Edward Seago: "Endeavor"

"The Bure Near Upton" by Edward Seago

"Back in Norfolk after the war, Edward Seago found a temporary antidote to his restlessness in the shape of an old naval sailing vessel and sported a 'For Sale' notice across her bows. The 'Endeavor' was fifty-two feet long, sturdily built and suitable for cruising on the Broadland rivers and at sea. Seago visualized sailing her up the Norfolk coast to familiar painting spots or going south to explore the Suffolk and Essex estuaries and then cruising up the Thames, lingering in the Pool of London to paint before working his way up the river to Oxford and the Berkshire meadows.

His preoccupation was with tantalizing views from the wheelhouse of subjects he could hardly wait to paint. He visualized himself, during the coming years, mooring his floating studio to every yard of bank along some two hundred miles of local rivers. So he finally embarked on his life-long mission which was to discover and portray the meaning behind the beauties of nature he recognized all round. 

From then on, like Constable, he took nature as his subject and was the constant student. 'My attitude to nature is one of enquiry - an endless search for explanations and discovery,' he noted in pencil on blank pages of his sketchbook. 'I believe that the more searching one does the more one's appreciation grows. Subjects present themselves which had not been apparent before, and fresh lines of thought invite enquiry.' 

It was the first time since his lonely boyhood that he had long periods of quiet to indulge his thoughts uninterrupted by the succession of events that had crowded his life since the day, sixteen years ago, when he had left home to join the circus. The circus and the ballet had tested and proved his technique and broadened his personal perspective; the war had released his capacity to express emotion. At last he had arrived at a point when he could accept that his senses were most stirred by the great expanses of sky and by moving clouds and the shadow of trees reflected in slow-moving water so that he need go no further than the familiar places he had loved in boyhood, where wind and weather and the seasons offered him a new subject every day and a joy which it was his challenge to convey."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)