The Crossing

The idea came while I was watching Shogun, the series set in the years before the Meiji Restoration. I have always been a sucker for history, and what held me was the thought of those European ships finding their way across half the world to imperial Japan.

I kept returning to the fisherman on the shore. What it must have been to look up from your nets and see a vessel that size for the first time, its sails full and lit, its hull dark against the water, arriving out of a world you did not know existed. This painting is my attempt at that first sight, the moment before any of it is understood.