acrylic on canvas 
1968 

acrylic on canvas
1968 

When I was teaching at Wolverhampton I asked a student friend, Nancy Davies, what her home town, Burnham on Sea, looked like, since I had never heard of it. She sent me the standard view of its esplanade, a generic seaside card. I played with isolating little areas of it whose colour and attributes seemed to epitomise the British resort. I brought six of these summery and summary fragments together and made a picture from them called (after a line in The Seafarer) Consider Our Haven. From this half amatory impulse a long large enterprise was unwittingly embarked upon. Twenty years later in 1988 I was still using postcards as a source (though by then only sporadically) when I came to paint the portrait of Jeremy King. As a background I had decided to paint a huge version of part of a postcard of his birthplace. This, by accident (should I rather say, 'as I might well have expected'?) turned out to be Burnham on Sea.