I had a rare opportunity to catch up with three old friends last weekend. We take a trip to the coast once a year for a night or two away just to goof around and catch up with one another. It’s great fun. Even rarer – this year the weather was so still and mild, we opted to sit out on the beach all night. We dragged a huge box of beer and some wood to a quiet place, lit a fire and drank and talked for hours.
I took paints with me on the trip, I figured it might be easier to use acrylics for a change, and a palette to mix colours from a set of around a dozen tubes I have. In the end, what with the beer and the moonlight offering very little to see by – I opted just to splodge around pretty much directly from the paint tubes and see what happened. As I added different colours to the pictures I sometimes mixed sand in too. As well as acting as a strong reminder of where the pictures were made, I also enjoyed adding something different to the mix. As a result – these pictures have a depth and texture that water colour, which I work with more frequently, doesn’t provide.
This first picture represents the glowing fire we made on the beach, and the second picture is an abstraction of looking across the beach and out over the water and the night sky beyond. Although it was dark – together we were in excellent company and the brightness of the picture is an interpretation of that. 
The first picture is on 240 g/m2 acrylic paper, 17.5cm x 12.5cm. The second picture is on 270 g/m2 water colour paper, 32cm x 24cm.
