This series of paintings carry the weight of my inheritance: two grandfathers who lost themselves at different junctures of their lives to alcohol. Their stories are warnings that echo in my own middle years. It’s not a crisis-in-waiting but rather a balancing act: youth’s potency and abandon on one side, the sobering age of reckoning on the other.

Empty bottles, broken glassware, and fragments of nights both remembered and half-lost, that could be born of celebration or collapse, holding laughter or lament. Like Dylan Thomas’s cry, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”, I recognise that vitality, no matter how brightly it burns, cannot outpace time. Like “wild men” who “caught and sang the sun in flight”, there is a recklessness here that, in hindsight, reeks of cognitive dissonance.

Through these paintings of shattered glass and empty vessels, I seek to understand the tension where celebration and sorrow can be indistinguishable, of vice and pleasure, or shame and exhilaration, and how the story of one night can never be fully told.