Samuel Bassett: From the Same Sea

I went out in the van on the odd bright day, paper and canvas beside me, looking for somewhere to tuck in out of the wind. It always has to begin from life - not through a lens or somebody else’s eye, but through direct experience. So I started with the sea. Small studies at first. Fragments. Rhythms. Ideas washing together with the coastline.

There is only one sea really, even if maps divide it up. The works arrived from it. As do we. From the same sea.

These paintings feel like the beginning of something - a shift in material, thought, freedom and relationships. Figures drift through them, steering half in and half out of frame, contemplative, lost, dissolving into their surroundings. Gestural marks become movement, spirit, memory. A towel flickers like a fin in the wind. Human and sea creature blur together. We are still tied to the water somehow. Still hake beneath it all.

The orange skies carry memories of my grandad’s fishing boats, painted the same colour, all gone now. These works became reflections on change - of family, community and place. A harbour town once full of life can begin to feel like a façade; granite standing where voices, games, tears and histories once lived. Yet the paintings are not only about loss. A sunset can also be a sunrise. An ending can become a beginning.

Faces appear everywhere for me now - in clouds, rocks, fields and water. Old friends beneath the same sun. People separated by invisible boundaries, connected more than ever yet somehow further apart. Small boats give way to vast container ships on the horizon, carrying more and more, progress always pushing forward. But I still want the little boat. The slower rhythm. The feeling of belonging to something shared.

The sea reminds me that everything moves in cycles. Seasons roll through us. We drift apart and return again. Clouds change shape but never truly disappear. Maybe we are the same. Temporary forms in an endless tide, all carried by the same current, all returning eventually to where we began.

So long as the sun comes up tomorrow, there is still something to steer towards.

From the Same Sea, An introduction from the artist, Samuel Bassett.