John Tunnard (1900-1971) was a British artist associated with the Surrealist and Neo-Romanticist movements. He began his career in textile design and started painting in 1929. In the early 1930s he moved to Cornwall where he began to paint abstract compositions influenced by the Surrealism of Joan Miró and Paul Klee. This watercolour was painted during World War Two when the artist, a conscientious objector, was working as an auxiliary coastguard. Geometric abstract forms appear to float over a bipartite composition of blue and brown tones. This sense of division suggests the point at which the ocean meets the land and reflects Tunnard’s Modernist redefinition of the English coastal landscape.
