Letting her dreams take flight, as she makes a wish or two, a young girl releases a string of piercing red coloured balloons and makes her sacrifice to the Gods of teenage visions nestling somewhere far above her ponytailed-head. A violent, malevolent sky snatches the intermittent gift from below, swirling them up and snaffling at them like a pig with truffles.

What the girl wishes for we’ll never know, but artist Bob Barker paints an arresting scene of dark being infiltrated by light and the innocence and optimism of youth pressuring an unswerving and evidently virulent Mother Nature. Being a typical Bob Barker study, the perceived depths of climatic despair are plunged by the eagerness and enthusiasm of the colour red, this time scribed and frequented in the girl’s hooded top and the sky carriageway of the balloons themselves.