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 surrounded by huge, flat fields. Painting waterfalls here felt slightly mad and made me think about what the paintings must mean, so far from their mountain home. 

 

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 have been sent and received and displayed on mantle pieces, pin boards and fridges. I saw that what is only suggested by a landscape painting is unmistakable with a post card - a thing hand written,  stamped, franked and sent from one place to another then delivered by hand. For no matter how real a landscape image looks, it's always distant from the real thing. It is both real and imagined.

This shifted the way I saw my paintings. They still looked truthful but, like cards sent  through the post, I could see them more easily as an imagined place. I also saw that, as with a post card, a painting could bring to mind an imagined map of places that  were real and that had been visited. And in this case they added to a mental map of England and Wales.

So, with a sense of sharing something with thousands of senders and receivers of post cards from Wales, 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 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.