How Salt & Citrus began

Every collection I have made so far started with a photograph. This one started with a route. From May onwards I walked the same twenty minutes between the studio and the water most mornings, and by July I could have drawn it with my eyes closed.

What stayed with me was never the architecture. It was the glare coming off the creek at ten in the morning, the way bougainvillea reads almost fluorescent against limestone, and the particular softness that arrives on the terrace once the sun drops behind the hill.

“I stopped trying to paint the place and started painting the glare, the heat and the walk home.”

So the first paintings were made from memory, deliberately. I put the phone away and worked from what the walk left behind. The drawing is looser than usual and the colour is warmer, which is exactly what I hoped for.

Salt & Citrus is nine paintings and two print editions. It is the most Maltese work I have made, and the least literal.