I was thinking about the dining table as a place of enforced peace, somewhere where emotional tension might be suppressed for the sake of politeness. The painting shows a group of figures, all submerged at different levels in water, one almost to the top of its head. They encircle an oval shaped dining table, which appears to be floating on the water’s surface. A torrent of finger-length sticks are pouring into the centre and scattering violently over the image, alongside spinning discs which appear to emerge from way back on the horizon line. The people don’t react to the chaos, instead they look slightly downwards, melancholically, and the figure on the far right looks out of the painting, scowling at the viewer, as if you may have had a part to play in their circumstance.