End of pier
- 📍 Location: Berck-sur-Mer, Pas-de-Calais, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
Almost nothing happens in this picture, which took some deciding. A low spit of stone runs in from the right, the sea lies absolutely flat around it, and two people stand at the far end looking out. Everything else is a gradient from pink to pale blue.
I framed with the horizon near the middle and the spit entering low, so the composition is essentially two horizontal bands and one line. That is all the structure it can take. Any foreground interest, any rock, any bird, and the emptiness stops working.
The colour is real. At this hour on this coast the sky goes a soft mauve-pink and the wet sand returns it, and because the water was mirror-still there is no edge at all between the two. I resisted adding contrast in the edit; the whole subject is the absence of contrast.
The two figures are strangers I waited for. I had the frame set up for twenty minutes with nothing in it, and it was flat and dull. They walked out to the end, stopped, and the picture immediately had a reason to exist: scale, and something to look at the emptiness with.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
