This painting has now dropped out of The Gallery where its comment was:

29/14 ‘Blakeney Quay: late dusk’ Oil on canvas 40 x 50 cms

One evening in July, for a long half-hour either side of 10 o’clock, the world seemed to hold its breath on Blakeney Quay on the north Norfolk coast. It had been a breezy but warm, sunny day. The sunset seemed to last forever as it gradually moved from west, to north-west, to north-north-west, across the vast expanse of flat saltmarsh north from the Quay towards Blakeney Point; simultaneously a great stillness arose across the land as the breeze dropped and diminishing daylight gently eased into dusk, then darker dusk. Yet clouds were mirrored bright white in the deep blue, grey and near-black of the dregs of the ebbing tide, and it is that image that I tried to express in the following days in this canvas.

At first, over-influenced by the figurativeness of the dozens of photographs I took throughout that magic time but scarcely looked at again, the painting included clouds and the stark black silhouettes of the many boats tied up along the quay, in places three and four deep side by side; but as ‘art’ took over, I removed them all (though their ‘ghosts’ remain) in the interests not just of simplicity but rather of getting at the essence of the experience, not just the scene. That experience was one of shared circumstance, in being part of a process, somewhat odd in itself, during which, as the dusk darkened, the mirrored reflections of the clouds in the surface of the creek, here quite accurately portrayed in terms of shape, became briefly brighter.