In 1950, Fairweather’s travels led him to Darwin, where painting materials were difficult to find. He resorted to drawing with writing ink and was mainly limited to the colours he could create by mixing blue, red and green. This work, Sea shells possesses a frontal flatness, a quality that was increasingly found in Fairweather’s compositions from this time, while its subject is one of his most enduring — the relationship between mother and child. The artist was left in the care of his aunt as an infant and was not reunited with his immediate family, who had moved to India where his father was a surgeon general in the Indian Medical Service, until he was ten years old. The extent to which this early experience affected him has been much debated, with speculation fuelled by his recurrent exploration of the mother–child relationship.