I took a break in Wales, driving West from Essex, through the English Midlands and over the mountains to the sea. As on childhood holidays, I saw woods, streams and waterfalls that I'd never seen before. Waterfall is about one of these falls, and how it has been seen, remembered and imagined.

The road between Aberystwyth and Machynellyth goes past an eighteenth century blast furnace. Set back on a bend it's easy to drive past, and easy to miss the fall tucked away in the trees. I glimpsed it as I drove past, pulled over and got out the car and walked back. Ducking under branches and clambering around some rocks, I got closer. Furnace Falls is part of an industrial site, but I barely noticed this on my first encounter.

I had found a nature condenser: a stone and water chamber saturated with noise, plants and animals. Updraughts buffeted insects, leaves and branches. Protean, the water changed colour, speed and texture. And when the sun came out the scene fragmented in ways that defied imagination.

I made an oil study, and later began a big canvas only to put it aside to work in a field in Essex. But I didn't forget this fall:  its distinctive shape fused with a memory of that first impression of natural richness into a kind of emblem.

 

Years later, I went back to make a fresh start:

I moved to Ely, a cathederal town surrounded by huge, flat fields. Painting waterfalls here felt slightly crazy and made me think about what the paintings meant, so far from their mountain setting. 

 

Friends sent me a post card from Niagra Falls, and I picked up an idea from the coconut mat. Since post cards were introduced, huge numbers of waterfall pictures must have been sent and displayed on mantle pieces, pin boards and fridges. I saw that what is only suggested by a painting is unmistakable on a hand written card, stamped, franked and sent from one place to another: That no matter how real the picture looks, it's always distant from the real thing: it's both real and imagined.

This changed the way I saw my own pictures. They still looked truthful but, like cards sent through the post, I now saw them as pictures of an imagined place. And I also saw that, like receiving a post card, hanging a painting can bring to mind an imagined map - in this case a mental map of England and Wales. So with a sense of sharing something with thousands of senders and receivers of post cards, past and present, I began to collect cards of Furnace falls.

 

These cards are part of Waterfall:

Each picture in Waterfall shows the same place through time. The waterfall is picked out of the landscape as something worth attending to, treating it as a natural image, a thing unbidden, there to facinate and instruct. Medieval Christians saw nature as God's created book, to read and interpret and full of natural images. And we are still trying to read the book of nature.

 

Dutch artists painted waterfalls a hundred years before the British, and Chinese artists a thousand years before them. But differences between their ways of seeing now seem less important than similarites - because each tradition  invites us  to consider permanence and change in nature, and what it means for us.

How we imagine waterfalls concerns us all.