Paraty

About ten years ago I was visiting Brazil with my partner and we spent a few days in and around the village of Paraty. The streets of the small former Portuguese colonial gold mining port are at sea level and deliberately flood with each tide.

Each evening when the street lights come on and as the tide rises the village takes on a mirage like quality and this is what we see depicted here with the baroque facade of Igreja de Santa Rita glowing at dusk.

As with the majority of my paintings there is a sense of an implied before and after, a moment caught in tension but which is also held in equilibrium as we look into rather than simply at a scene.