I visited India for the first time in 2017, it is somewhere I had always wanted to see and I quickly fell in love with the people and the incredible landscape. For a few months afterwards I digested all that I had seen, holding back painting as I wanted to really take in how I felt.

Garuda Lagoon came to me after making a couple of smaller paintings in the same palette and I decided I just had to go big. The memory of a wonderful trip in the backwaters of Kerala inspired the painting and I wanted to express the dreamlike quality of such a sublime place as the Indian jungle, so I decided to convey this by using unrealistic colours. I felt, at the moment I saw the man punting his country boat across a lagoon, like I was looking into paradise. I hope the sense of looking through the water hyacinths and grasses into a scene of magical stillness is captured in this painting.