Original artwork description:

'After They'd Gone' depicts the land and sea after a coal mine on the East Durham Coastline (Dawdon Colliery) closed and nature slowly returned to a coastline blackened and destroyed by decades of coal mining and industrial vandalism.

Darcy says, "I painted 'After They'd Gone' with my fingers and the process was oddly reminiscent of my childhood - as a child I used to play on the Blast Beach; a heavily industrial stained stretch of coastline, battered by the North Sea. The colours were odd, out of place for a beach, there was no yellow or pale fine sand in this place anymore; coal dust, slag, and oxide chemicals, had all seeped into the sand to form hard cracked crusts, where pools of polluted yellow, orange and red, water formed, much of nature perished, though some battled to survive. Painting the canvas with my fingers, and then washing the acrylics and gesso off afterwards, was akin to being a child again, where I'd run to the shore to wash the coal dust and chemicals off my small hands before returning home."

Materials used:

Acrylics, Gesso, Satin Varnish

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