waterfall
I had found a nature condenser. A wet stone chamber with a white wall and green floor of water, saturated with noise and alive with plants. Updraughts animated leaves, branches and insects. 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, putting it aside to paint a field in Essex. But I did not forget this fall, and years later returned to make a fresh start:
I work in a tradition that treats painting as a way of making contact with nature. Think of Constable or Cézanne. There's an empirical assumption that you don't know what's there, and that painting is a direct way of finding out for yourself.
Compared to an object on a table, a waterfall is almost impossible to see. Often with distinctive shapes at a distance, close to all waterfalls are chaotic. Stable instability is part of the facination: they almost tell you that you can and can't see them.
The paintings in Waterfall show different visions of water in one place. They are made from oil studies, notes and photos taken on the spot, and digital analysis, creative distortion and mapping in the studio.
TWO STUDIES

WATERFALLS ON THE FENS
The idea changed the way I saw my waterfalls. The paintings looked truthful, but they were also like post cards, pictures and messages from an imagined place. And like post cards, they were also part of an imagined map of Wales and England. So with a sense of sharing something with thousands of senders and receivers past and present, I began to collect post cards of Furnace falls. These cards are part of Waterfall:


This one was was posted in 1906 in Eglwysfach, the village next to the fall where the sender, Jim, lived at Ty-mawr - 'big house'. Addresed to The Liverpool Royal Infirmary, its message in Welsh translates * as
It was good to hear from you and to know you are improving and have got through the operation very sucessfully. You will be as strong as a horse again, like before. After sending this I'm going to Festiniog today or tomorrow.
Jim.


By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / National Library of Wales
It was made in 1789 by a cosmopolitain Royal Academician, Phillipe de Loutherbourg, who travelled from London to record modern industrial wonders for a set of then fashionable prints. The distinctive 'T' top of the fall dates from this period, a man made extension of boulders, packed in to enlarge the upper pool to feed the waterwheel which powered the furnace bellows. The study is from a time when British artistic interest in waterfalls was only just beginning. It's a picture of a blast furnace with a waterfall, not of the fall itself.
WORK IN PROGRESS
SUN MIDSUMMER

CLOUD MIDSUMMER


The Welsh titles for these paintings come from conversations with Gerald Morgan. I often heard Welsh as I grew up but have no Welsh myself; however Gerald is a Welsh speaker and scholar.
* Translation by William Troughton, Visual Images Librarian, National Library of Wales.
For a discussion of local language and nature, see Robert MacFarlane's book Landmarks.