The studio is a ten-minute walk from the water. That's close enough to hear the wind change and feel the weather shift, but far enough that I can work without being distracted — which is to say, I'm distracted constantly, but at least the distractions are useful ones.
Working in Whitstable means working inside a landscape that refuses to sit still. The light changes through the day, the sea changes through the week, and the town itself changes through the year in ways that still catch me off guard after all this time here.
Autumn and Winter: The Making Season
September brings the visitors home and gives the town back to itself. There's a quality of early autumn light here — lower, warmer, cutting across the rooftops in a particular way — that feels immediately productive. The summer energy quietens. There's space to think.
Winter is the deepest working time. The harbour is quiet, the beach walks are long and solitary, and the studio gets genuinely cold in a way that's bracing rather than miserable if you dress for it. Some of the most sustained work happens in the months between November and February — no events, no distractions, just the coast and the canvas.
Spring: Starting Again
Spring in Whitstable comes in gradually, and then suddenly. The sea anemones appear in the rock pools, the weekend visitors start to drift back, and the light picks up a brightness that feels almost startling after months of grey. It's the season for starting new bodies of work — the energy is right for it.
The town itself blooms in spring in a way that's almost quietly theatrical: the front gardens, the handmade signs, the little touches that remind you why this particular place holds people so completely.
Summer: Looking and Noticing
The studio is cooler than outside in summer, which makes it a good place to retreat to at midday. But summer work happens as much outside the studio as in it. Long walks at dawn before the beach fills up. Noticing the quality of light on the water at seven in the morning. Sketching at the harbour, drawing the boats before the tourists arrive with their cameras.
Summer is the research season as much as the making season. What gets gathered in the warmth gets processed and distilled through the winter.
On Working in a Place You Love
There's an argument that working in a beautiful place is indulgent — that art shouldn't require an exceptional landscape to draw from. I've thought about this and I disagree. The landscape doesn't do the work for you. But it does give you an inexhaustible subject, and in the early years, that's not a small thing. Whitstable has given me enough material to last a career, and I'm still finding new corners of it.
The LRM Studio is open for commissions and original work year-round. If you'd like a piece from a particular season or a specific part of the coast, get in touch — some of the best work we've made has started with that kind of conversation.
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