I’ve been aware since shortly after I began working as an artist that a great deal of what I paint has had to with time, in one form or another. (This is something I discuss briefly in my website.) I have been interested by the different time-scales that affect the world in which we live–geological, seasonal, vegetable, archaeological as well as biographical. It was partly the very antiquity of old stone circles that impressed me, for example, in my series of studies of them. The contrast between the obduracy of the rock and our vulnerability has always interested me in my recurring preoccupation with Almscliff Crag. On the other hand, of course, part of the fascination of the forms of rock lies in its subjection to weathering.
Recently, however, I have been struck my a new turn my painting has taken. The How Stean series focussed very much on the characteristics of water. Although it was the flow of water that was the ostensible subject of each painting, in fact what I was doing was reducing this flow to stasis by capturing a particular moment in that flow. In other words, what I have been doing is symbolically abolishing time. The tree that is the subject of my Tree of Marriage is writhing in activity–but frozen at a captured instant.
Last night we watched the TV film about the life of Dylan Thomas, A Poet in New York. In it Thomas reads his celebrated poem Do not go Gentle into that Good Night, in which we are urged to “rage against the dying of the light”. Clearly my painting lacks “rage”: but have I come to share something of the poet’s purpose?