Roddy Ritchie

High Water World – the thoughts and creative practice involved in my paintings.

I'm not a conchologist, but I'm interested in using seashells in paintings related to climate change, global heating, and rising sea levels. I've been a lifelong beachcomber. I grew up in a fishing village on the East Coast of Scotland called Gourdon, pronounced 'Gurden' in the Doric tongue.

I started beachcombing at a very early age, and I have continued to search beaches all over Scotland and beyond for all sorts of treasures and other delights – for 50 years and more. The beach, any beach, is very much my happy place, much like many people the world over.

Our connection/wonder with the beach and the dividing line, which is water and dry land, is deep-rooted. In ancient times, seafarers gazed out to the horizon, wondering if one would fall off the world's edge or if something was beyond the horizon – exciting, dangerous, profitable, otherworldly.

We have all seen the glorious sunrise or sunset – again, the world over from a beach. The dog walks in a raging gale. Salt on the lips, the soundtrack of deafening roaring waves as the wind buffets you. There are a million other reasons for loving the beach and where the high tide is stopped in its tracks by terra firma. I'm sure you will agree. Terra firma, the Latin phrase, literally means "firm land."

However, terra firma is entering a new chapter or battle with the sea and oceans. The ever-growing high water is pushing further inland, all courtesy of global heating and climate change. The planet is sending out an SOS to us. And we seem to be sleepwalking into an environmental disaster – no matter the warnings we are being given by scientists, the media, and nature herself.

What will it take for us to change our habits and wake up to the fact that our legacy to the children of the future is one of inaction, greed, consumption, and arrogance for the planet's health in the here and now?

Over the past few years, I started picking up seashells that have been whitewashed and gnarled by the sun and saltwater – dead, empty homes of once-living creatures. In effect, a tiny world of their own, now gone, lost and forgotten, situated at the very top of the tide line. Interesting and often broken shells. Tangled with all sorts of detritus that the waves and tide have shaped and created.

The arrangements and patterns created frequently look structured, organized, and massaged into shape – for example, tapering to the side, fat in the middle, etc. Complex tangles and continuously compacted interwoven spirals of things, seaweed, shells, twigs, plastic rope, all the stuff that high water delivers to the top of the beach. All are forced to comply with the creative wishes of the moon, tide, wind, and the waves that put them there. Crowded, pushed up, and now with global heating issues, the waves and tides will be pushing ever further up the beach and encroaching on our fragile manmade world. Crowding and pushing us into more complicated living arrangements and behaviours.

As a boy growing up in a fishing village, I heard every day the fishermen asking (shouting across the pier), 'When is high water?' – calculating the 12-hour cycle of moon, gravity, tide, and wind. It was an ever-changing time that had specific ramifications for fishing activities in a harbour that dried out when the tide was out – low water.

The magnitude and concept of high and low water are planetary phenomena. Something not often thought about when pondering the sea or dawdling along a beach or coastal path—high and low water affect everything on the planet. Global heating and climate change are other unfortunate planetary realities affecting everything and everywhere every day, and we seem to be dawdling along as ever, head in the sand, as it were.

Governments are terrified of upsetting the carbon fuel industry providers and avoiding the hard decisions needed to implement radical policy change – for everything connected to a different way of living and a sustainable global economic management plan. Consumerism remains the goal (smash and grab, then move on); the capitalist model is KING.

I have created paintings using the shells I have collected over the past few years in a style and arrangement that reflects my thoughts about the high water sculptures that the tide and waves have created at the top of the beach – related to my thoughts and concerns about climate change. Shapes and textures in a painting format with three-dimensional aspects, especially when lit from above, casting shadows on the canvas, bringing a different feel and look when illuminated at night.

The 'ordered chaos' of the shells pushed up against one another, creating patterns and interesting partnerships of motion and linkage. The pallet knife pushing the paint with energy and flow over the large canvases, impasto style. The rhythm of the colour and paint working in tandem with the shell sculptures. A forced and ordered visual narrative on a canvas that is not natural in nature, as is the case with our influence on the health and welfare of the living planet in the form of our manmade climate change catastrophe.

The late Joan Eardley, one of Scotland's most important and popular 20th-century artists, incorporated material from her surroundings when painting in violent storms on the cliffs and beaches near Catterline. Her gallery representatives discouraged her from this practice, but for me, combining the elements around her in the paintings brings a real sense of vitality and connectedness to her environment. There is an energy that stands out from the canvas and almost allows one to feel and smell the weather and overall scene she painted. Her painting style has significantly influenced me and many other artists. Joan loved the raging North Sea and the East Coast of Scotland, as I do. Gurden, as the seagull flies, is only a few miles from Catterline.

It's taken me three years to figure out how to use the shells in the paintings to illustrate the SOS the planet is sending us. The high water is on the move, and it's getting higher with every passing year. Island communities in the Pacific and Indian Ocean are all too aware of their fragile existence and the immediate climate catastrophe descending on their way of life.

Let's hope that as a species, we don't take too many more years to figure out that we have to significantly change our habits and behaviour if we are going to have a planet to live on in relative safety and comfort – avoiding the incoming high water and overall climate change inevitability.

Or – will we all drown in a fit of eco-global anxiety on a boiling planet, like the dead, broken, whitewashed shells at the top of the beach? As it were – all washed up…

It's up to us to save our souls and, therefore, the blue planet. SOS.