Given the opportunity, paint gathers in pools, and it splashes, seeps, soaks, drenches, and flows down the Watercourse Way*. Just as if it were a flooding creek laden with pigment, paint can be guided, diverted, dammed and allowed to drain away or just dry out, leaving marks of its passage.

Wet paint, like the sea in estuaries and creeks, is only partially controllable. It constantly asserts its own nature and becomes the joint author of any attempt to make use of it. I like to join in the playful engagement of earth and water to make marks that are reminiscent of the present visual world, or which evoke feelings about it.

I have restrained these paintings loosely within an horizontal/vertical grid as a way of imposing a minimally Human signature on the liquidity of paint; and I have employed dots as a means of introducing formal incidents which cannot easily be read as depicting any particular kinds of objects. There is thus an attempt to create an abstract illusionary space of indeterminate depth in which there is always room for more to happen.

Each of these works has a familiar history for me. But I am not my history... I am this, yet not this. The paintings refer to landscape, but this is not intended to be limited to a particular "place" outside and beyond the work itself.

As the flood subsides, the drying surface retains evidence of its passing, together with signs of my own physical presence - to become, among other things, grounds for painting.

*Alan Watts, TAO: The Watercourse Way, Penguin, 1975.