Different views

I was contacted a couple of weeks ago by someone who'd already bought a painting from me, asking for a version of a piece I'd made a couple of years ago in response to the Somerset flooding. It depicted the village of Langport, its church prominent, across the flooded farmland. I decided to reduce the colour palette and concentrate on tone. The painting was, to me at least, a success and was sold, received and appreciated by the new owner, a resident of Langport. Making work with a poignant reference sometimes walks a fine line between beauty and ugliness, admiration and upset. I painted this and many other scenes of the flooding with a sincere sympathy for those affected, and as a modest record of the huge disruption it caused, but at the same time presenting the devastation as something, from my distant position, potentially beautiful.