The Beach Journals

The beach was a constant in my life as a child, growing up a minute’s walk away from it. It was the place of recreation in the summer, to be sure, but a place of reflection, solace and repose at all times of the year, through heat and sun but also through cold, wind and rain. The beach was a daily presence - a place for me to be myself, to be free and alone without seeming alone. A place to rest and reflect on life and all it was offering and not offering. 

The Beach Journals series offers a snapshot of my more recent relationship with the beach. No longer do I enjoy that daily, easy access to the beach; instead I have the same sporadic mainly summer-day based relationship with it that as a boy I considered incomplete (with my privileged life by the sea). I still feel the beach a place to access in all weathers and conditions, but as life intruded I lost this luxury, the way many people do as they grow into lives and careers in the city that takes them away from what it is they really love about the world. In my case that is the sea. This series was almost exclusively created while I pursued a corporate life in London with all the stresses and disappointments of that life, and all the limited time it affords to pursue a life more true to oneself. But it became so clear, as the series evolved and with time to reflect upon it, that the meaning of life was not to be found in that corporate world to which I devoted most of my time, but the brief interludes in between, when I could exist without care by the sea, on the beach.