As a deliberate attempt to choose a route which would stretch me in its difficulty but which would echo my own interest in the way we humans struggle with life and our perception of what life is, I attempted to understand a poem that I had long said to myself I would one day tackle. I had put it off through lack of courage and some life choices which had sent me into various dead ends. In the long poem by T.S Eliot ‘ Four Quartets’ there lay an opportunity for discovery. I felt intellectually inadequate for the task but trying to overcome this was an exciting challenge. How to explain the sense of human struggle in time, with which the poem deals, was a subject that had been at the heart of my painting for more than fifty years. After the exhibition at the Oriel Ynys Mon in 2017 I decided to accept the offer of an exhibition at the Royal Cambrian Academy. It would be half the size of the last show and to take place in 2019. Two years seemed a dauntingly short period in which to develop the technique to express the sense of the poem, putting aside an uneasy feeling that it was, in any case, a presumption to attempt to do so. But I argued that if we put aside difficult tasks then we would never move on - and to move on was my only option.

The exhibition at the Oriel Ynys Mon, 2017 was shaped by my move away from the strong influence of the sea to the more interior feel of an inland landscape, I was faced with the questions: What next? Do I want to continue to paint ‘more of the same’ or attempt to move on again? And do I have the energy to do so? Energy is generated from the excitement of discovery and I feel no energy in repetition. It needs courage and time to make the break, to explore and move technique on while still expressing the only subjects that really count in all things – Birth, Life, Death. I want technique to be driven by the idea but also a continuation of an emerging interest that a painting should have an overall pattern, a sense of calligraphy in brush strokes, a luminosity of colour, a rhythm and tension of composition and an atmosphere which is not realistic but which conveys feeling. Above all that the idea and the technique are in perfect balance. That said, I’ve been thinking about the difficulties of moving away from early training that taught the progression of tone and that the more it is applied the more realistic a painting remains. Likewise, the teaching of perspective again shackles a painter to realism. In early attempts to move into an abstract expression I can see how I was continuously sucked back into a space I understood and knew how to create. The challenge was to leave all I knew behind and express ‘feeling’ in colour, shape and rhythm, without reference to a known object. It is like trying to cross a bridge and finding it difficult to travel further than halfway.

Burnt Norton: poem of Air

East Coker: poem of Earth