Literature

I cannot remember when I began working on this painting, but it has been a project of many years. An ashen sky burns with the embers from what has now become a dormant volcano.

The mountain-like image was always intended more as a path. The colours are inspired by memories of a childhood visit to the landscape in the Outer Heberden part of Scotland. But they are entirely colours that I produced myself—oil paints constituted from pigments imported from western Europe.

It is a metaphor for paths taken, turned, stretched, and halted mid-route. It exists to explain that even the smallest painting can potentially take up more time, more energy, hold more meaning than a giant canvas.

The genesis emerged when I was in Sharjah in 2022 exploring the possibilities of the colour blue—the rarest colour in nature; which is when I began making my own paints, and asks the question of what will become of the world when it eventually returns to water, or not?