Just Gentle – The Day the Water Smiled Back
There’s a very particular kind of moment when I know I’m no longer just out on the water – I’m on the edge of an artwork.
Most days, that moment never comes.
People sometimes imagine that every time I take the kayak out, I come home with something magical. The reality is very different. I can paddle for days – even weeks – without seeing anything that feels like a real possibility. The weather might be flat, the wind might be up, the tide might be wrong. The sun is too high, or too low, or behind cloud. The water is choppy, the reflections are dull, or the colours simply don’t speak.
Those days are part of the practice. They’re like turning up to the studio and sweeping the floor. Necessary, but unglamorous.
And then there are the other days.
Every now and again, nature decides to shine on you. The light is right, the wind drops, the surface of the water turns into something between glass and silk. You feel less like you’re on top of the water and more as if you’ve been invited into it – embedded in it, if that’s possible. The physical, spiritual and mental all seem to line up. Your body is paddling, but your mind is very, very still.
Just Gentle came out of one of those days.
I remember feeling as though I wasn’t separate from the scene in front of me. The reflections weren’t just “out there” to be captured; I felt like I was inside them. The blue was soft, the ripples were slow and unhurried, and there was a lightness in the air that I can still feel in my shoulders when I think about it.
When I raised the camera, it wasn’t a dramatic “this is it!” moment. It was quieter than that – a calm certainty. Something in me recognised that this wasn’t just a beautiful patch of water; it was the beginning of an artwork. I took the photograph almost as a reflex, as if the water and the camera had already agreed what they wanted to do and I was just there to press the button.
Making Just Gentle
Back in the studio, when the image came up on the screen, I had the odd sensation of stepping back into the kayak again. Every time I look at Just Gentle, I feel as though I’m right back there on the water, in that exact patch of blue, taking that exact photograph. It’s not nostalgia – it’s presence. The work doesn’t so much hang on the wall in front of me as open a little door back into that moment of stillness.
And the artwork smiles back.
That might sound strange, but that’s how I experience it. There’s a softness in Just Gentle that feels almost like a personality – calm, welcoming, quietly joyful. It doesn’t shout for attention. It doesn’t demand interpretation. It just sits there, breathing slowly, inviting you to do the same.
As an artist, there’s a wonderful and slightly dangerous test for a new work:
“Would I live with this myself?”
Most works I’m happy to send out into the world for others to live with. But every so often, something appears that touches me so deeply I have to seriously consider keeping it. Just Gentle is one of those pieces. I can very easily imagine it on my own wall, printed very large, filling a room with that soft, blue stillness.
Perhaps that’s the real sign that a moment on the water has become more than a photograph. It has become a place you can return to – not just as the artist who made it, but as anyone who stands in front of it and lets themselves be carried, for a few seconds, into something just… gentle.
