August 2026
Climate Change in Essex
It’s raining! It’s pouring! I’m delighted due to this summer of drought, this rain is the first significant amount all summer—a strange thing for me to type in the UK! It is an eerie feeling: the exceptionally hot summer and talk of this being the first of the ‘new normal’. The smell and sound of the rain pounding down makes me think of how dependent we are on our environment, how rain and joy fit together so simply, and how insignificant we all are. I am watching the birds. They are so high that I can’t identify them, and they seem to be flying with a skip and a dance in the rain. I am writing this blog about my recent paintings to the downpour.
Dream-Swim 2026
My summer has been full of joy. A real skip and a dance for me has been being part of the RA Summer Exhibition at Burlington House. This has been a tremendous experience, and I am truly thankful to all the amazing staff at the Royal Academy. I have been humbled and blessed by the wonderful comments people have made about my painting: Dream-Swim.
My next three paintings all follow on with the theme of dream-swim.
Dream Swim: Blue Lagoon 2026
For these shapes, I thought about dreaming of a swim—this time feeling the troubles sea life has endured due to pollution. I painted both of the first two images together and then took them apart to finish. I’m fascinated by sections; up close, we only see and, unless contained, experience anything one section at a time. Dream-Swim: Blue Lagoon is an abstract painting exploring colour and experimenting with paint to create a melancholy feel—capturing the strangeness of the hot summer and the sea. The blue colour invites you to jump in: a colour like a mobile phone screen, or like a mother’s blouse to nestle into tight and cry, much like sadness of the sea creatures affected by the warming of the ocean.
Dream-Swim: The Final Curtain 2026
Pushing the theme further like a play – a play we are in, a dream we are in, the sea of life and death. It could contain a creature, one we could save or destroy. The oil paint running as if crying.
Dream-Swim: Hot Summer 2026
Dream-Swim: Hot Summer was painted third. We had gone a month without rain in Essex by then, and I had been swimming in the Thames Estuary out in the channel named The Ray. I wanted to paint what I felt: swimming in the unusual heat as if in a strange land, with red dominating the landscape. Then I did not realise we would go two months without rain and a water hosepipe ban.
All three above paintings I have entered into Opens along with Dream-Swim: Swimming in the Spotlight and Dream-Swim: Dive in, both painted earlier in this year, before the drought, and pictured below. So fingers crossed they get to be seen in galleries.
It has stopped raining now, and as I walk home I see patches of green in the dry, brown grass.
27th August 2026.