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White silhouettes sway against softly gradated backgrounds: blues, purples, yellows and pinks The painted palm trees are tacky and kitsch They invoke long stretches of beach and crystalline waters, images seen many times before, perhaps not in life, but in that common currency of signs endlessly circulated and reproduced in advertisements and mass-culture During a studio visit earlier this year, Rob Sherwood explained that the series of works was inspired by a poster of an idyllic beach stuck onto the wall of a gloomy, windowless office He described it as an ‘image of an image’, because the poster drew upon the icons and symbols of the collective imaginary, offering the viewer a representation of nature that it is both culturally and economically encoded The same might be said of the five painted palm trees, which are currently on display alongside other paintings in the front window of the Hannah Barry Gallery in London Dreams of adventure or escape, the Hollywood of myth, tall shadows criss-crossing the Sunset Strip—what becomes apparent when looking at these works is that their familiarity cannot be accounted for adequately by recourse to what they represent If they are immediately recognisable, it is not simply because they are paintings of palm trees as objects, so much as paintings of palm trees as ideas   To paint the idea of something, the image of an image, suggests that the idea resides in some imagistic realm more pure than the objective world because less material And it is true that there is a certain breeziness to these paintings that makes them look idealised and almost decorative This criticism is often levelled at still-life painting, more forcefully termed nature morte, the lowest of the traditional genres and the most readily assimilated into the private sphere of the home as an ornamental commodity Yet in each of the paintings in question—suggestively titled ‘Shaman Faced’, ‘Desktop Riviera’, ‘Eager Leaves’, ‘Nothingwise’ and ‘How To Get A Fire Going’—there is a sense in which the image and the dreams it induces disintegrate from within To spend time with the works is to see how the fronds of