First thing to say, just in case my work becomes internationally famous and people start flocking to the village looking for it, is that there’s no such feature as crater lake, there’s only the natural pond that’s been banked up to retain more water and that I’ve named Crater Lake.

These images describe the biscuit crumb trail onward from here to the image that has taken on a life of its own, the end result of which you can see here.

At this point, while there’s still a smidgen of connection to the reality of the setting, this is remote but I was enjoying the wild water and the formidable beast that is either the cause of it or osmething trapped where it had no business being. I’m finding water soluble oils (WSOs) a comfortable medium with its more prolonged malleability over acrylics, even though I have a limited range of colours available to me.

There is the beginning of a narrative emerging here but at this stage, I don’t know what that is. Exotic foliage and a large animal in a channel of active water that’s too narrow for it.

The channel had to go even though it had potential as both a visual and narrative focus. It felt clumsy and belonging to a different perspective. The animal, however, given more space had room to become more of itself and, in a moment of inventive serendipity, I found that pieces of towel roll (unbleached by Naked Paper) rendered a scaly fish/lizard skin better than I could have imagined. I smoothed the water out behind so I could see the animal better while I added signals of movement with brush flicks of white paint.

How satisfying is this for primeval fantasy megamphibian skin!

At this point, I knew I could easily wreck what I had but also that I didn’t have enough that described the scene effectively. There had been an indeterminate dark shape in the water in an earlier iteration (above) and so this began to emerge as a second animal. But, as with many surreal representations, there needed to be an incongruity to pull the whole away from the relatively obvious and into an un-askable question. And we had one – a barely believable bright yellow crane that had rumbled all the way here from Hull at about 5mph to hoist into place a new bridge in a field just a couple of miles from this lake:

Deliberately understated, its presence is only evident if you notice the unlikely yellow and the shape in which it’s contained. Good fiction does this by subtley seeding a story with apparently inconsequential references but painting only gets one shot at it, and in this wildly unbelievable image, I’m asking the viewer to accept the foreground as the norm and then to notice the 21st century intrusion and understand it as the irregularity.

This is the final iteration although probably not the final photograph as lighting conditions don’t always produce an image that’s congruent with what I believe I see in terms of colours.

And at this late stage, I realise I don’t know which way these creatures are going and whether they’re predators or prey. I’d thought right to left and probably filter feeders, but now I’m thinking possibly left to right and with chainsaw massacre jaws. Actually, I can see a fin underwater on the one closest so right to left, no argument.

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2026