This is my painting ‘Figures at Ebb Tide’, It was finished in March 2000. 

It took 15 months to paint.

It is a large and complex painting. 

You don’t need to understand it to feel it but it might help.

It’s about the cycles of life, repetition, evolution and death.

The landscape is loosely based on an area called Sowley Marsh which lies on the New Forest coast. A wall once defended the area from seawater but was breached over half a century ago. Over
time the oaks, stranded in expanding brackish waters were reduced to dry
husks. As one ecology dwindled, another thrived. The inter-tidal plants multiplied, new patterns in the landscape emerged. 

Marsh grasses thrived. I painted them in repeating patterns. They repeat and then those repetitions fade and reform into new patterns.

In the evolving landscape Inter-tidal plants take hold as the dry surface soil peels away.

Oaks stranded in the Brackish waters die, fall and decay. 

Transitory figures pausing under a changing sky. 

The waking figure, a transitional state.

Here on show in the Forum at The ‘Reality’ show at The Walker Gallery in Liverpool, 2015.