Study in Sprats

I could describe this painting as ‘unfinished’, except, having lived with it for a while, I know that it is. I painted the shoal of sprats that descended from the plastic bag from the supermarket into the bowl, as they fell. The light caught them reflected on their bodies as on a hundred mirrors. There was the chaos of the mass and its movement and its flashes of colour. This is what I was trying to paint, I shall catch the intricacies of their small bodies another day….