No Man is an Island, 2020

*Currently on location with The House of Hackney. Please contact us for details of how to view and purchase.

On this large canvas, a beautiful collection of rounded forms in ice-cream colours appear caught in the instant of moving past each other, like circles of harmonious but immiscible liquids constantly pooling and reforming in relation to and in combination with each other.  The chocolate-brown form in the centre engulfs a circle of peach-pink, possibly the precursor to the form disappearing from the bottom left-hand edge of the painting, which shows their hues delicately blending into each other. Against it, the mint green form’s softly pointed corner creates a narrow channel through which more peach-pink flows from right to left, a single tiny droplet left behind.

To the right of the painting, a complex shape in deep, blueberry hues is the only form with an aspect of three-dimensionality, its paler blue edges seeming to reflect a light source from outside the painting, and with a dot of brown contained in the lighter blue ovoid at its centre. Or is this simply the unconscious illusion of two colours temporarily in combination? The smooth ivory foreground is not an absence, but a form in its own right, the luminiferous ether of the surreal, mesmerising and alien universe through which these forms move.

Henrietta Dubrey said: “This work’s title was loosely based around the John Donne quote: ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ An abstract interpretation; the different forms uniting on a warm and friendly common ground.”