Once, the whole city flooded but then it was fine

2022, 30” across, Mixed Media: ink, varnish and acrylic on wood.

I first started working on this piece of wood in late June of 2020. I 'finished' it soon after that (last image). But for some reason, I wanted its surface to have a more glossy finish. I did a pour of varnish over the top prematurely, and it was essentially ruined. All the colours ran and blended, destroying the shading that had taken me so long to achieve. The varnish dried hard and uneven and was impossible to get off. I put the painting away for a long time (looking at it made me too sad). I recently dared to pull it out again and managed to scrape a large amount of the varnish off. I then painted over the whole piece and highlighted the places where the varnish rips with silver ink. The sections that are just wood now have the kind of patterns you would see on a child's topography map from school. The varnished areas do not.

The lockscreen on my phone back in 2020 when I first started working on the piece was a birds eye view of Egypt, the Nile river cutting through the land, like a snake escaped from the ocean. I remember thinking a lot about how civilizations developed surrounding bodies of water and the acres of dry land that span behind them. The initial design of this work (below) had something to do with that. If the first version was the land and river, maybe this is life after the flood?