During this lockdown, we have been lucky due to where we live and being able to walk in the countryside. It was a very windy day yesterday. The wind always stirs memories of childhood. We walked over a small bridge hearing a brook moving beneath, the babbling of my kids chattering in the near distance behind me, the small birds flitting and chirping, the crackle of the dry grasses and twigs we were walking over, then the gusting almost haunting sounds of the wind. All these sound textures create our sense of space. The sound textures are so full that there is little to do but be passively overwhelmed by it - it fills the mind. Compare this with the total silence in a house in the early hours (if the house is in a quiet place ); the silence is literally deafening, that’s when the demons can arrive - the hauntings of the tired mind, disturbed to terror even by every tiniest creak. Our minds fill the silent void with their own musings, which invariably gravitate to the more macabre or fanciful supra-realities.

To compare the space of sounds with the making of a painting: texture is so important to creating a space in a painting . There are two textures to deal with: the “actual” and the “perceptual” (the former will also dictate the latter). To control the paint: its sheens and surfaces is to control the “facture”. The “texture” is the resultant visual appearance: the contrasts, the colour changes, the scale and the ‘inter-relationality’ of forces which will all build the texture. Both these textures are dependant upon difference for their expressiveness. Difference manifests itself through changes of detail - not details as recognisable features in smaller parts, but the concomitant experience of seeing and acknowledging the most nuanced or abrupt changes of colour (colour as revealed through facture and texture). That is why transitions are so important in a painting for me. Looking for disruptive forces which place greater and greater demands to reconcile them with their function in the painting - how they must energise it. The stronger the forces the steeper the challenge to channel them into working together. The meaningful and believable transitions of colour and surface from one to another will determine the success of the work.