In actual fact, this is not so much a new project as a tangential extension of a long established series.

I have always been fascinated by complex forms and, over many years, studies of intricate structures such as Reims Cathedral, rock faces of the mountains of North Wales or the Alps, TT racing motorcycle engines, constructions such as the pithead winding gear of the South Wales deep coal mines, Pegasus Bridge and the gun emplacements of Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall” have all been incorporated into this particular strand of my work.

This fascination is not concerned purely with the identity and sculptural qualities of the forms themselves but also their potential as vehicles for the exploration of “pictorial composition” and “visual dynamics” when translated into two dimensional images.

I am intrigued by the tensions which can be generated in an image by introducing a degree of conflict between the “picture plane” (the two dimensional picture surface) and the “picture space” (the illusion of three dimensional space beyond the picture surface)

The abstract qualities and interaction of these two pictorial elements are significant components in much of my work, and this project in particular.

Amongst the devices I am using to achieve these complex visual tensions is the integration of text and image by combining digital print with drawing/painting techniques.

Photocopied or printed text, which I sometimes introduce at random into my drawing techniques, immediately and unequivocally establishes the “picture plane” and a gradually constructed drawn or painted image which is superimposed without completely obliterating the text, subtlely “penetrates” into the space beyond.

Michelangelo said
“To reveal the form which was hidden within the stone is all the hand and eye can do.”

Similarly, I sometimes feel that I am laboriously prizing out an image, bit by bit, which lay concealed behind the surface of the paper or canvas. Sometimes, indeed, the image has to be partially prized out from behind another, existing, photocopied image with which it then becomes integrated, as in some of the work I produced in the Somme and Auschwitz in the 1990s. The trick is to establish the second image without obliterating the first one.

The final results of this project, which will be a series of investigative studies of various sizes and approaches, will be incorporated in an exhibition which I have been planning for a long time entitled “Motorbikes, Engines and Cathedrals.”