Fading Away

Fading Away

Medium: Oil paint and sand on canvas
Size: 121.5 × 91 × 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 wife sitting among the dunes. I took the photograph before she looked up.

Years later, after we had separated, I returned to the photograph intending to paint a photorealistic portrait in full colour. Her vivid, patterned Yemeni futa was central to that original idea. 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.