I took a break in Wales, a place of childhood holidays. I drove from Essex, through the English Midlands and the Shropshire hills, 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 the building, and very easy to miss the waterfall 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 it 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 fall's distinctive 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 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 my 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 in a painting is obvious 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 reminded me that even realistic images are products of imagination. 

This changed the way I saw my paintings. They looked truthful, but like post cards they were also pictures of an imagined place; and they added that place to an imagined map of England and Wales. So, with a sense of sharing something 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 over time. The waterfall is like a natural image, a thing unbidden in the world, there to facinate and instruct. Medieval Christians saw nature as God's created book, something to read and interpret, and full of natural images. Today, with religious or secular eyes, our desire to read the book of nature is again very strong.

 

Dutch artists painted waterfalls a hundred years before we British, and Chinese artists a thousand years before them. But differences between their ways of seeing now seem less important than the similarites, because all these traditions invite us to consider permanence and change in nature, and what it may mean for us. How we imagine waterfalls concerns everyone.