This is a collection of coastlines, and it goes wherever I do. It starts in Galicia, because that is where I have stood most often with a camera, but what I am after is not a country. It is the quality certain beaches have out of season, when there is almost nobody left on them.

I keep photographing the same thing. Not the sea exactly. The room the sea makes around you.

Every photograph is remade the same way, so the collection holds together as one hand. Black ink laid in broken, hand-drawn lines over layered gouache, the surface painted rather than rendered: paper grain, dry brush, scratched paint, the small imperfections left where they fall. The palette is narrow and deliberately cold, Prussian and petrol blue through deep cyan, teal, indigo and slate, with the blacks kept inky rather than grey. The light is overcast or blue hour, never harsh sun. What warmth there is arrives only as small amber glows, a lit window or a line of town lights across the water, and each piece carries exactly one red object, placed where the eye can rest.

The blue is not sadness. Anyone who has stood on a cold coast at the end of a day knows the water really does go that colour, and that the light lasts longer than it should. What I want to keep is never the view. It is the quiet of being somewhere that does not need you to be there.