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Oil on canvas
As a child I seemed to have spent a long time waiting to become an adult but thankfully never really achieved that status. Most of all I wanted to flee from the Royal Burgh of Kinghorn which I considered depressingly dull and parochial.
After spending many years in Dundee, London and Edinburgh however, I began to realise what a great place Kinghorn actually was. When I moved back I spent much of my spare time roaming along the Fife coast, sketching the old harbours and docks that are often ruinous reminders of Fifes rich nautical heritage. In the course of this I did a number of drawings and paintings of the Kinghorn area and some of these are shown here.
Every morning, come rain, hail or shine I'd walk down the hill with the dogs to the beach. Invariably Davy and his crony Fred would be leaning over the harbour wall chewing the fat. Usually their talk was of the weather or fishing but the words I've
put into their mouths are dysfunctional art speak.
"I'd rather be in a landscape by Mackintosh Patrick than this shite."
"This felt suit by Joseph Beuys is braw and warm."
I was still at school when I started drawing out of doors. The more I think about it the stranger this activity seems and initially it took a certain amount of courage to overcome my teenage embarrassment. Nowadays I try to blend in with the environment and choose a drawing station so that unwanted visitors can't creep up behind me. One day I was making an ink drawing of the view from Dodhead towards Burntisland. This is an area lost in the fields at the edge of an escarpment that is rarely visited. I was concentrating on my work but suddenly had the uneasy sensation that I was being watched. I turned round and found a fox standing a few feet away, curiously observing me. It loped casually away not the least bit concerned.
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| Burntisland from Dodhead Ink on paper Private collection |
At school I was encouraged to draw out of doors by my art teacher, Tom Gourdie M.B.E. He became well known for his numerous books on calligraphy but was also a prolific water colourist. He made many paintings of places in Kirkcaldy that were about to be swept away by the 1960's redevelopments. He also painted every coal mine in Fife, a collection that was purchased by the National Coal Board. Where this work is now I do not know but they have a historical significance as all the pits have gone
Old houses, Kinghorn 1964
Ball point on paper
Gourdie encouraged the use of the ball point pen and added his own hand to this drawing by strengthening the shading. He probably didn't realise then that ball point ink fades and the drawing, now badly foxed, has survived because it spent a long time in a dark attic. At art college I discovered the wonderful graphic qualities of Indian ink, used with steel and reed pens and tonal washes. I made several more drawings of these old houses over the years but never drew in ball point again.
Ink and watercolour on paper.
Private collection
In the 1960's Kinghorn began to change quite rapidly. Part of the High Street and South Overgate were redeveloped and private housing began to spread over the old wartime fortifications on Crying Hill and down Pettycur road. There was a bottle works at Pettycur harbour and a siding off the main railway line brought in sand and took new whisky bottles away. When I was a student I did this pencil sketch from high on Kinghorn golf course. The people who built the new houses on Crying Hill complained of the smoke from the bottle works chimney and this had to be extended in height. Most Horner's thought,
"Well, what do you expect if your stupid enough to build a house near to the top of a smoking lum?"
The bottle works closed in 1982 and the area is now private housing.
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| Kinghorn bottle works Pencil on paper 1968 |
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| Pettycur pier Ink and watercolour on paper Private collection |
Pettycur pier was constructed for the ferry that sailed regularly from Kinghorn to Leith. No one knows when it started but by the 1830's steam boats were running that connected to a stage coach service. It was closed down in 1847 when the railway opened connecting with the ferry from Burntisland to Granton. By the 1960's the pier was in a desolate state with only two vessels moored there. These were cabin cruisers, the Silver Arrow owned by Mr. Young of Craigencalt and the Silver Spray owned by Millers the Bakers. High on the wall at the start of the pier stood the harbour masters house. This had a wooden veranda to the rear with steps that led down to a sandy inlet for access to the low water pier. You can still see the pier at low tide but the house, a wonderfully quaint structure, was demolished and the back harbour is now a car park built over Kinghorn's sewage treatment works.
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| The Old Ferry Pier, Pettycur Oil on canvas, 50cms x 70cms |
The Spring storm of 2010 almost cut the pier in half but has now been repaired. It is a popular spot for leisure fishermen and there are seventeen wooden sheds nestling along the piers length. However, at the time of writing there are only ten moored boats, although two or three of these are professional creel boats.
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| Fishermen's Huts, Pettycur Oil on board, 46cms x 61cms |
The loss of the ferry must have been a serious financial blow to the Burgh but eventually the railway brought in new industry. The Abden shipyard opened in 1864 with iron, boilers and some workers being brought in by rail. This must have transformed the old decaying seaport into a noisy industrial town with hundreds of riveters hammering vigorously on red hot rivets. To make the environment worse a glue works had opened at the top of the Braes in 1854. Glue making consisted in the prolonged boiling of animal skins or bones and created a terrible smell. There was also trouble with effluent from the glue works running down the braes to the beach. Possibly worst of all was the human excrement that spewed out onto the sand at low tide. This was still a problem when I was a teenager and I remember asking a Royal Burgh councilor if any thing could be done about this. His reply was as astonishing as it was ignorant. He stated that as the faeces was in salt water it could do you no harm! For all that the holiday makers kept on coming and Kinghorn, like all the Fife coastal towns was packed out during the Glasgow and Edinburgh fairs. That is, until the 1970's when cheap air travel and package holidays whisked the population away to Spain.
The Abden ship yard had it's ups and downs and launched it's last ship, the S.S. Kinghorn in 1923. The three slipways are best seen at low tide and over the years I made several drawings of them. The sea has inevitably taken it's toll and it's hard to believe that it was such a busy and industrious place. The area is now a holiday caravan park.
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| The old slipways, Abden Ink and watercolour on paper |
The power of the sea is irresistible and on 1st March 2010 the old limestone sea wall that had been built by the shipyard was breached by a ferocious storm. Two mobile homes ended in the sea, fortunately unoccupied. I was down at the front a few minutes after high tide. There was a north easterly gale blowing, a very high tide and a meter storm surge in the north sea caused by the gale. This conjunction caused massive coastline erosion. Kinghorn Bay was like an enormous washing machine with broken boats, gas canisters, mattresses and numerous lengths of timber from the mobile homes churning around in the waves. Boats had been swept across the tank top which was almost submerged and the end of the old life boat shed smashed in. The big doors of the current life boat station were buckled by the weight of water and stones driven against it.
I returned the next morning and the Council had a team down on the beach doing a great job clearing the debris. The waves had scoured all the sand away down to the bedrock but piled a drift of stones against the promenade. The most remarkable discovery was the sheets of metal cladding from the mobile homes had been rolled into perfect green balls just like crumpled sheets of paper. Such is the power of the churning sea.
This was an unusual event and one that I thought worthy of recording. Some years previously I had painted a number of coastal scenes but destroyed most of them. I kept a few that were more successful and hid them away in the attic. One of those was of Kinghorn bay. All the buildings were there but the area of the beach and sea was empty and decidedly boring. Now I knew how to fill it.
Oil on board
916mm x 1220mm
We are now being warned to expect more extreme weather events such as this as global warming continues to increase. It is with some irony that I remember how my generation was brought up to take pride in Britain's and especially Scotland's part in the Industrial Revolution. We are now suffering from it's down side. The shipyards, coal mines, steel works and all kinds of manufacturing have been swept away or transferred to other countries where labour is cheaper and environmental controls less strict. But at least locally the Firth of Forth is much cleaner than it used to be. There are signs that fish are beginning to return. I never thought I'd be able to stand on Kinghorn Braes and watch the great splash of a breaching Humpback whale.
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| Southbound, Kinghorn Oil on board, 916mm x 1220mm |
