This quartet of works, Aldeburgh, Cap de la Chèvre, Drumrunie, and Forêt de Landévennec, constituted part of Coker’s sketchbook number 20 that he worked on throughout 1985 and into 1986. The sketchbooks were fundamental to Coker’s practice: he painted or drew in situ and then used the sketchbook works as the stimulus for oil paintings that were created subsequently in his studio. The sketchbooks themselves could be taken apart and the sheaths presented as works in their own right. Predominantly recognisable locations appear in these four sketchbook works as Coker continued to uncover fresh inspiration on each return, rejuvenated by intimate familiarity with an environment. Aldeburgh, the beach in Suffolk that Coker first discovered in the early 1960s, is seen here from a decidedly modernist viewpoint. The scene, overlooking the shoreline dotted with boats, is bisected by a vertical pillar that jarringly severs the uninterrupted horizontal sweep across the vista. Audierne, another of Coker’s haunts and one that pre-dated Aldeburgh, also features, in Cap de la Chèvre. Working in watercolour in both Aldeburgh and Cap de la Chèvre, Coker alternates between light washes of muted browns and greys for an overcast, unassuming British beach and translucent washes and flourishes of rich purples, mosses and mandrakes for the more animated scene of the French coast. A monochrome ink wash work presents a new location, that of Drumrunie in Badenscallie, North West Scotland. Coker and his wife visited Badenscallie in 1985 for the first time, staying with close friends Colin and Maggie Ellis following the death in March of that year of their only child, Nicholas. Badenscallie is crofting land, remote and bleak, with scrub-covered mountains falling away steeply to the sea and numerous islands dotting the coastline. In Drumrunie, the viewer looks through a tangle of undergrowth and spindly trees to a low mountain in the distance, dark clouds scudding overhead. From 1985 onwards, Coker returned often to Scotland. In 1987 he encountered for the first time the sight of salmon nets drying, a motif that proved critical to his work for the remainder of the decade. Not straying far from familiar territory, the final work in the quartet, Forêt de Landévennec, depicts a lone monumental tree in the Landévennec Forest situated in inland Brittany. This sketchbook work is a watercolour study for the oil painting, Forêt de Landévennec of the following year, and the remarkably exact correlation between the two is an illuminating insight into Coker’s working process.