Literature

I made this painting after a visit to New York to see artist and polymath, Simone Fattal, to whom it is dedicated. She had just opened two giant solo shows during a winter storm.

Those days, amidst candlelight and conversation, were pure magic. I met some of her closest friends. We spoke about the history of the wars that we had survived, and we spent, perhaps the most time, discussing a love of nature—the primeval forest.

When I came back to the UK, I found myself overcome in a burst of energy, I turned on New York public radio, as if we were still lodged in that time and place, and I made this (which is incredibly unusual for me) in a single stretch of 12 hours.

What we see here, are paths, flowers, trees, that become staircases, which assume themselves as animate bodies. They are not merely plodding along, they are fighting, together, all of nature’s vestiges to carve out a path to freedom, a yield to a time of care. It is ancestral history being summoned from the ground up.

I then re-visited it and I made one very minor addition. If anything, this was a performance, and an embodiment of one of the great women artists who inspired me.