Sa Bequille ( his crutch ) Print

This series of watercolour collages were inspired by reading a French translation of Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure story Treasure Island. The sea has personal resonance for me as I grew up playing along the sands of the Irish sea When I started painting this series, my own memories, Louis Stephenson’s vivid scenes and the recent migrant crisis in the Mediterranean all merged together. A sense of foreboding tinted with a glimmer of hope and promise on the horizon inspired these works, fulfilling what Virginia Woolf called ‘the strange human need for feeling afraid but also the need to retain links to ones past and oral traditions.’ I chose to paint onto the pages of the book as a nostalgic reminder of all things passing like reading and the sensations of handling paper as opposed to looking at digital formats