Emotional undercurrent
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Words by Mercedes Smith
Greg Ramsden’s new paintings explore the mesmerising push and pull of our tidal estuaries.
Greg Ramsden recently celebrated being elected to the Royal Society of Marine Artists. It is an honour he has earned through two decades of painting the marine environment and the communities and working histories that surround it. “The RSMA is built around artists who live with the sea, not just those who paint it,” he says, “so becoming a member feels like a homecoming. It tells me that the long path I have walked, with regard to my passion for painting life on the coast, has been seen and is valued by my peers.” Greg is an award-winning artist who makes work inspired by coastal landscapes, from his home in South Devon to the Eastern Seaboard of North America, and even out on the ocean. In 2025 he won the Guild of Ships Painting Award and took up the prize of an Artist Residency on the 68ft Lugger and eco-sailing vessel Grayhound on its journey from the UK to France last summer. A selection of the resulting works has been exhibited at Mall Galleries, London.
Throughout April and May of this year, Greg presents a new collection at Tonic Gallery in Salcombe, which explores the beauty of Devon and Cornwall’s tidal estuaries. “Estuaries have a very particular presence,” says Greg. “I am inspired by both their history and their quiet drama. These are flooded areas, once valleys between steep mountains, now filled with tidal waters. You can feel the ancient landscape beneath the surface, that sense of place that has been reshaped but not erased. Estuaries are places where the sea, land and light are always in motion and nothing is fixed. Tides pull, the water rises and falls, and the atmosphere changes minute to minute. Estuaries are a threshold between certainty and uncertainty, between solidity and fluidity. That tension is what fuels my work.” Inspired by locations including the Camel estuary in Cornwall; and the Kingsbridge and Dart estuaries in Devon, these paintings capture the shadowy shapes and refracted light of the coastal landscape as the ocean moves inland up the river, and back out on a retreating tide, in a palette of colours and soft brush marks that capture the haze of sunlight on seawater.
It is a radiant and deeply calming collection of works. “Estuaries are peaceful in a way that the open coast is not,” says Greg. “There are no breaking waves, just a rise and fall that feels more like breathing than an elemental force. Estuaries have a sonic calmness, often just of birdsong, the lapping of water against the bank, and the quiet shift of the river. That soundscape sets the emotional tone of my paintings long before the visual details do.” These tidal places, Greg tells me, mirror his own working process of quiet, settled drawing on the coastline, before the image is transformed and endlessly revisited. “In those first plein air sketches my eye is never looking for the whole scene,” he says. “It is looking for the structure beneath it, the rhythms and the lines that hold the landscape together, the weight of the sky, the pull of the tide line, the geometry of the coast.” Greg makes these sketches quickly with graphite or charcoal in a small sketchbook, “making marks before my mind has time to interfere – a gesture for the land, a suggestion of movement, the silhouette of a cliff or light sparkling on the water. My sketches are about finding the pulse of a place. Once I’ve caught that, larger drawings will emerge, and from then the work progresses naturally into paint.”
The wonder of estuaries, he says, is that they teach us to pay attention to subtle shifts in the world, and the way patterns return again and again. “Estuaries, like all landscapes, alter dramatically throughout the day and throughout the year,” he says, “as the angle of the sun changes and the hours turn. A misty landscape on an April morning might be flat and shadowless on a hot July afternoon. The same is true of colours. They shift completely between the UK coast and the American seaboard, or out at sea on the Grayhound, but the greatest influence is not geography; it is the seasons. On the English coast my palette changes constantly: early spring brings soft pastel tones, a kind of tentative brightness, but in summer there is that gold shimmering morning light that feels almost weightless. Winter is the opposite; it is muted, monochrome, the world reduced to essentials. America’s Atlantic coast has its own clarity; it has a harder light and sharper contrast, but when I’m sailing, the colours don’t just change, they behave differently. At sea, the light is unfiltered. There’s nothing to interrupt it. It comes at you clean and absolute. The horizon becomes a sharp blade and colours separate, rather than blend. The open ocean reflects the only sky, so the whole world becomes a single, shifting field of tone. When I am painting, at sea, on the coast, or at the mouth of a river, I am always trying to capture what is already dissolving, a moment that refuses to stay still.”
For this exhibition, the Dart estuary has proved particularly inspirational, “because it is the stretch of water I know most intimately, from Totnes Weir down through Tuckenhay’s Bow Creek, across to Stoke Gabriel and along the foreshore at Dittisham and out to sea past Dartmouth. It is the estuary I live closest to, the one I walk in every season and in every kind of weather, and I think that repeated, lived‑in familiarity has shaped my work more deeply than any other place. What draws me back are the many different worlds the Dart holds within a single tide. Some days the water is a mirror, and on other days it is a sheet of pewter. Its transitions are beautiful, from the place where the river meets the bank, to the tidal zone where the seaweed begins and ends and the rocks emerge as the water level drops. Everything shifts gradually. Those soft edges and slow changes are exactly the qualities I try to put into my paintings.”
Greg describes his work and his career to me as, “a long conversation with the coast”, one that has been influenced by his life in the South West and the artists whose work he has learned from and continues to admire. “Several important artists have significantly shaped the way I think about the coastal landscape,” says Greg. “The ones I admire most are those who work with mood and the emotional temperature of a moment. Peter Lanyon’s paintings of the Cornish coast feel like lived experiences. He painted from within the landscape, gliding, climbing, and sensing the air and the pull of the land. Joan Eardley’s Catterline paintings have taught me that honesty and atmosphere matters, and Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series showed me how a landscape can be pared down to rhythm and colour without losing its sense of place. Edward Hopper’s work demonstrates how light can carry narrative, how stillness can hold tension, and photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes are pure meditation, defined in a single horizon line and infinite variations of light. What connects all these artists is their ability to reveal the hidden frequencies and the emotional undercurrent beneath what the eye sees. That’s what I am always searching for and trying to capture in my work.”
See the Estuaries collection from 3rd April to 21st May 2026 at Tonic Gallery, 7-9 Union Street, Salcombe, Devon TQ8 8BZ and at tonicgallery.co.uk.
