I took a break in Wales, a place of childhood holidays. I drove West from Essex through the Midlands and the Shropshire hills, over the mountains to the sea. As on a childhood hoilday, 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 integral to the industrial site, but I hardly noticed this on my first encounter.

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 buffeted branches, leaves 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:

The oldest known image of Furnace Falls

is on the far left of a small drawing by Phillipe De Loutherbourg

in the National Library of Wales:

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 the coconut mat. Since post cards were introduced, huge numbers of waterfall images must have been sent and displayed on mantle pieces, pin boards and fridges. I saw that what is only implied by a painting is very clear on a hand written card, stamped, franked and delivered from one place to another: that no matter how real the picture looks, it's always distant from the real thing. It was a simple reminder that even the most realistic image is a product of imagination. 

This changed the way I saw my waterfalls. The paintings looked truthful, but like post cards they were pictures and messages from an imagined place. And like a post card, they also added a place to an imagined map of Wales and England. 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. With religious or secular eyes, our desire to read the book of nature is still very strong.

 

Dutch artists painted waterfalls a hundred years before we British, and Chinese artists a thousand years before them. But today differences between their ways of seeing can 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.