On a warm clear day, a young mother takes her infant for a walk in a stroller. They pause to look out at sunlight playing off the water. There seems to be a connection between mother, child and sea.

Created in 1985, a year before Robert began the “Seal Upon Thine Heart” series, The Sea foreshadows many subsequent ideas. Robert used water as a metaphor for change and metamorphosis throughout his troubled lovers series. The series was based on a novel by Elizabeth Smart, who writes:  “I am going to have a child so all my dreams are of water, across which the ghost of an almost accomplished calamity beckons. But tonight that child lay within like the fated and only island in all the seas.”