This image is based on the view from the window of a temporary studio set up in a cottage just outside Dunwich hired in January, 2010, to experience coastal Suffolk in winter. It duly snowed and was brilliantly frosty, producing very bright light reflected in this painting.

In front of the cottage was a sluggish stream (yellow) slurping down the valley into its blocked up estuary (brown) where Dunwich harbour used to be. Facing was the hillside (red) with modern church bottom right and trees on top. The land is hemmed in by constantly shifting banks of shingle (yellow ochre), from the former harbour round to top right, where the next valley, Minsmere with its nature reserve, can just be glimpsed (I could not of course see it over the hill from my valley-bottom position, but I knew it was there). Beyond was the sea (dark blue) and overall was the sky (light blue), with black clouds above the place where the port of medieval Dunwich once prospered. This superficially rather strange image is actually first and foremost figurative.