Melbreak Dawn

Exhibited in 2024 at Kendal Museum. Melbreak Dawn is a dark mountain straddling the western shores of a dark still lake, Crummock Water in the northern Lake District of England. Crummock is one of my favourite lakes to take art students from Higham Hall College to on drawing expeditions. We went there one February morning and witnessed sunlight from a break in the clouds illuminating the side of the fell with orange light. It was a brief moment seared into memory and then roughly recaptured on canvas later in the day and developed over the coming months. Funny how such a fleeting moment can absorb one for weeks on end even for years. The process of painting alters the perception of time. As the painting progressed I recognised that the mountain possessed an inner heat as if alive somehow. The more obvious signs of life on the surface and in the air are inextricably connected to the less obviously alive entities like rock, water and air but, as we all know, these things are all intimately connected into a living multi-dimensional whole. Odd to think that the authorities in far away London want to bury nuclear waste deep under these hills a few miles to the west.

Some people have said to me that paintings like this are like photographs, but I couldn’t agree less. They accumulate in physical layers of paint and brush stroke and change over time. They come out of the imagination as much as they arise from visual apprehension and correspond only partially to what might be viewed through the lens of a camera or smartphone in the blink of shutter.