Over the past few weeks I have been wondering whether my painting ought to be more directly relevant to today’s situation. I have asked myself whether I am not being rather self-indulgent and possibly even escapist in what I do. Then today I realised that at least a part of my work points a finger directly at our current situation. I have in mind my Beyond series.
This succession of images deals with the glimpse, or even only the possibility of a glimpse, of something positive beyond a series of massive obstacles (usually large rock formations.) There is sunshine …. but not here. It is over there, and we have no obvious route by which we might get there, or assurance that ever we will. The series began several years ago, following a visit to the Orkney Islands, where my imagination was seized by a kind of geological formation common in that part of the world. Deep chasms run at right-angles to the shore line, which can just be glimpsed beyond. Since then I have been drawn repeatedly to this kind of imagery.
As I listened to the news today, in which our political system plunges ever more deeply into disorder and conflict, with ever less visible possibility of a way forward, I began to wonder whether there might be a political metaphor at least in my work.
What prospect is there for us where we are led by a minor newspaper columnist who fantasises about being a statesman, backed up by a city slicker who imagines that he is a gentlemen. They are followed by a rabble composed of the deluded, who still cannot void themselves of the illusion that Britain is still somehow a “great nation” that can go it alone in the contemporary world, and the fearful who are mindful that they are in imminent danger of losing their seats in Parliament. The phrase “Gadarene swine” comes to mind.
It takes the most enormous faith to assert that there might be a “beyond” for us, but all current indications to the contrary a persist in affirming that there can be.