You are standing by the sea and forget everything else for a moment. All the worries of the world disappear. Not because anything has changed, but because the water and the light demand the attention of all of your senses. These paintings are about that feeling, of letting go of the heaviness and holding on to the small moments in the here and now. The marks in these paintings come directly from that physical experience. Repeated textures echo pebbles underfoot, sea spray, the surface of the water in low light. I wanted making them to feel like standing at the shoreline, absorbed, losing track of time, and I wanted the paintings themselves to pull you into that same state. Not to depict the sea, but to recreate something of what it does to you. These paintings lead with colour. They are not the colours of the sea. They are the feeling of it. Saturated pinks, lilacs and yellows placed next to each other create a kind of hum, an energy that for me translates the particular aliveness of being in the elements. And throughout these paintings there are small spots of warm yellow that seem to glow from within the layers, like light breaking through clouds. I have always been affected deeply by light, and in this series I was chasing that specific quality of it. There is vulnerability in this work too. The sea is unpredictable, and standing in it you are small, subject to something much larger than yourself. That exposure is completely freeing. It is the same freedom I try to bring into the studio, following the painting wherever it wants to go, leaving in the marks that surprise me. The sea never quite does what you expect, and neither do these paintings.