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My childhood summers were spent on the sandy coast of north Wales, where the silt-laden waters of the river Dee spew out into the Irish Sea.  At low water the sea would withdraw completely, creating miles of sandy beaches and acres of shallow, rippled pools.  The featureless landscape impelled me to look down closely at the trapped wildlife and sparkling water in these pools.  I learned to fish in the ponds and rivers in Cheshire; a countryside dedicated to dairy farming, dotted with oak trees and divided by miles of hedgerow.  My father was a picture framer, guilder and french polisher and all the important objects I was warned not to touch as a child were pictures or polished pieces of furniture.

My grandfather was an engineer for the waterworks and painted landscapes in his spare time.  He lived beside the river and had a workshop that smelled of oil, metal, wax and leather.  His world was full of colossal pumps, gleaming brass, massive nuts and bolts, tiled floors and whitewash.  At first there was no television, but when it finally entered our house I was twelve, by which time my imagination was ready for the inspiration of programmes such as Diving to Adventure with Hans and Lottie Hass, Zoo Quest, Seahunt and the Cisco Kid; all in black and white.  I discovered colour on a visit to the National Gallery with an aunt.  Room after room of huge canvases cluttered with people in scenes from battle and the Bible.  The picture I remember most clearly was a still life by Gustav Corbet, a bowl of apples lit by the single window of his prison cell.  The contrast of the dark background and intensity of the green comes back to me still.

I trained as a photographer at the Regent Street Polytechnic, and studied Industrial Lighting under Walter Nurmberg, who would start his tutorials in complete darkness and build the light gradually from there.  The trend towards a 'back to nature" way of life and an holistic approach to the world generally was becoming imperative and 1 was drawn to landscape and natural forms using dramatic lighting, both natural and artificial.  It was becoming increasingly difficult to justify the use of highly toxic chemicals to produce pretty pictures, beautiful things.

By 1973, having travelled extensively taking pictures, I was working for a publishing company creating a library of flowers, trees, and fruit.  The oil crisis, power cuts and the three day week, however, triggered a change of direction and a conviction that western civilisation, as we knew it, was coming to an end.

I teamed up with three other like-minded people, and we set about building a 50ft sail boot, a task that was to occupy the next eight years.  This experience brought to the surface the work of my father and grandfather and kindled a genetic facility for working wood.  After 32,000 miles at sea, including two scientific charters to the Azores and the Hebrides, tagging sperm whales and seals, the influence on my present work was complete.  All the elements of colour, contrast, natural forms, light and reflective surfaces had come together.

The tables are images, 'pictures in the fire', allowing the wood to speak for itself with the minimum of interference and detail.  Unlike a picture on wall, the pictures on a table can be viewed from any side.  They have no up or down.  Using burr veneers with their wild grain as a background allows joints to be made behind the fish.  Woods with an interlocking grain, which I use for the fish, tend to change colour as the viewing angle changes, like the nap on a lawn or billiard table.  The 'pebbles' are scorched in hot sand and cut together with a knife, before being pressed onto a birch plywood base.  The frame is made from solid timber, either walnut, oak, cherry or London plane and sits a little higher than the image area, which is lacquered and polished to a high lustre.  The surface is heatproof, waterproof, thick and very tough.  The underframe is simple and made from the same material as the frame.  The tables are all 14 inches high.

Colin Watmough

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