The family of paintings grouped under the Brighton heading represent a shift both geographically to the coast and artistically away from more rigorous abstraction. Earlier paintings resisted the temptation to allow shapes that could be read as representational. In the Brighton paintings, a compositional form, related to the experience of living 'at the end of the land', is played out through a series of explorations of colour and mark that relate more to Symbolist notions of the decoratif and internal experience than to narrative or descriptive modes.

In these paintings, an idea of pictorial simultaneity was worked out as an integrated compositional approach and a way of looking. Following the example of Matisse, rather than Cubism's more overt superimposition of depictive fragments, this idea of the multiple and shifting valence of pictorial structure was and is informed by a continuing examination of a broader history of the methods of European painting.