My Found in Translation drawings, where I was using a cross-hatching technique derived from studying etchings, moved into drawings of windows of an abandoned pencil factory. Something about the framing and the way the frame contains the interior and the exterior intrigued me. And of course, the idea of drawing parts of a pencil factory with just a pencil.

While I was making one of those drawings, I began to wonder what it would be like to draw just the window pane, without any of the surrounding structure. You would see the dim outlines of things inside the building, reflections and shadows of things both inside and outside: an ambiguous world of half-glimpsed things.

Here is the result: a world of dirty, streaked windows; blinds half hanging off; trees reflected; obscure highlights.

While I was working on that series, I remembered a trip to Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate and the time I spent looking out to sea. The tall, relatively narrow windows frame slices of the external world, creating compositions of sky, sea, and structure. The internal world is entirely absent. At a time when CoViD19 restrictions meant I spent a lot of time indoors and couldn’t make a day trip to the seaside, these images were especially precious.