One of the great pleasures of travelling along the Turkish Mediterranean coast, apart from the beautiful landscape, is the food. The holiday snap which inspired this print was full of people and tables loaded with dishes but during the transcription it was necessary for reasons of both artistic economy and the sidestepping of problematic technical challenges, such as the difficulty of modelling the human figure, to edit much of the detail.

The minimalism of the restaurant with its cage like lath enclosed balcony, the two shadowed tourists ignoring one another and the hallucinatory vividly hued landscape was a result far removed from the original reference image. However, that mattered little because in this case the unexpected was welcome and the need to steer the work closer to what was initially visualised was unnecessary. I showed this print to a German acquaintance and in the discussion about a European tourism subtext asked her if the guy on the left was German; amusingly her reply was an unequivocal no doubt.