Fading Away

Fading Away

Oil paint and sand on canvas

Size: 121.5 x 91 x 2 cm

We were staying in a caravan for a long weekend by the sea. I was out on the beach with a camera when I turned and saw my former wife sitting among the dunes. I took the photograph before she looked up.

The original intention was a fully coloured, photorealistic portrait. She was wearing a Yemeni futa — vivid and patterned — and I intended to paint all of it. But as the work developed, the colours felt increasingly wrong. I never found a reason for that. They simply felt wrong, so I kept reducing them until almost nothing remained.

The sand came into the paint late in the process. The grasses, with their sharp crossing forms, took considerable time to develop, as did the balance between the rough textured surfaces and the comparative stillness of the figure. What emerged was not the painting I had originally intended to make.

The flowers were the one thing I could not remove. They stayed.

The painting was shown in the In the Blink of an Eye exhibition in 2017. Later, her uncle saw it and recognised her immediately. Not from the face, which is barely visible, but from something else. Her posture perhaps. Her presence. Simply the way she was.

The title arrived after the painting was finished, though the seeds of it may well have been there from the beginning.