. ‘What I love about this boat, apart from her classic beauty,’ Martyn said, ‘is that there is so much storage space. Now I will be able not just to stow my easels, paints and brushes, but there’s room too, to hang drying canvasses in the foc’sle.’
A full list of available works by Martyn R. Mackrill is available online, or enquire at our gallery in St. James's