This is a small, long-standing lake that may have been natural (it’s located in an area of wetland in the village) but that has been reinforced at its edges to create paths in what’s become a new nature reserve. It sits adjacent to another small lake that I can’t say I recall seeing before, but as access was less easy before the council conferred protected status on the area and put in low-profile bridges over natural waterways, I visit much more now than I used to.

Drawing in outlines of edges, margins, and vegetation in watercolour pencil.

This was a bit of a weird phase in that I wasn’t quite sure what to do about the ripples. This was because the image had moved in my head from a straightforward representational to one with an underlying dialogue.

The dialogue began to emerge in a change of treatment of the water and the introduction of traffic lights. The first is entirely consistent with the image’s origins, the second not in the least, but it’s clear something was going on, I would just have to wait.

Good old unconscious processing! This area, and others like it in the locality, have frequently been targeted by developers who, after a (short) period of reconnoitring, abandon it as unsuitable due to its frequent flooding, its value as a flood plain to the locality, and in the face of opposition from conservationists. The vegetation had already become unruly in an earlier iteration, but now the traffic lights felt right. This is a stop sign.

At this point, I had the story but also a vast expanse of unconvincing water. Too uneven to be smooth and glassy, and too smooth to be unaffected by the slight breeze, making ripples on it.

I drenched the area with a view to better smoothing, then found a line in it. I was going to use this to reflect the sky but it was suggesting movement beneath the surface. Up to now, I was using just water-soluble oils but the new perspective was hinting at another filter through which to view it, and I brought in some dilute neon orange acrylic.

In the image above, the neon has been muted somewhat and the ripple has become a large, unspecified water creature. The lake has a guardian, apparently, and I’m beginning to believe the vegetation would do serious damage to anyone thinking to get rid of it!

I’ve become dissatisfied with this, but I’ll have to wait until the reason for that becomes less amorphous.

I think I preferred the lighter shades of the palaeolithic improbability in an earlier version, but I’ll let it rest before piling in on it with amendments. The good thing is that I’ve made the water’s surface relatively smooth and bright white. It seems to me that, while the overall image doesn’t shriek ‘SURREAL!’, the individual elements do, and the move diagonally from the sky at top left, down through the traffic lights, the bright white unreflective surface of the water, to the unlikely pond life seems likely to convey a mood of unsettling oddity.

A few iterations later –

The lights on the traffic lights disappeared so many times I had to dig them out with a stylus! I’ve used W-S oils, acrylics, watercolour pencil on a base of white acrylic gesso, and inks to give them the intensity I was looking for. It eventually happened (below) with neon paints (cf the orange top left).

The beast in the foreground became camouflaged and, I think, has more solidity to it due to the implied weight associated with the water displacement and movement around it. It’s military, it surfaced for some reason, and now it’s returning to depths that shouldn’t exist in this location.

Crater Lake. 2026. Mixed media on 40x29cm canvas. Animations made in PhotoDirector, video in PowerDirector.

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2026