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Green Pebble Magazine
Rood Hall Studio
Bungay Road
Beccles NR34 8HE
Articles> Tessa Newcomb
Image published
with permission of the artist
Tessa
Newcomb lives much as she paints; in a quaint little house in the midst of
an abundant Suffolk countryside, surrounded by blossoms, bird feeders and
hand-painted milk jugs. Just a few steps separate the gate from the house
and at the back of the property her courtyard barely has room for the shed
in which she stores some of her materials.
Her studio – or painting room – overlooks this courtyard, which
could be a perfect roosting place for a chicken or two, but here Tessa draws
the line: no chickens, no dog, no matter how much she enjoys painting them.
Now that her children Tiggy and Henry have grown up and left home –
‘Well, more or less; Tiggy’s here at the moment’ –
she wants to travel with her partner, Telfer, and is not getting as much pleasure
from the East Coast’s hot summer as one might expect.
‘I tend to do rather ordinary paintings during the summer. I don’t
know about you, but I always feel the summer is for other people,’ she
says thoughtfully; this, from a woman who will have done her sketches and
completed a couple of paintings in the time most people take to have their
breakfast, and in the process produce the very summer scenes her collectors
covet.
Her latest paintings are of a little girl shaking the sand from her beach
towel. The painted boards stand side by side on a mantel piece, drying. Around
the corner from them, just inside the studio door, lies a stack of similar
boards, in various sizes, prepared and ready; and beside these, a small heap
of papers with sketches on them. They are from Tessa’s trip to Sizewell
beach, near Aldeburgh in Suffolk. There are drawings of a goldfinch; a house
with black weatherboard cladding; thistles rolling along the sand dunes.
There are also annotations beside the sketches; these will be her only guide
to her choice of colour, mood and composition because there never has been,
nor will be, photographs to act as aides-memoire. ‘I’m not painting
from my imagination either,’ she points out. ‘I’m painting
from my drawings, which trigger my memory and as I remember the scene, it
takes on a life of its own.’
With a BA Hons degree from Bath Academy of Art and a career spanning thirty-two
years, Tessa paints what she loves best: ‘Little caught incidents.’
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