Beginnings of a Great Day

Almost two thirds of this painting is sky. A line of fat cumulus clouds sits along the horizon like a row of parked ships, lit warm on their undersides, while above them the blue deepens toward the top edge. Beneath, the tide has pulled far out and left a wide sheet of wet sand that doubles the sky, holding the same pinks and blues in shallow pools. The dark strip of dunes in the distance is barely there at all, just enough to separate water from air. Trace the ripples in the sand and you can read where the water ran as it drained away, fanning out in fine grooves that catch the light.

Nicola Wakeling is a contemporary British painter who works in oil and returns again and again to tidal beaches, the kind found on the Norfolk coast and in the Scottish islands, where the sea retreats so far that the shore turns into a mirror. Her paintings belong to a long line of British landscape work that treats weather and light as the real subject, with people left out entirely. The title points to an early hour, before footprints, when the beach is still exactly as the tide made it. There is not much event here, but the way the wet sand and the sky trade colours is worth following from the foreground to the far dunes.