I hesitated before taking this painting out of storage again after more than twenty years. On 11 September 2001, fanatical Islamist terrorists carried out a horrific attack on humanity. When it happened, I was standing in my studio and, as I watched the shocking footage on television, I was deeply shaken. I couldn’t paint for days. It is hard to look at this painting, but it is an expression of my grief, of my speechlessness in the face of such cruelty. At the exhibition where I have shown this painting just once in all these years, a young woman came up to me and said, with tears in her eyes: “My school friend was in one of the planes that flew into the Twin Towers.” I think of the roughly 3,000 people who went to work on that sunny day and lost their lives; I think of the firefighters who lost their own lives whilst trying to save others; and above all, I think of the bereaved, who miss their loved ones terribly…