This is the first of three paintings involving fragments of quails’ eggs. Why such eggs? Well, a friend gave a clutch of quails’ eggs to me and, after boiling and eating them, I kept the shells and fragments. Why? – well, their colouring was so delicate, so varied and so subtle that it occurred to me that they might look well in a painting. Here, they are crushed in a field setting or crushed in a fieldscape, depending on the scale at which you view their context. I had in mind a nest of them being crushed and dragged a bit by any one of the large pieces of farm machinery which now roar across the countryside, compressing anything in their way.

Of the other two egg paintings (which I shall not exhibit here, at least not yet), one is meant to convey the idea of a robbed nest while the other, more happily, is of eggs successfully hatched.