"It's not often that I scratch out a prepratory drawing. While I like to anticipate the approach to each painting, most times, hard thoughts of what I will encounter interfere with what I might discover along the way.

In this case, I was thinking of that work on paper, so figural it was ( and is). It was appealing to me to think of figures in blue somersaulting in the picture plane. I think of those old renaissance motifs of figure in battle. I remember when I was young, drawing something like sea gods in a melee, writhing in knee high water so appealing to a kid because all the hard to draw feet are concealed in the surf.

I thought of blue and how the color key of the painting could be dominated by that color. This, against the green of the previous painting and of the red/black of the one before.

I thought of my old navy days and how we used to train in full scale mock exercises, blue team and gold task forces trying to encircle one another within imaginary cartographic se/landscapes mapped over open ocean. These exercises are set up with elaborate back stories that mirror contemporary geopolitical struggles. One fictional landform stuck in my mind: Chocolate Mountain. Blue and gold forces in a tussle over Chocolate Mountain." (Dennis Hollingsworth)