Edwin Ellis' Welsh Coast

The Welsh Coast

I struggled getting going with writing my 500 words on this, I think the main barrier was getting into other forms of art than photography. It took quite a while to get past the point of thinking "what can I write other than 'this is good' or 'I like this'". But I started noting down little details about the painting, which lead me to create a structure for the essay, which at least was a starting point if nothing else.

After planning out what I was going to write about, and in what order, I managed to produce this essay about the painting.

My 500 words

The piece I chose was Edwin Ellis' painting 'Welsh Coast'. The painting instantly stood out to me because of the size, the contrast in the colours and the detail in the scenery. Although the people and animals appear to be the subjects, the land that they are situated on takes up far less of the painting than the sea does. Another quality that caught my attention was the detail in the animals in the foreground was far greater than that of the people in the background; this is either to give the effect of depth of field for aesthetic purposes, or for a more metaphoric reason, like the people being of little importance.

In the painting, Wales looks massively different to modern day Wales. Ellis' perception of the coast looks more like a desert island, inhabited by jungles and wild animals, as apposed to Wales a century later which looks far more suburban. The scene looks distant from civilization in my opinion, mainly due to the grassy area on the beach, which looks more like a jungle than a place anybody would live.

To me, the characters in the piece look uncivilized, and almost like scavengers in a way, the single improvised shelter on the beach looks less like the sunny paradise I first saw, and more like the people are stranded, using whatever resources they can find to get by. Aswell as that, the people have wild animals roaming near them, and they are changing in front of each other, which I perceive as being almost savage, having no structure or care about their lifestyles, and having little dignity, or respect for their surroundings.

This leads me to think that the people lived simple lives; they don't appear to have a source of food or water, they don't have careers or homes like regular people would, and they aren't even dressed. At first glance, the painting just seems like a 'nice' picture of the beach, but looking further into it, I have a massively different opinion of the scene now.

I thought the painting was really open to interpretation, which is the most important quality to any piece of art; I have scene people living in a sense of poverty, whereas others may see it as a paradise. Although I couldn't relate it to another painting, the picture instantly reminded me of early parts of J. J. Abrams' series 'Lost', which featured characters being stranded on an island. After seeing so much of a story from this piece, I would look into more of Edwin Ellis' work, although working with photography instead of painting, it is difficult to take much inspiration from The Welsh Coast.