The contrast between light and dark is an effect I’m always returning to and in 2004 I took it to surreal extremes combining dark sky and bright sands. The beaches were done for a show called Leisure Paintings in which I moved from painting single figures to crowds of sunbathers. There are no solitaries here but seething masses as far as the eye can see, made from drawings on Berck-Plage in northern France. Metamorphosis governs figures moving in and out of abstraction, fusing and melting in the heat, pixelating into cellular forms beneath backgrounds full of more cells as if there were some kind of incoming menace. This cell has been my favourite image of threat or mystery, ballooning and hovering near figures, since 2002, when I imported it into paintings based on Marvell’s poetry.
