Fish

Hello,

For a while I lived in Porto, in the north of Portugal. This is what it looked like.

Portugal is a fishy place. Any family living anywhere near the coast will have fishermen in their recent history.

I met someone who owned a seafood restaurant called Ostras e Coisas. She wanted some art for the restaurant walls.

I made these paintings of people in boats. I tried to make the boats sort of fish-shaped.

The restaurant was once a tailor’s shop so I painted a series of sardines in suits for the upstairs dining room. Portugal has a famous canning industry so I put the sardines in suits in tins.

I didn’t expect to paint fish in suits again, but since I started selling my Sardinhas de Fato print I’ve been commissioned by several people to make more.

One of them is Claudia Starr, a designer in Norfolk. I painted the fish on the mirror below for her. It’s in a property called Mr. Binnacle.

It’s funny how it goes with some pictures. These fish seemed weird to me when I first painted them, but for some reason or another I keep ending up painting more of them.