A Vision of the Sea

Between 26 July and 13 August I was at my house in Deal, working on my orchestral piece for next year's BBC Proms, which is provisionally titled A Vision of the Sea. From before dawn until dusk I was surrounded by the constant calls of Herring Gulls, and they have got into the piece; in fact have been transformed into one of its main motivic ideas. At the same time, almost every day I made watercolour paintings of the sea and the sky, the majority in the early morning, which I felt helped me to compose. The weather during this time was a mixture of sunshine and cloud, and some of the skies were spectacular. Here is the sequence of nineteen paintings.