I took a break in Wales. I drove West from Essex, through the English Midlands and over the mountains to the sea. As on a childhood holiday, I saw woods, streams and waterfalls 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 runs past an eighteenth century blast furnace. Set back on a bend it's easy to drive past, and very easy to miss the fall in the trees. I glimpsed it as I drove past, pulled over, got out the car and walked back. Ducking under branches and clambering round 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 water and stone chamber, saturated with noise and alive with 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 a study, and later began a big canvas only to put it aside to work in a field in Essex. But I did not forget this waterfall. The richness of that first impression fused with the shape of the fall into the memory of 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 at sea level. Painting waterfalls in this landscape made me think about what the paintings meant so far from their mountain source. 

 

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 had been sent and displayed on mantle pieces, pin boards and fridges. I saw that what is only suggested by a painting is obvious with a hand written card, stamped, franked and sent from one place to another: that no matter how real a picture looks, it's always distant from the real thing.

This changed the way I saw my paintings. They looked truthful, but like a card sent through the post they also represented an imagined place, and sending the card or hanging the picture added that place to an imagined map of England and Wales. So with a sense of sharing with senders and receivers past and present, I began to collect post cards of Furnace falls. These cards are part of Waterfall:

Each picture in Waterfall shows the same patch of nature through time. The waterfall is picked out from the landscape as a thing worth attention, treating it as a kind of 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. Today, with religious or secular eyes, 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 can now seem less important than similarites, because each tradition  invites us  to consider permanence and change in nature, and what that may mean for us. How we imagine waterfalls concerns us all.