Although my work is predominantly figurative, I don't want it to be simply representational.

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Artists and writers through the ages have distorted images, simplifying them, omitting or magnifying key characteristics; and by doing so, have introduced an element of early abstraction and a sense of enigma which carries an impact beyond mere quirkiness. Viewing art or reading text we are I think drawn in more forcefully to a work we don't fully and immediately understand; more so than to one which wears its message openly on its sleeve.

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In Parenthesis, by David Jones, is the most powerful literary work I have ever read about the First World War. The language is at times clear and at times difficult. The words (from common parlance, and so easily recognisable) convey a forceful sense of place, of relationships between soldiers (through snatches of dialogue), of cold and wet, of darkness and blinding light, of violence and fear - but the way in which the words are used, the construction of sentences, is unfamiliar and new (although not in any sense arbitrary). The work is, for me, irresistibly compelling as a result. I would like my art to achieve something similar. The use of familiar imagery in unfamiliar ways. 

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I do not yet have a strong desire to produce abstract work, or work which is wholly conceptual - although I intend to push my practice more in that direction. But I do seek, at least sometimes, to create a "clear enigma", or "art which looks like something he knows, but not quite" [See Philip Guston - I Paint What I Want to See - passim]

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And I am happy too to take refuge in gentle satire to deal with topics which are otherwise deeply sensitive. I have, in the preliminary sketch opposite, borrowed the title of a Paul Nash painting from the First World War, for an image of destruction in the Middle East.

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I am proposing to combine the image of a "bright cloud" (an image I recall from a drawing and a painting by Samuel Palmer - see below), with an image of urban destruction from a newspaper cutting (see opposite). 

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The cloud in the sketch is from the photograph to the right, taken from my house one evening.

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I want (as I think does Nash) to capture a contrast between the aesthetic of the "bright cloud" and the destruction beneath it.

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