Self Portrait Four, Jewel Box (The Broads, Thunder Showers, Late Afternoon, A Young Girl in Reflection, Poetics of the Past Never Forgotten)

A layered and luminous self-portrait by David Kim Whittaker, this oil and acrylic work pulses with atmospheric tension, evoking the brooding skies and shimmering waters of The Broads beneath the charged light of a late afternoon thunder shower. Whittaker weaves together autobiography and reverie, embedding within the composition the fleeting image of a young girl lost in reflection, as though memory itself is a jewel box—ornate, sealed, and trembling with poetic residue. The painting operates as both personal archive and visual elegy, collapsing time and landscape into a single, iridescent surface where the past is never fully surrendered.