I have always loved the town of Tenby. I grew up in Wolverhampton, which is about as far from the sea as you can get, so I was always fascinated by the sea and seaside towns. We used to go on holiday to Tenby and it was a place of enormous fascination and joy for me. 

It is a town of juxtapositions: land and sea, tourist and locals, people relaxing and people working, and being Wales, sun and rain. 

It has a chocolate box charm with pastel coloured guest houses overlooking a working harbour. And this is a view I sketched and painted many times as a kid. But this is not the real feeling I associate with the town. Step out of the sunlight into the shade down by the sea in the harbour and the place has a different feel. Darker, damper, a visceral feeling of sea and silt, of earth and water. 

I think watercolour is the perfect medium for capturing this feeling, to create the feeling of water and it’s importance to the town. I used pencil to capture the hard lines of the man made world, the guest houses and boats but then used layers of paint to submerge the town beneath washes of water.