I took a break in Wales. I drove 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, used, 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 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, 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 didn't forget this fall: the richness of that first impression fused with its memorable shape 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 made me think about what the paintings mean so far from their mountain source. 

 

Friends sent me a post card from Niagra Falls and I picked up an idea from my 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 in a painting is unmissable on 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.

It changed the way I saw my paintings. They still looked truthful but now, like cards sent through the post, they also showed an imagined place. And both posting a card or hanging a picture, put that place on an imagined map - in this case of England and Wales.  So with a sense of sharing something with thousands of 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.