Tethys: When the Sahara Was Sea

Tethys: When the Sahara Was Sea

Oil paint, mediums, and sand on canvas 

Size: 58.5 x 47.5 x 7 cm

I was in Tunisia, trekking into the Sahara Desert on foot with a guide, a camel driver and three camels. The sand was extraordinarily fine — wind moving across the dunes built drifting veils that looked almost like gauze. Animal tracks, insect tracks, the marks of everything that had passed through.

But what I kept coming back to was this: the desert I was standing in had once been the floor of an ancient ocean. I found that impossible to hold in my mind. I kept trying.

I brought a small amount of sand home. I had no plan to use it.

The painting developed through exploration rather than execution. Paint was applied heavily and worked physically, allowed to dry and shift and change. As it developed, the Sahara sand came into it. What emerged was not a landscape — it was closer to an object, something that had accumulated rather than been painted.

The frame came significantly later. I carved pine to echo the movement and texture of the dunes, and incorporated sand into the wood as I had incorporated it into the paint. By the time it was finished, the frame was not a boundary around the work. It was the final stage of the work.

It was a trek, an exploration, a journey through paint on canvas, through sand, and finally into wood.