Our world is real to the senses and irreducible to any one. Sight, touch, hearing, the interaction of the body with spaces, with that 'outside' self. The textures of sound, motion and changing light. All things have a centre in our being, in the hot and cold of our skin, the action of light and colour and the attention and categorising function of the brain. In the system of meanings, everything is to an extent interlinked. Therefore it can be said that a colour or shape has a sound or texture and can be felt by more than one sense. Linking those senses with our language and meaning systems generates another level of interpretation. We can say drawing and painting are language but that leaves out the essential difference between visual art and language – the lack of syntax or vocabulary that can form repeatable structures of meaning. Even allowing for the idea of puns or word play in spoken or written language, the fundamental difference with visual art is the free-floating and multi-textural nature of what is set down before us.

Written language tends to consist of a set of symbols that have meanings not indicated by their shape – a transferable set of ciphers that can be put together in many arrangements within a generally accepted format, creating a simple or complex system for capturing or articulating human thought and sense impressions. Each culture has evolved its own system which largely reflects the need for tools to describe and mirror the arrangements necessary for the functions of that society. Cross-cultural influences add and evolve to continue this mirroring. At the same time, skilled practitioners can re-articulate the mirror to continue or reach beyond the reflection. The logic of brain/thought can accommodate and consolidate these leaps beyond the mirror to a created or extrapolated world.

It may be possible to create paintings and drawings that celebrate or evoke the well-springs of the natural world and our instinctive response to it in a fluid or 're-created' way without being didactic or static. In a sense they may dis-assemble the elements of such phenomena and re-assemble them on a flat surface. Critics have written on the tabular nature of a painting which thereby allows for simultaneous, parallel or even conflicting 'narratives' to be generated, notwithstanding the material 'thingness' of the object. Elements in a painting co-exist simultaneously and the presentation of the work is free from linear discourse in the conventional manner of written language. That is not to say that there is not some linearity in our understanding of what is placed before us. At what ever level we catch sight of and 'read' the image, our experience of it has a starting point and a time-based involvement with what is observed. Interest in an image creates a interlinked set of impressions. For example, on one level, all work uses media which has a material presence and is, in a sense, self-reverential. On another level this media may be used to re-create or re-imagine something that is already existing. The artist may chose to mimic surfaces, texture or colour found in nature which illustrate the time-based processes of weather, erosion, deposits and eddies. Of necessity these images must be static – a moment, or series of moments, set down in another medium.

In fact, one might be tempted to say that many pictures represent something that is not 'present' in the gallery – the remembered 'living' spaces, water tumbling over rocks, wind playing over a landscape, in the timeless continuing pulse of a natural world which sustains human life. Also there may be something of the magic or myth that is symbiotic with human imagination. We live in a world which links with and shapes our thinking, imagination and dreaming. The physicality of that world is bound up in our own physicality and our senses. Some natural phenomena attract us; one thinks of the warm sun on our skin, the delight in the colour and texture of nature. Alternatively, some things we witness or experience in nature create a sense of foreboding, fear and discomfort. The dark recesses of fear are mirrored in the dark recesses of caves or the perceived depths of bog pools. The cry of the wind or the creak of trees swaying can disturb our imagination, seeming to be linked with how our thought processes and instinctive survival responses interpret these natural sensations and alert something at a primal level. This is at odds with our modern removal from living in the landscape and surviving in a seasonally dependent way. What it may illustrate is that enough of our link with nature remains to play on our unconscious thinking.

Culture and habit has conditioned us in many ways to read the static, tabular language of painting as a language – the codification of these natural processes. The signs can be 'read' – taken up by the reader and re-constituted in so far as meaning can be attached or experience shared or mirrored. In other ways the viewer recreates something new and personal from their experience of the painting or print. In that way artist and viewer collaborate in giving life to the signs and surface of the painting or drawing.