In 2015 and 2016, artist Paul Butler undertook four stages of an artist in residency at Tenby Museum and Art Gallery, where he made studies of the town and its wonderfully dramatic landscape during the ever-shifting seasons. These studies have formed the basis of his new exhibition On The Edge of the Ocean, opening at Tenby Museum and Art Gallery on May 12.

“My overwhelming feeling about Tenby,” Paul says, “is that it is an elemental place, dominated by great rocks and huge beaches; the ‘Little Fortress of the Fishes’ on the edge of the Atlantic, its cliffs and harbour shielding the kids as they play on the beach with their inflatable sharks and plastic toys.”

Paul has family connections with the area. His mother’s family were farmers and horse-breeders, including pit ponies, in Penally.

“Family mythology and history become curiously mixed: my great-grandfather throwing himself off Giltar Point, his body washed up in Marloes; Augustus John, whose work is represented in the museum, diving into the sea at Giltar, hitting his head on a rock and emerging a changed person; Nina Hamnett dancing naked on the café tables of Montparnasse; my grandfather, returning from the Great War a broken man, starting a tailoring business in Tenby, which failed; my grandmother managing the Castle View Hotel. Whilst there is an inescapable sadness about these stories, overwhelmingly my memories of Tenby are of the joy of being in the elements. And now my children come and bring their children on holiday and the family connection continues.”

Of the work in the show, Paul says: “The edge of the Ocean, where sea, land and sky meet is a spectacle of the sublime, a space of beauty but great danger. But banality intrudes. The dramatic coast becomes the seaside. ‘A Port in a Storm’ becomes the pub, fish are dipped in batter and deep-fried. When the sandcastles are washed away by the tide parents take their children shopping. So these paintings are about contradiction - between cold rock and warm bodies, between the ephemeral and the ancient, between joy and sadness. And they are about the permanent and the temporary, a sense that the rocks and the sea see the people come and go. The holidaymakers, the children, the boatmen, the ghosts, they make their entrances and exits, play their parts: comic, tragic or farcical. We are left with the intensity of memory - of sensations - bare feet on hot sand, cold sea, rushing into the breakers in the rain.”

Paul has had many exhibitions nationally and internationally and originally trained as a sculptor. Until 2009, he was head of painting and professor of fine art at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of London and in many private collections, including that of Booker shortlisted author Peter Ackroyd and Harry Potter villain Ralph Fiennes.

The exhibition On The Edge of the Ocean will be officially opened by Dr. Tom Camps at Tenby Museum and Art Gallery on Friday, May 12, and opens to the public on Saturday, May 13. This sales exhibition runs until Sunday, June 25.