oil on board, 2025, 30 x 24 cm

 Framed size (simple, deep, white frame) 33.5 x 27.5 x 5.5 cm

A small oil painting made this summer as part of a larger project to paint summertime- as a piece of time. I have been working across several paintings all at once, allowing a slow accretion of layers and observed light to billow and flicker across paintings. This rolling mix of observed shadows and abstract enquiries has played out against the constant backdrop of a world in violent turmoil. I make small paintings like this one alongside much larger, slower work- sometimes these small works have a pulse and an energy which sums up the overview.

The title is spoken by Puck in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream; 'For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast...' It sums up the nature of time and mortality, the strange disjunct between 'time of the mind' and time measured in hours.  As I have been recording Summer 2025 in paintings, Shakespeare's words have been very close. At another point in the play Puck observes, 'Lord, what fools these mortals be!'