Ahead of his upcoming solo exhibition in Lewes, Tom Benjamin looks back at three decades of painting the same two rocks at Hope Gap — a subject transformed again and again by light, tide and time.
"A while ago, I was talking to an artist friend about returning to the same subject over many years – he does this too. He said that the trouble is you never really know whether you're mining a rich seam or flogging a dead horse. In a way, painters are always in that position. All you really have to go on is whether you still feel a sense of discovery and excitement in what you're doing.
I've recently been selecting work for my next solo show at the Star Brewery Gallery in Lewes (11–26 April 2026), and alongside new subject matter there are themes that have never quite let go of me.
Perhaps the most long-standing centres on two particular rocks at Hope Gap – a small beach on the Sussex coast, cut off at high tide and backed by chalk cliffs. Low tide reveals a foreshore rich with rockpools, and from the beach you can see the famous Seven Sisters cliffs. Large chalky boulders and rocks are a distinctive feature of the beach. I've been painting these two rocks, along with their neighbours, for about thirty years. There will be two new paintings of them in the show – one large, one small.
The obvious questions are: why paint them, and why so often?
It's difficult to answer, because all I know for sure is that when I go to Hope Gap with a fresh canvas, I sometimes look at the rocks and feel a sudden excitement – something in the quality of light and space around them, and in their physical presence, which is different every time. I think I paint them because I find them, and their relation to their surroundings, ever more beautiful each time I see them. That feeling brings with it an overwhelming desire to paint them again. They sit slightly apart from the other rocks at Hope Gap and are the first ones you reach coming down the steps (now closed, but that's another story). Their pale colours mean they reflect light even in shadow – cool light from the sky, or warm yellow and orange when backlit by the sunlit cliffs.
Alongside this is the excitement of translating those qualities into paint. Something formal has caught my attention again – perhaps the relationship between busy and quiet areas, or the colour relationships, which are always central for me. There is also the tension between the scale, physicality and weight of the rocks and the fleeting character of the light playing across them, and the way the tones of the surrounding rockpools can make the rocks seem hard to read at first. But those formal elements are inseparable from my emotional response to the subject and my sense of the place. The long association – painting them over decades, watching my children climb on them when they were small – has made them part of my internal landscape too.
I paint best when I am directly in front of my subject, which means hauling all my gear – sometimes including quite large canvases – down to the beach and weighting everything down with rocks. Painting on location means painting a moving target: the light, weather and tide are constantly changing. I tend to work on each painting in two-hour sessions, returning at the right tide and time of day until they are finished. When the two hours are up, I move to another canvas, so I often have quite a few on the go at once.
Scroll down the page to see selection of some of my favourites. I'm really looking forward to showing a couple of new ones in April – they continue a long conversation with a much-loved rock."
Tom Benjamin's solo exhibition Traveller's Joy is at the Star Brewery Lewes, 11-26 April 2026.
And you can find out more about Tom and his work on his website, or NEAC artist profile where you will find a selection of his work available to buy online.
