TIM BAKER

Before the Mupe Bay Show

Next day at the third attempt I was determined to get to Mupe Bay – the easy way, and with plenty of time to paint it, via the Fossil Forest which geologically nerdy friends of mine had told me about. I had gone past there a few times and saw people on the rocks and wondered how they got down there until I saw the hefty steps. So after getting coffee and breakfast at the Red Lion where I was camping in Winfrith Newburg, I got the bus in and walked from Lulworth – the easy way around the cove and along the coastal path.

No tanks, no tides, no exhausting steps and definitely no scary cliffs like from Bindon Hill.

So I got to the Fossil Forest and read the info and marvelled that mud and trees had created these rocks…and then setup painting one of the formations. Again wave studies – but this time mixed media, watercolour pencil with watercolour. The blurriness gave it an interesting effect, unlike the photo suggests it was a gloriously sunny day, and the sea was that bright greeny blue which I had fun trying to replicate. The closest I got was cerulean or cobalt blue, with little patches of ultramarine or Winsor Green Blue Shade or Manganese Violet. It really did vary that much.

I would have explored the Fossil Forest further but I was joined by a few people, including a cute grandfather with a Cerne Abbas t-shirt – WANT – who was the spit of Rob Halford, another fossil of rock appropriately. I didn’t get his name but he told me about another artist he’d encountered that was using iron ore directly in her work – I explained that most brown pigments are either earth or iron ore. We got chatting for ages about art, design and engineering so I didn’t get to the part with the trees like shrivelled polo mints, as my friend Chris described them accurately.

I felt I had spent far too much time at the forest, so moved onto Mupe Bay at a pace. I was glad to find that my first choice, the old gun emplacement/bunker was free. Like the headland steps at Lulworth you get couples and families colonising spaces like that for a long time. I settled there to draw the scene for my watercolour. It was sunny yet very windy up there, and I almost lost the paper a few times – something that only happened for real inland but didn’t lose any work. This was my first choice, the second choice was sitting in the ruin a few yards away I photographed on my first wander past there.

I’ll discuss the watercolour shortly, but it was interesting after almost a week of walking to stay in one place and document that, and my tired aching legs thanked me for it too! The mountain sheep were still around, and wandered past me when I was drawing the second view of Mupe Bay in ink, and I drew the sheep in front of the bunker in Woody Pencil. Also around the bunker, and along the coast where these metallic daisies and flowers – what seemed to be normal flowers but they had lost their colour, maybe due to dying or the extreme elements.

They shined in the sun, looking very spiky, as spiky as the thistle and bramble on the bunker. There were raspberries or blackberries growing on the bunker.

As I was sitting there a fair few people approached me, it seemed like this was a popular route even on a Tuesday lunchtime! I met a cute bearded man and his wife, who asked to see the work – cute men always get to the front of the queue! And we chatted a little and they parted…and wasn’t the last time I’d see them, or some other people I’d met earlier in the trip. Also I saw a lot of people approach the edge and try and photograph the small cove below which was quite alarming how close they got, I wondered if anyone would fall over.

The sheep liked that area, but I suspect if you were very brave you could make it down there on the scramble paths, or probably safest is to get there via Mupe Bay. Well safer, as I found later.

I did have to suddenly sweep my stuff out of the way as a gang of kids descended and saw the WW2 bunker as a climbing frame. I don’t really get why British parents let their kids run riot on dangerous places like that – and it’s nearly always the British kids. Visitors tend to be politer, or at least understandably more wary, given travel insurance nightmares. Most kids were OK, especially on the campsites and bar babies they conked out early. It was the party tents and adults having fires and chatting loudly til 1-2am that were the main bugbears.

One kid though tried to sass me at Lulworth away from adults calling me ‘old’ while his sister giggled, so he got rudely abd quickly reminded that you don’t get away throwing shade at a queen while wearing shitty fake Raybans.

I think the piece is one of the best of the holiday – certainly the most planned. First done in fountain pen as you can see – I forget which but I think one of the vintage pens, and on Fabriano Paper. Like the view of Man O War beach, my style seemed to shift into less washes and more small pieces of colour, a bit like assembling an artistic jigsaw. Never was totally happy with the colour of the water, but I think I got most of the cliffs. You can see the chalk and the Purbeck beds folding here, and Arish Mell where the caves and inlet are after the white chalk cliffs of Bindon Hill.

I keep forgetting to say this – but this work like all the non-sketchbook pieces is for sale.

I was also slightly unhappy I didn’t get the whole scene, so retired to the grass headland in front of the bunker to draw the scene quickly with my Hero 395 pen. This tends to leak and blob especially when warm as it’s eyedroppered with Hero ink, but I like the full expressive lines. As per the ‘abstract’ comment from the girl at Durdle Door I wanted to simplify the scene into lines, shapes and angles. Blobbing of the ink meant it turned more into a wash drawing, but I like it’s boldness.

So after all that, I decided to brave a descent to Mupe Bay itself. I guess the military have also been keeping this up, as like Fossil Forest there was a very good concrete steps mostly and a metal handrail (luxury!). I wanted to investigate the rock formations at the bottom left of my picture but that area was all massive pebbles. I don’t like walking on rocking or unstable large rocks, especially with a backpack – visions of breaking an ankle or straining it and ruining the rest of the trip, I kept away.

I did draw the bay in several Woody Pencil drawings of Mupe Rocks and Mupe Ledges and the bay, partly focusing on a large rock formation which I called The LIon since it looked like a lion, or a Sphinx or one of those Chinese cat dolls but without a bobbing paw. It was nice to sit in the shade away from the wind for a bit, I was getting rather blasted up there on the headland! That’s what ended those pieces really, more getting rather windswept.

So back to Lulworth and the bus to Winfrith, for my last night there. Had another good meal in the Red Lion (seriously need to stop that on future trips, I burned through more money than I should on meals) and breakfast after (ditto).

I went to one of the few marked village bus stops with my full backpack (I wasn’t risking the unmarked ones this time) and drew a sketch of the pretty thatched houses while I waited. The title came from a feeling of unquiet I felt while at Lulworth and also to some extent at Winfrith – that the locals see backpackers and tourists as a pain, and don’t want to put up with the great unwashed – until they up their property value with work and the attention they give these places.

There’s something I struggle with as an artist – I don’t want to be the shock troops of gentrification; but am aware my work glamourises these places and creates value for them by bringing them to attention. That attention can be damaging or destabilise local economies – whereas mymanifesto which I worked out during a drunken walk back to Durdle Door one night is to bring the beauty of the world to people, to show them how wonderful it is, so they care and save it. But I do worry I am part of the problem as well as trying to be part of the solution.

And while I was waiting, a car stopped, and it was the couple from Lulworth Cove that gave me a lift! They wanted to go with them to Durdle Door, but I’d done my Doodles and wanted to move on to pastures new. So I bid farewell and got onto the bus to Corfe Castle, where I hoped to vary things a little from all these seascapes – if the campsite has space.

Next installment: Tumbles, Rooks and Peregrines, grumpy caravanners, Tea Shops and plastic pens…

• Part 1 – White Horses, Parachutes, Amazing Pebbles & Kites
• Part 2 – Man O War Went Thru The Durdle Door And Got A Dungy Head
• Part 3 – What’s a Sheep Lulworth with All MOD Cons?
• Part 4 – Mupe Bay & Great Fossils of Rock
• Part 5 – Corfe Castle & St Edward The Martyr
• Part 6 – Corfe Castle – Escape from the Model Village
• Part 7 – Swanage Around The Globe On A Tilly Whim