It was my brother Matt’s birthday, and I was sitting on the beach in Llandudno with a golden latte from my favourite café, painting a small canvas as a gift for him. The little painting was the view of the sea from my favourite beach at Craig‑y‑Don, complete with a kite I had photographed days earlier when I took my dad to the same spot for a tea — another memory of Mark, who loved kites. The day before, I had visited my older brother, Mark, who was ill, and he had given me some mugs —That morning. I got my coffee in one.

As I worked on the birthday painting, two girls arrived on the vast, empty beach and stopped a few meters away, directly in front of me to prepare for their sea swim. With miles of shoreline to choose from, they chose my view — and I knew instantly they would become the next piece in my growing series of “interruptions.”

Mark was an artist too. He painted to classical music, creating abstract works full of movement and emotion. His next dream was to paint giant monochrome canvases to his favourite pieces of music, but he became too frail to begin them. When I started Girls on the Beach after returning home, Mark was still with us, and I decided to paint the scene like a black‑and‑white photograph — a quiet nod to his wish to work in monochrome, and a step toward creating larger pieces myself.

Mark passed away before the painting was finished, so it spans both his presence and his absence — a moment from a world where he was still here, carried into a world where he no longer is. It is a painting about interruption, memories, and the way life continues to move around us even as everything changes.