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 there, 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 the richness of that first impression 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 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 must have been sent and displayed on fridges, pin boards and mantle pieces. 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.

This changed the way I saw my paintings. They still looked and felt truthful but now, like cards sent through the post, they were also pictures of an imagined place. And I saw that posting a card or hanging a painting puts that place on an imagined map, a mind chart of England and Wales. So with a sense of sharing something with thousands of Welsh and English senders and receivers of post cards, I began to collect 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 something 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 the differences between their ways of seeing now seem less important than the 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.