I took a break in Wales, driving from Essex West, through the English Midlands and over the Welsh 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, imagined and remembered.

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 in away the trees. I glimpsed it as I drove past, pulled over, got out the car and walked back. Ducking under branches and clambering around rocks, I got closer. Furnace Falls is part of an old industrial site, but I barely noticed this on my first encounter.

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

I settled down and made an oil study and later, back in Essex, I began a big canvas only to put it aside to make paintings of a local field. But I didn't forget Furnace Falls:  its  distinctive shape combined with that first impression of endless richness and it seemed to become a kind of symbol or emblem.

 

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

I moved to Ely, a cathedral town in the East of England surrounded by huge, flat fields. Painting waterfalls in flatland made me feel disonnected, and I began to think about what the paintings might mean so far from their mountain home. 

 

Friends sent me a post card of Niagra Falls and I found an idea on the coconut mat. Since the introduction of postcards, huge numbers of waterfall pictures must have been sent through the post and displayed on mantle pieces and fridge doors, but these pictures were very unlike the paintings I make. Realist oil landscapes can draw you in so that they feel more real than imagined. But the photo on the postcard just didn't do that: it remained an image, on a card, with a message in my friend's hand writing on the back, that had been bought, stamped, posted, franked and delivered. The picture was of a real place in the USA, but the card in my hand was in Ely with me, standing in the hall.

The photo of Niagra falls was realistic, but everything else about the card told me that it was not. I was reminded in a fresh way that even the most realistic image is a thing of the imagination. This shifted the way I saw my waterfall paintings. I was still drawn into their reality, but at the same time it became easier to see them as unreal. It seemed a just small step to see my paintings as pictures of an imagined place - like pictures arriving by post. 

Both post card and paintings brought to mind imagined maps. In the case of Furnace, the falls had become a location on my mental map of England and Wales, a map with compass points, a simple geography and huge gaps, scattered with places I knew.

Receiving a postcard is also a form of participating in a shared mental map: - now a global commonplace with phone photos and videos creating billions of different shared maps of almost everywhere in the world. But this is to run ahead.

To focus my own thoughts I began to collect old postcards of Furnace falls. And as I read the messages on them I felt things in common with the people who'd sent these cards from Furnace all through the twentieth century. I now have a large collection, and am making some card display cabinets of a kind once found around Wales to show tourists the local sights. I remember them from childhood, and the new cabinets will be shown with the paintings as part of Waterfall:

Each picture in Waterfall shows the same place through time. The fall is picked out of the landscape as something worth attending to, treating it as a natural image: something unbidden, there to facinate and instruct. Medieval Christians saw nature as God's created book, full of natural images to be read and interpreted.

We are still trying to read the book of nature.

 

Dutch artists painted waterfalls a hundred years before they became really fashionable in Britain, and Chinese artists painted watercolours of rivers abd falls a thousand years earlier. But I think differences between the ways of seeing now seems less important than the similarites, because they all invite us to consider permanence and change in nature, and what it means for us.

How we imagine waterfalls concerns us all.