This is a very unusual painting, as you can see, so here is the artistic analysis to help guide you….
Meanwhile explores the tension between fleeting human presence and the quiet permanence of the built environment. The woman walking through the scene occupies only a passing moment. Her movement is incidental and temporary. Outside this instant she will continue on, listening to something through her AirPods, and eventually disappear from the landscape.
Here, however, that passing moment is arrested and given permanence. An ordinary walk becomes fixed in time, allowing us to observe it — and think about it. Alongside her, in a literal parallel universe, the rows of beach huts have a very different relationship with time. Repetitive, functional and familiar, they are the sort of architecture that can become almost invisible through constant presence. People pass them time and again without necessarily noticing their remarkable geometry. Yet from this particular angle, their repetition creates an unexpected sense of scale and monumentality. Something ordinarily overlooked becomes the dominant structure of the image. The perspective turns the huts into a tunnel, drawing the eye towards a distant point and creating the expectation that the passage must lead somewhere. But the apparent destination never quite arrives. The eye travels through one opening after another, only to find that the tunnel ultimately dissolves into the landscape. It is a journey created entirely by perspective: movement towards somewhere, without an actual destination.
At the centre of this visual journey, a naturally pink-painted post provides an unexpected piece of visual punctuation. Its colour and position are perfectly placed within the geometry of the scene, briefly catching the eye as it follows the receding huts. It is an ordinary detail of the landscape, yet within the composition it becomes something more — another point of interruption that prevents the eye from simply travelling towards the apparent destination. The eye is continually redirected by an unknown force — into the tunnel, towards the woman, back to the pink post, and then out again into the wider landscape as you try to find quietness in the scene. This is deliberate. The painting is intended to create a subtle agitation in the act of looking. Just as the woman is caught between moving through the landscape and being temporarily fixed within it, the viewer is caught between competing points of attention. There is no single place at which the eye can comfortably settle. This creates the contradiction at the heart of the painting. And just as we think we have found the route through the image, something draws us elsewhere.
The sea, of course, adds another layer: constantly moving, yet fixed within the painting. Its surface is in perpetual motion, while the horizon remains unchanged. Like the woman, the sea is always moving; unlike her, it never leaves. The more mundane elements of the landscape continue their own quiet existence — the sea defences, the promenade and even the power station in the distance. They are not the subject, yet they are part of the world in which this tiny human moment occurs.
Meanwhile refers to the interval between these different forms of time and relative dimensions in space: the brief, human moment and the slow, almost unnoticed persistence of the world around it. While one person passes through the frame, everything else simply continues to exist. The painting deliberately sets movement against stillness, human presence against architectural permanence, and apparent destination against nowhere. Even the act of looking becomes part of that tension. Perhaps that is what Meanwhile ultimately asks us to consider: that while something is happening to us, the world around us is quietly carrying on. During the struggle to resolve the image, this painting is reminding us to stop — and actually notice these moments in our own journey.
I’m hoping to make prints available for this work. Let me know if you would like one, and I’ll send you details.