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Faster than words, painting is older than thought. The way we perceive the world is more significant than the way we think about it: It's the first experiencing.

For me it's about integration - the old and the new experiences; holding them together, making sense through mythology.

But the image is not reached directly. It stands behind as an emergent value - something lost, half-glimpsed, somehow essential.



   Rollercoast



I rely on recognition and have very few tricks. It's no careful gardening - more like a battlefield or tumbling through a hedge. What happened in this painting was a rollercoaster ride. Over the months it moved and evolved.

Rollercoast is founded on a part of Cornwall that I know - a stretch of coast between Portreath and Godrevy. It's an image from my life; a walkabout - quietly endless, difficult and surprising.

Portreath is an open bay with a round hill and long pier. It's slate, north facing, steep, shady and very dark. The coast is flat - like you could roll marbles on it - but the road twists and turns. As you reach Godrevy you turn right around onto the south-facing coast of St Ives Bay.

However, I'm using landscape here as a device to enclose myth: Asclepius, born out of the flames of a funeral pyre.


The landscape construction in Whitesands is the bay from Cape Cornwall to Sennen. The central image is a figure from the story of Pasiphae.


A lot of the time I'm engaged with childhood memories and imagination. But out of Cornwall I discover new kinds of place.


Since returning from the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia - crossing snowfields above the tree line; exploring enormous spaces in the huge mountains - new issues have stomped-in with both feet. I was looking for signs and found that sense of recognition - the feeling of being there before.


Mountain Pass
picks up on
an equivalent to Cornwall's industrial past: A piece of old tourism in the abandoned cablehouse and derelict pylons of Tatranska Lomnica. It all competes for attention with images of Cornwall.


 Whitesands

                           
 
Mountain Pass
                           

                                             


Place is more than locality: 'Portrait of a place' was a way my father found to talk about what he was doing. It has a different ambition than the picturesque.

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